At the beginning of this month, we celebrated a very exciting day - my brother's wedding! Months before, I thought "oh I should make a drawing for them as a wedding gift." Well, four days before we left to travel to the wedding, we were out shopping for picture frames for the rehearsal dinner, and I remembered my idea. I went ahead and bought a frame, got back home, and got right to work. I found one of my favorite photos of them from when my brother went to go visit her for her high school graduation. It's a great photo of the two of them, and the setting is really nice as well.
I used this as another chance to use more colored pencils. The sharpened points would be great for the small details, and I could really get a nice color with them. First I sketched the piece out with a graphite pencil. I had a bit of trouble with the details on the faces with them being so small, but eventually, after a lot of reworking, I got it to look right. I often end up with lines that are too dark when I sketch a lot of details, so once I finished I went back with an eraser to lighten all my lines. I didn't want any graphite showing through the colored pencil, just guidelines to work with.
Then I began coloring it all in. With colored pencils, the layers are very important. If you color an area in hard with one color, then another color is very unlikely to show when you try adding it on top since the paper is full of pigment already. Instead, it's important to create light layers that you build up to create the exact colors and values you want. Once you get to the top layers, you can press harder to smooth it out if need be. This works especially well with light colors like white or tan that won't show much.
I find it helpful to work with one color at a time to build up layers more evenly. For example, I used a light tan for all the arms and legs, then a darker brown, and then a lighter, warmer brown. This involves less back-and-forth and makes it more even.
Now one area where pressing hard with a colored pencil can come in handy is for intricate designs, like on her shirt. Before I colored anything else there, I drew out the lines with a white colored pencil, pressing hard to fill the paper. Now that the paper wouldn't allow any more pigment in those spots, I freely colored over with the blues, teals, and black. I also used this technique for some of the highlights on the shirts that I didn't want to lose.
Last but not least, I colored in the background, using less and less detail as it goes back, such as in the trees. This keeps the focus on the faces where there's the most detail. To finish it off, I signed it and put it in the frame to give to them!
