I’ve always stayed away from colour pencil sketches, I’ve always produced graphite pencil sketches and then put the best ideas on canvas but since starting this course I’ve realised that there’s more to art than just paint. After completing the ‘Mark Making Techniques‘ exercise I decided that I should spend more time using other mediums and so I decided to start by making a coloured sketch from a photo of a girl with red hair from one of my Facebook likes.

Everything was going great until I got to the lips when I gave the girl, who was supposed to have inviting full lips a pair of camel lips which ruined the whole sketch. Anyway I plodded on to finish the sketch which was in a bit of a state by now but I was determined to learn something from it, the first lesson I learnt was that I should have done this in my large sketch book, not my 6 x 9″ sketch book.

Realising that messing up the lips on a portrait can ruin the whole thing and when you are working with media that is difficult or impossible to erase that can be drastic, I used this as an opportunity to not just practise drawing lips but to practise drawing using coloured pencil. I did a number of sketches starting off drawing the outlines in graphite pencil then colouring in until I got confident then I produced further sketches using 100% colour pencil using techniques such as hatching, cross hatching and point shading.