I was watching a very gripping Sci-Fi, T.V. series, I am well into the series at this point and very much feeling the heartbreak over the previous episodes, and the anger the characters all feel towards an antagonist, this makes me very invested in the outcome of the show. All of a sudden a brand new character is introduced, by chance, you know that they are going to be of reasonable significance when they have more than a couple lines. What struck me most wasn't just the incredible height advantage he had over the character he was conversing with but it was his facial features, very defined cheek bones as well as jaw line, they where reasonably harsh but the rest of his features would tell you otherwise big soft eyes, medium forehead, and a round nose.
This combination of features and the kind smile he carried with him through the episode had me waiting for the happy ending, which unfortunately did not come. Mad at the ending of the episode I furiously watched the end credits role looking for the characters, and corresponding actors, name, finally I found it and immediately plugged it into google. Quiet a few handsome pictures came up, and I decided in an effort to burn away my anger, challenge myself, and improve my portrait skills I would draw one of the pictures.
Although not as accurate as I had hoped my initial pencil sketch left me pleased, and so from that sketch I completed a pen drawing.
The pen drawing left me feeling like something was missing, the colour, and so wanting to colour it in using markers, this was where things started going wrong.
Initially I tried using the pens I had in my Prismacolor Marker set, they had served me well on the few previous portraits I had completed, and during a late night-early morning haze I managed to finish the Ink and Marker drawing. But immediately I noticed the cheeks where very pink and the rest of the skin very yellow. This had not gone anything like the other portraits I had completed.
Since it was late I decided to go to bed and see what I thought in the morning. Waking up and getting ready for work I had a look and it was the same. Even the people at work thought the same, the colouring was off.
So I decided that it might be time to upgrade and get a small pack of markers in skin-tones, the ones I purchased had a range of peachy-pale skin-tones.
Trying these out on a few smaller drawings first, they worked fantastically, not to dramatic, and not to pink.
So I sat down and tried once again to complete an Ink and Marker drawing.
The result ended up a mess, I obviously was not fast enough for the pens, they had worked fine on a small drawing that did not take much time to colour, but on a larger portrait the ink dried out before I could get back to it, and I ended up with odd layers of yellow and a few small and random appearing patches of pink. I was so disheartened at the outcome of the face that I couldn't bring myself to finish shading the hair.
However through all the disappointment at another failed Ink and Marker portrait I noticed that the eyes of this man had improved, from the first. The shading instead of being a dark mess was now an evenly shaded area, although, there was clearly room for improvement.
I decided to continue trying different mediums to get my mind off of pen, and markers, and to see if I could get a better result for a portrait.
So next I tried watercolour, or in my case Inktense blocks. In terms of the skin this version was the opposite of the others, the skin turned out incredibly pale but the balance of shading and blending was much improved.
The downside to this version was that I had not been able to control how thick the eyes where so in order to correct mistakes they ended up becoming extremely thick and dark. Comparing the dark eyes, to the pale face, and the dusty hair that encircled his face, the portrait I had painted appeared to be of an entirely different man, who appeared to personify someone who was pretty mad.
This got me thinking, if I was coming across so many things that bothered me with trying to draw and create something in all of these different mediums, then maybe it was best to just leave it as the pencil drawing I started with. Maybe come back to it when my style had progressed.
Obviously the person I picked had a facial structure and stance that at my current level of competency when it comes to Ink and Marker, and watercolour, portraits was to complex for me to expect any fantastic results. But this was an exceptional learning opportunity, to know what does not work when shading a face, it also taught me something about using the skin-tone pens.
I have seen some amazing people on social media posting amazingly realistic portraits using coloured pencils, so maybe that will be the next medium I will tryout.
If anyone has any helpful comments of suggestions on how to improve portraits done in any media I would be glad to hear them.
Thats all from me on this portrait project analysis.
IoG