And, actually, these pencils work as well with portraits as they do with figure drawings, encouraging me to use all sorts of crazy impressionistic colours. Portraits are much easier with these pencils than they are with watercolour - probably as easy as they are with the markers. With this one today, I applied something I learned from the James Gurney book and divided the head into three bands. The top band has more yellow in it, the middle band more red and the bottom band more blue, green and grey. At least that was my opening plan. I went in quite lightly with the original pencil drawing and added more pencil after after each coat had been wetbrushed and dried. I could have carried this on forever but you can see on my bottom right jaw that the paper was starting to protest at this treatment.
I'm quite happy with this one. It's my best self portrait so far. Not cartoony for once (apart from that ear) and more attractive than usual.
I don't expect even my most ardent fans to want to see my face on their wall, so this one will just be stashed away rather than put up for sale.
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