In December I was commissioned to do a couple portrait in coloured pencil. I started right away, but only finished a few days ago - not because I was lazy, but I had a lot of other work on, so the projects with the closest deadlines were completed first. It's a juggling act! =P
It's quite some time since I did a portrait (or anything, really) in coloured pencil (I think it's about five years!), so this was a lot of fun. It's a medium I used to use a lot more, but which fell by the wayside a bit for the joint reasons of my hurting my drawing wrist (back in 2008) and learning how to use watercolour properly so that I no longer had to rely on mixed media. My coloured pencil method has changed somewhat since I hurt my wrist - lots of soft layers instead of hard colouring - so that I can use them without ill-effect. This means things look a bit fuzzier close-up, but from a normal viewing distance I think the effect is actually much better than my old technique.
Here's a progress animation so you can see how this came together. Note how I was struggling with the likenesses for a while, and was making lots of small changes. Coloured pencil is much more nerve-wracking than graphite when it comes to likenesses, because it's so much harder to make corrections!
Prismacolor pencils on Quill Drawing Cartridge paper. About 20-25 hours.
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