Have you ever used just a few coloured pencils for a portrait? I challenged myself and created my first five coloured pencils drawing, using Prismacolor Premier pencils.
I drew this portrait of actress Kiernan Shipka as Sabrina Spellman with black, canary yellow, poppy red, white and chocolate.
While I love using Prismacolor Premier coloured pencils, they do give considerable wax bloom. You can see it on the side of the face, black parts of the hair and the back of the neck on this portrait. Basically, anything I had coloured with black had wax bloom on it. I have wiped it, used Gamsol on it, and it still surfaced almost immediately. What was particularly challenging was the face, which I had to use some black to shade, and the wax bloom there became very difficult to blend out.
The reason why I used just 5 colours is that I was intending to buy a set of Derwent Lightfast coloured pencils. I wanted to try out a small set and the colour range is quite limited I wanted to see whether I can do a standard portrait with just a few colours. Once I finished this portrait, I purchased the Derwent Lightfast set of 12. You can check out my review here.
Did I like this experience of doing a five coloured pencils drawing? I must admit, it’s not easy. I likely won’t do it again, because it took too long to create the right shading and the Strathmore Bristol smooth paper can only take on so many layers.
