Luligirl for JKPP

Luligirl for JKPP a photo by Frank B10 on Flickr.

Much as I love watercolour painting, sometimes a desire comes over me to just get a pencil and draw. In this case, it's portraiture again. For some reason, I've always had trouble getting long hair to look realistic, maybe it's because of the long continual strokes needed - I don't know. This time, I think I am getting somewhere near.

Self Portrait

It's been a while since I did a self portrait, 12 months in fact.

Self Portrait
Watercolour and 6B pencil on Bockingford paper.

I sat down this evening wondereing if I could just roll off a quick painting, when a self portrait came to mind. The only stipulation that I gave myself, was that it must be a realatively quick study. I grabbed hold of a smallish watercolour pad and a thick 6B pencil and started work straight away. Very quick measurements were used in the drawing stage, and I thought that I would use the pencil to embellish the dark areas, so that I could keep the paintwork light. In fact, some of my work has looked very restrained of late, so now came another stipulation - it has to be loose and fresh as possible.

I used quite a bit of water on the paper, and dropped slightly darker colours into the fleshtones as I went along on this one. As the pencilwork was so dark, I didn't use much dark coloured paint at all.


Overall, I am really pleased with this - the likeness is not too bad, and it has opened up my work a lot - my tight work has been broken I think. The only downside of using the heavy lead pencil, was that the paint wouldn't cover the pencil lines at all much, just rolling off on globules, but hey, it doesn't matter does it? All good experience.

Time taken; 75 minutes.