Steps to Creating Vivid Portraits with Coloured Pencils!

1. Welcome to Class!: Hi Skillshare. My name is Chris Hong and I'm so happy to say that I'm back with a brand new class, Steps to Creating Vivid Portraits With Color Pencils. As an artist, one of my most favorite things to do are portraits. But I've only recently discovered doing portraits using colored pencils this year. I absolutely fell in love. Colored pencils offer a lot of control and because of this level of control, they really allow me to express my color sensibilities to the fullest extent without being hindered by the medium in any way. As you can see, I love color. I want to show you how you can also inject a ton of color and life into your portraits. I've taken your feedback for my first-class, level up your portrait drawing, and made improvements with this latest class. I distilled my process down into simple steps you can take to build up your portrait to a solid foundation. Then from there, I offer insights into how you can take your foundation and inject color and artistry into it. The class contains two core lectures on the importance of values and setting up the portrait, including three narrated real-time demonstrations that take you through each part of the process with tons of tips along the way. This class is suited for intermediate artists who are coming into the class with the basics of drawing the human head as you'll be required to draw head from photo reference as a first step in our process. It's perfect for those who already love to draw and paint portraits and want to challenge themselves in color using colored pencils. If you've always been intimidated by using lots of colors and always shied away from using unconventional colors in a portrait, then this class is for you. Grab your pencils and let's get started. 2. Materials: I'm really excited you're here and I truly hope you take away some valuable information from this class. But before we dive into the lessons, let's quickly talk about the materials you'll need. You will need a drawing pencil of some kind as you'll be blocking in your portrait before using color pencils. I recommend a regular graphite pencil since it's readily available for most people. Most of the time, I like using my 0.5 millimeter lead mechanical pencil because I feel I have the most amount of control with it and it's easy to erase when I make mistakes. Sometimes I like to use a Prismacolor Col-Erase pencil, which is like a blend between a pencil and a color pencil. Using something that comes in a color like this, can incorporate more seamlessly with the color pencils than a regular graphite pencil if you're someone that's bothered by seeing the graphite underneath. They're easy to draw with a pencil, but don't erase as well as a pencil. There's the drawback there. I hop between using the two, but my go-to is definitely just the mechanical pencil. For this class, go with any of your favorite drawing pencil that is fairly easy to erase and you'll probably be set. I like to have both the regular type of eraser and a kneadable eraser handy when working with color pencils, mostly for use during the drawing portion before bringing in the color pencils. Color pencils in general don't erase very well. So ideally, you want to work in a way where you can avoid using an eraser, since it might do more harm than good. But we all make mistakes and sometimes backtracking is necessary. In these cases, I like to use the kneadable eraser since it's more delicate than the regular eraser. Depending on the color and brand of pencil, I find it does help lift up some of the excess pigment so the paper can be a bit more workable. But in general, try to apply the color pencils going from light to dark to avoid going in too dark too quickly, and to build up your picture more gradually, giving yourself more room for correcting any mistakes without the use of an eraser. The great thing about using color pencils is that they're not super fussy and work well with most types of drawing papers. So far, I've used color pencils on my regular unbranded drawing sketchbook, which I would describe as just your regular old sketchbook paper. It's maybe a little delicate for any extensive use of color pencils, but they still take them really well and it's perfect for doing quicker sketches and preliminary work. I've also used the Strathmore 500 Series mix media sketchbook. It's definitely more robust than my regular sketchbook paper, and I've enjoyed using it so far and have gotten pretty good results. I've also used the Canson mix media sketchbook paper, which feels pretty close to the standard sketchbook paper, maybe a little bit more robust than that. It also takes color pencils pretty well. For more finished illustrations, I recommend using hot press watercolor papers. I've used Arches, Fabriano, and the Fluid brand. The hot press finish papers are smoother than sketchbook papers, and so it takes the color pencils really well. As far as papers I haven't personally used myself, I hear illustration boards and bristol paper take color pencils very well. I'd definitely look into them as an option as well. Ideally, you want paper that isn't too rough in texture like cold press watercolor paper. Cold press watercolor paper has a more toothy texture to it and so it's quite difficult to lay down smooth, even layers of color pencils. Layering is a crucial technique in this class, so using any papers with a heavier texture may add unnecessary challenges and therefore isn't recommended. But do experiment with the types of papers you have available to find one that works best for you, as it may just come down to personal taste and application styles. To keep it simple for this class, just grab your nearest sketchbook, and I'm pretty confident your color pencils will take to it quite nicely. Finally, let's talk about the star of the show, the colored pencils. Let me first start off by saying that I'm not making any firm recommendations on which color pencils to use since I personally have not used all that is available on the market out there. If you don't already have color pencils ready to go for this class, I definitely encourage you to do research outside of the class to find the pencils that best suit your needs. So far, I only have experienced using the favorite Castell polychromos color pencils and the Prismacolor scholar color pencils, which are actually student-grade color pencils. I have the 60 color set. The quality between the pencils varies from color to color, but I find most of them work well enough considering a student-grade quality. I find that I can still get beautiful results from these, so if you're just trying color pencils out and if you don't want to invest hundreds of dollars into it just yet, I would recommend checking out a set of these since they're fairly readily available, at least in North America and I believe in Europe. For the last few months, I've been working with the polychromos set of 120 which are artist-grade pencils. They've fast become my main go-to set at this point. The biggest thing I like about them is the hardness of the lead, which allows me to make very controlled and precise marks. But at the same time, the colors are really buttery and pigmented. Though some of the colors are not quite as pigmented as the others. There are always going to be pros and cons with every art product that you have to consider. It's less about finding the perfect color pencils, but more about finding ones that work best for your specific needs that also fit your budget. If you don't already have some color pencils and you are in search of buying some, I will definitely recommend searching on YouTube for reviews where you can find a ton of other artists sharing their experience using all kinds of different brands of color pencils. If you're coming into the class and you already have color pencils ready to go, then that's great. You absolutely do not need to go out and buy the same color pencils as I'm using. My class isn't designed in a way where you'll need any specific brands or colors, since colors are all about the context anyway. I don't work in a way where I need to look at the names of the colors, but rather just set the colors themselves within the context that I'm working in. Please don't feel like you have to go out and buy anymore art supplies for this class. The only thing I would suggest is having enough colors available so you don't feel hindered or stuck in any way. Maybe a set of 24 colors to start. You can always build up from there as your budget allows for it. A pencil sharpener isn't just strictly necessary for you to have if you don't already have one handy, but it definitely save some headaches when your pencils break on you. I use this Korean branded manual pencil sharpener that I borrowed from my parents, but really any pencil sharpener should do the job. I personally do prefer these ones compared to the little portable ones where you have to twist the pencil to sharpen it since I find they're faster at sharpening and they tend to cause less breakage. I find they also produce a sharper point, which lasts longer. Last but not least, you will need some photo references to work from when following along in this class. In my previous class, Level Up Your Portrait Drawing, I did a lesson on how to go about picking the right photo references for drawing portraits. The principles covered there very much apply to finding references for this class. To make it easier for students, I've prepared a Pinterest board specifically for this class with photos that I thought would be perfect to work with. You don't have to go out in search of your own references. From looking at past student projects from the previous class, I noticed some students were using photos that I personally would consider pretty difficult to work from, and therefore probably made it unnecessarily challenging for them. This Pinterest board is a place where I can direct students who are looking for easier reference materials to practice with. But of course, if you want to find your own references, you're more than welcome to as well. In which case, I definitely recommend checking out that lesson from my previous class if you'd like some guidance on how to go about finding good photo references. Once you've gathered all these materials, you're ready to start this class. I'll see you over in our first lesson. 3. The Importance of Values: You are likely here in this class because you have a deep love of colors, and you're in the right place. Before we get to play around with colors, we first have to spend a little bit of time talking about values. Values, as you probably already know, describe how light or dark the color is. If we strip the color information out of the picture, what's left is the value relationship, which still makes a picture readable. But why such an emphasis on values in a color class? There's a common understanding in art that if you have good values, you can rely on your colors being good as well, or at least get away with using pretty much any color combinations since the values are going to hold the drawing together. Here I'm taking John Singer Sargent's portrait that I took all the existing color information out of. What's remaining is the underlying value statement and I'm just randomly painting colors over top on a different layer in Photoshop, in the color mode, which only imparts to hue and saturation of the colors over the existing values underneath. Really what I'm doing is just taking a grayscale image and tending it with some colors. The colors are pretty wild, but see how the drawing still stands up to the colors and it doesn't look completely wrong or bad. That's because of the rock solid values that Sergeant had already established. This is a basis that I work by. I know that as long as my values are okay, then the colors will fall into place. Thinking mostly in terms of values helps simplify my process. Instead of having to think about all the other aspects of color like hue, and saturation, and color temperature, and more that can all come into play when picture making. By focusing on values, I can plan on my picture in a way where I can make it really easy for myself to organize the colors since I know where the lighter values will have to go and where the darker values will have to go. With colors, there's simply too many variables. But with values, it's much easier to gauge and quantify. Look at this patch of hair, for example, and how many colors seemingly are there. It looks more complicated than it really is, since in grayscale it reads more simply as just the light patch of value. This is a power of learning to control your values. What do I mean by good values? By good values, I'm referring to good value organization or value grouping. This is where shapes come in. For anyone who has already taken my portrait drawing class, the concept of shapes should be familiar to you. But since it's such an important aspect of picture making, it doesn't hurt to have a refresher. Using values to help with the process of picking colors starts by first organizing the vast array of values that we see down into the simplest shapes. For our purposes, we're going to be dealing with just two shapes, the light shape and the shadow shape. If you had to group all of these values into just two separate groups, how would you go about doing it? To make this easier, let's take the color information out of the photo and just look at the values alone. Seeing the photo in grayscale definitely helps, but still there are so many values present. How do we go about dividing these values into just two groups? I'll show you how Photoshop would group these values. Here, I'm taking the grayscale version of this image and using the levels adjustment layer to manipulate the values in the photo, so I can push all the lighter values towards white and all of the darker values towards black. At the end, we're just left with two very clear value groups. This is essentially what value grouping is. You take a wide range of values and you sort them into its simplest statement, the light shape made up of the lighter values and the dark shape made up of the darker values. Artists are not cameras and therefore, we can't record the sheer amount of values that we see pixel by pixel like a camera can. So grouping values is a way to distill all the values that we see down into more manageable groups of values. In order to get familiar with this concept, let's take a look at a variety of photos and analyze how we could break down the values present in two simple shapes. Here's an example of how I would go about drawing shapes using this photo. Before I begin, I start with a line drawing of the head as accurate as I can get it with the features and proportions, so I know I'm going to place those shadow shapes. Once I have the drawing, then I try to observe the photo and figure out where those shadows lie. I look for hard edges like these were darker values are very closely against lighter values. Like along the cheek, under the nose, and under the neck, and the lips, and underneath the brow bone that show the clear boundary between where the light ends and shadow begins and I indicate them in my drawing. As you can see, this photo shows a very clear sense of the shadows and so the job has been made pretty easy for me here. Here I'm just filling in the shadow shapes I established with a darker value. You can clearly see how I've divided the values into just two simple shapes, the light shape and the shadow shape. This is how I would break down the values in this photo into a simple value statement using just two value shapes. For fun, let's compare it to how Photoshop would break down the values in this photo. Again, adjusting the values so that all of the lighter values in the photo are pushed towards the white and all it darker values are pushed towards black. I think I came pretty close and that is a good sign. This is how my block ends look when I'm ready to start using color pencils. Having this planning in place before going in with color, I know where I need to go in with those darker colors, which is hugely helpful. Let's quickly take a look at some other examples. There were some trickier areas in this photo where I couldn't really see the clear distinction between the light and shadow, like along the hair and the forehead. Since the transition between light and dark is much more gradual. In these cases, I just have to make a decision and design the shape myself as best as I can. It's important to note that these shapes don't have to be perfect or super clear cut to begin with, since it can be adjusted as I work, other artists might choose to draw these shapes differently and group values differently than I did, pushing areas more towards the light than into the shadow and vice versa. Designing shapes is really up to the artist and what the artist wants to see with their piece. In this example, the photo already beautifully groups aside of her cheek that's in shadow with the neck and the ear and the part of the hair together to create a much simpler statement. But there are some trouble areas here, and so I want to point them out since it's a common mistake that I see with beginners. What a beginner might do is get caught up in all the little lighter patches where the light is hitting each little bump in the braid and try to bring them out individually, since the natural inclination is to highlight everything that we observe. But this may lead to greatly exaggerating the contrast and creating too many distracting little shapes. It's often better to create larger shapes that describe the general value of the area, since it's not about all the little bumps and the hair, but rather her face that's in the light and that's being framed by the dark overall shape of her hair. Another trouble area is the bright highlights on the skin. People tend to greatly exaggerate the value of highlights and try to draw around them by breaking up the shapes with more values, and this leaves a confusing and messy look. Highlights are best represented when their group as part of the light shape and more simply stated as such. After all, this picture is not about the bright highlights on her forehead and her nose, and her shoulder. But rather it's about this overall clear and simple value statement. When you want to group values into shapes, I find it helps to first ask, what is this photo about? This sounds like a strange, an obvious question, but it often needs reiterating when trying to figure out how to simplify the picture. Is this picture about highlighting a person's features or is it more about an interesting lighting scenario? This is how I would break down the lighting in this example, seems almost too simple. Well, based on this information, I can further break down these simple shapes, to show the nuances within the shadow and the light. Notice how closely I keep the values within the light and shadow shapes, so that the overall lighting statements still comes through. The lighter shape or reads clearly light against the darker overall shadow shape, which is the key to creating a convincing sense of light. Compare this to what I would consider a bad example. Here I deliberately exaggerated low-level of contrast of the features and all of the little darker areas in the hair, and by doing so, I ended up creating too many distracting shapes. In my opinion, this photo isn't about clearly being able to see all these little details on the hair and the face. But it's more about the beautiful back lighting setup and the subtlety of her features peeking through in the shadows. Knowing what you want the picture to be about will clarify for you, how you may want to design your shapes. For example, there's no doubt what this photo is about. It's about that interesting tripled light falling across her face. That's how I grew up my values and design my shapes, and here is the simplest value statement. But once I've established a statement, it means I can expand on this and add more complexities like deeper shadows within the shadow shape and slight variations in the light shape. But look at how I still kept the two shapes very different from each other, so I don't lose that sense of the light since that's what this picture is about. Here's an example where the entire face is actually in shadow. Then what is this picture about? It's about that intense light that's hitting the patch of her hair that's framing her face, and not about highlighting her features. As a portrait artist, it might be tempting to try to accentuate the features at all times, but in this case, that would interfere with the sense of light on our hair. Again, once I've established this simple statement of first, then I can start to bring out the nuances of those areas with much better control and direction. Is taking the complexity of the photo, distilling it down to its simplest statement in order to be able to bring out the richness and complexity of the picture, it's not easy to try to build up something grand without first laying down the foundation that helps guide you there. Distilling the values down into this simple statement with shapes, is laying that foundation down. That will help you tremendously when it comes to using colors. Which photo should you be looking for? Some photos have a very clear sense of light and shadow that makes us job of designing shapes a lot easier. They often show a clear distinction between where the light ends and the shadow begins. I like to look for a clear directional light like sunlight or studio lighting that casts a strong cast shadow. Since these hubs, the lighting scenarios usually have a very clear sense of light and shadows. I'm looking for these photos, look for strong, crisp cast shadows under the jaw or under the nose that create more visible transitions from light to dark. However, not all photos are created equal, and there are definitely some photos, I would say are harder to work from, especially for our purposes. These are photos. I have a very even lighting setup that doesn't show a clear sense of light and shadow. This even type of lighting scenario is a result of either having many different sources of lighting or a more diffused light source like in most as friendly photography. In these photos, the shadows are much less distinct and the transitions from light to shadow are gradual, sometimes almost indiscernible. Personally, I don't like to work from these photos, from my portraits, since without a clear sense of light and shadow on the form, I find it's easy for the portrait to fall flat. If you're just starting out, a great place to practice is by using black and white photos, since it's much easier to see the value relationships without the filter of colors. Actually, a really great exercise to do would be to take a black and white photo like this and try to do your own version of it, using colors instead and see what you can come up with when you try to follow the value structure of the photo. I suspect that if you keep your values and check, you may end up with color combinations that you might not have ever tried before. That might pleasantly surprise you. Speaking of color, how does this all tie back to helping us deal with colors? After all, this is a color pencil class, isn't it? I promise you that the key to unlocking your confidence and mastery over colors is first you're getting more familiar with controlling your values, to help solidify your understanding of how to go about using shapes. The next lesson is a demonstration of two portraits where I take you through the process of drawing shapes step by step. 4. Real-time Demo: Shapes: In this demonstration, I'll be taking you through the steps and thought process behind analyzing a photo reference, and simplifying the values down into shapes to build up the portrait. I suggest trying to follow along with what I'm doing to bolster your understanding. I'm going to start by just walking in the shape of the head. Basically I start by trying to get the gist of the head down first and get the features of the face placed fairly accurately before I do go into finding the shadow shapes. Underneath the chin, you can see there's a shadow shape going across the neck like so, and in the ear here, you can see there's a shadow shape that looks something like this, caused by this upper part of the ear there. Roughly trying to find the features, so you can see a shadow shape underneath the lip here, that's because the lips have form and they stick out away from the face so they're going to cast a little shadow when is hit by the light. The lightest part of the face I think is here. Once the face turns away from the light along the cheek here, you're going to get that dark shadow underneath. What I'm going to do is I'm going to fill out the shadow shapes to show you how much of an effect it has on your drawing, once you have separated what is in the light and what is in the shadow. I'm going to start with the very clear cut shapes that I have which are some of these cast shadows, that were easier to identify in the photo. I'm just worrying about the shadow shapes not what's in the light. This upper lip here is in the shadow because it is facing downward and it is turning away from the light. You notice how this shadow underneath the nose, some of that is part of the nose, this little underside of the nose, but I group it together with the cast shadow underneath. I'm not worrying about the nostrils there, at this point in time I'm just grouping it altogether Into one simple shadow shape, same with the eyes here. Now I'm going to deal with this cheek shadow. I'm going to put this whole area in shadow here. To me this is feeling too dark, It's competing with this shadow, I think that tells me that I want to keep it within the light shape. I think that reads better. Now I want the cheek to be part of the light shape, which means I don't want it to be very dark. I want it to be just dark enough, so it reads as part of the light shape instead of the shadow shape. Yeah, I think that to me reads better than what I had just before. That's what's tricky about trying to decide where that line is, do you want this to fall within the light shape? Like how I have now where this value is closer to the light than it is to the shadow, so it raises two separate shapes. Or do you want to push this down towards the shadow value, so that this whole thing reads as one big shape. I found that once I had that a bit darker, I didn't really like how that looked. I don't always know right off the bat, how to group these values together. It is a lot of the times trial and error, I'm always refining and redesigning the shapes as I go. Also the eyes I'm going to put in the shadow. Underneath the lower eyelids as well is going to be affected by the shadow. Now we have our basic light and shadow breakdown of this face, but this doesn't mean your portrait has to stop here. For example, I don't want to just leave the nose like this line drawing here. I want to add some indication of form still so it reads, like a nose. But watch how very gentle I am being here as to not create too much darker value there, because I still want to read, like it's part of this light shape here. Same with this brow underneath the brow ridge there, I want to show that rounded form between the brow ridge but I don't want it to be so dark that it reads like this one big shape. Along the forehead here, I want to show the curvature of her head. Notice how it's still not going quite as dark as the shadow because I don't want it to read like it's in the shadow. I want to read like it is receding away from the light but not quite as dark as this shadow shape, it still reads like this whole area as one shape. Just adding a little bit more nuance to these features now. I think the shadow got a little bit too dark, so I'm going to slightly lift up some of that because I don't want too much contrast along this edge there. Once you've basically established your lighting situation, with darker skin tones, that's when I go in and give a nice base tone for their skin. I suggest establishing the lighting scenario first before establishing the base tone, because that can get a little bit confusing for a lot of people. I like to first establish that crystal clear what is in the light, what is in the shadow and then I worry about establishing the base tone of their skin. Now I'm going to go over the entire skin and give it a base tone, but I'm still going to be very careful as to not get as dark as these shadow values that I've established, because I don't want it to read like it's part of the shadow shape. I'm just going over these areas. I'm not really worrying about the highlighted areas very much. Well, I will be a little bit careful around it. I'm just establishing a base tone, except I will go around the highlight of the nose there. Then just clean up the drawing. Fine-tune some of the details. This shadow shape of the lips got a little bit lost so I'm trying to bring that back a little bit. I think it's pretty incredible how much the shadow-shapes that I established very early on do so much to give this flat two-dimensional drawing such a strong sense of form. When it comes to using pencil crayons, this is essentially what I do as well, except with pencil crayons there's the added difficulty of using color. There now. See how once we've established what is in the light, what is in the shadow, then we can go in and add the little nuances of this strong cheekbone here that appears dark in the photo. But remember when I had it as grouped as the shadow-shape, and I had it at a similarly dark value, it didn't look right. That's why I pushed it back into the light shape, but now I am able to gauge how dark and how light I should go with it. We have another great example here because this model's face is very structural and I can very clearly see the shadow-shapes across the form of his face. I'm just observing the photo and I'm going to roughly block in the shape of the head and then plot out the features. Sometimes I skip drawing the feature and I just draw in the shadow-shape that I'm seeing, and that also helps me place the features after I've established where the shadows are. Because I'm just using the negative shapes I'm seeing around that shadow. Here's the general just layout of our drawing. Now I'm going to go in and find those shadow-shapes. shadow-shapes can be as little as just this little block under the ear, showing that that ear is a thing that has a sense of width, it's not a piece of paper, it's got a sense of width here, so once light hits then that part of the ear is in shadow. Keep that in mind as well when looking for the shadow-shapes. Basically any kind of form, like the lips, the nose, the eyes, nothing is like paper, everything has width, so always keep that in mind. The biggest shadow I see is along this cheek here. Do that. Then I'm seeing it going like this, along his jaw area. Of course understanding and knowing how the facial structure works in terms of the anatomy will help you tremendously when it comes to drawing out these form shadow-shapes along the face. That is something to keep in mind if you wanted to do some extra studies in that. But still not always clear where the shadows are. Like I said, like we did here, I need to do a trial and error type of thing. Again like my comment about the ears having width underneath the lower lids, there's also width there that is going to be catching shadow, so definitely get that in as well. Also underneath the upper eyelids. Again underneath the chin. Because our chins are not just flat pieces of paper, at this angle of the face we still see a tiny bit of the bottom plane of the chin peeking through, so we're going to see just a little bit of a shadow-shape there. Then let's get this shadow-shape under the chin on the neck, that is a cash shadow being cast on to the neck by the head. When I am looking for the shadow-shapes to block in during my block in stage, I mainly look for just the biggest ones that stand out. If it doesn't really stand out I don't draw it, since it's probably closer to being in the light shape than it is in the shadow, and it's easier to go from light to dark than it is from dark and then having to erase anything. When in doubt I just leave it and I only draw the major shadow-shapes that I see. Let's get in this shadow-shape on this side of the nose here, because we know that if you can identify a shadow-shape along this chin here or along the cheek here, then you know on this side of the nose there's also going to be a shadow as well because that's just how light works, it works very uniformly like that. I think the trouble area I think people might have with this particular portrait or this particular photo reference is, looking at the hair and getting lost all the details of the hair here, and trying to draw out all the little strands of hair. That would be a mistake to do at this stage when we're trying to figure out the shadow-shapes. We want to treat this hair as one big shape. I wouldn't worry about seeing all those little crevices between the hair and trying to lock those out, instead I would look at any major shape and then just do like an overall shape. Like the only shape that I really see is this shape here. I would just leave it at that for now, maybe along here as well. Because this side of the head is in shadow. I think this side of the hair is also then in shadow and darker, so maybe just that is enough. But I wouldn't worry about trying to draw all these tiny, little shadow-shapes. I would just worry about getting big, overall shapes that you can identify and draw easily and then go from there. Again this is a block in drawing, it doesn't have to be perfect because you have some flexibility as you move in to using color and you can adjust the drawing as you go. But having a great block-in to work from does instill some confidence, so something to always work on, but not to the point where you're not even moving on to using color, you're just stuck in the drawing portion. Again the point about ears having width and the eyelids, also the hair. Along the hairline, the hair has a certain amount of width. It's not like an ultra thin sheet of silk sitting on her head very tightly. Think of it like a yoga mat instead where it's a little bit plush, it's got a little bit of thickness. Therefore, you're going to observe a little bit of shadow along the hairline there because of that. Anyway, I think this is as far as I would probably go. So this is our shadow shapes and now I'm going to fill them in like we did earlier and see how that looks. So I'm just filling it in pretty evenly. This whole ear I put in the shadow. See how I was going across the forms just treating the shadow shape as one big shadow shape. Not worrying that this part of the shadow shape is in the skin. This part of the shadow shape and so in the hair, I'm not worrying about that for now. We can establish the nuances later. Once we have this clear sense of what is in the light and what is in the shadow. Don't forget the shadow shapes underneath the lids as well. Casting a shadow onto the eyeballs. Usually, I like to groove the iris in with the shadow shape as well. Even if they have a really light colored eyes. I can bring the light back. Yeah, I can bring some of that light back. Then the eyebrows. Let's not forget the lips. So I think that already gives off a very clear sense of form and light, which is great. But we don't want our drawings to look of this stark. We don't want basically all this to be one singular color and treated very evenly like this. We want to bring some of the nuances to the features. We want to show that there is a little bit something here that will separate the nose from the rest of this cheek. We want to bring a little bit of detail into the hair to make it look like hair and we want to show that this part of the head is receiving more light. So it's lighter than down here, along the cheek and along the neck. It seems to be darker when looking at the photo. So at this stage, we're ready to go in and show those nuances so that it doesn't look like this kind of mosaic, like art. But I really want to show you how easy it is to take this to something that feels a lot more realistic and natural. But the key is knowing how to do this first. Drawing a clear distinction between what is in the light and what is in the shadow. Trust me, this will come into play once you start applying color as well, I'm going to go in with my kneadable eraser and I'm going to lift up some of the value along here in this shadow shape, because I want that cheek to read as the darkest part of that shadow shapes. I want a strong bit of contrast there. Notice I am lifting up the value here, but I'm trying to be careful not to let it go too much in towards the light because I don't want to confuse with the light shape. So to help that, I'm going to darken this edge of the cheek here. Notice that I am breaking the line and bringing some value into the lighter part to create a smoother transition. Just because I'm emphasizing drawing the shadow shapes very cleanly and clearly it doesn't mean we have to keep those edges as hard as we drew them initially. We can break out of them once we have established them to create just smoother transitions. Here again, this part of the nose I want to bring that back up. Also in contrast, want to darken this here and notice how I have two strong edges here, but I want to now blend out this edge on the side here so that it's more softer transition along the bridge of the nose. That's much more naturalistic feeling. I'm going to draw in the eyelid. Sometimes I like to use a stamp, sometimes I like to just go in with the pencil. So now I am trying to bring in nuances in the light. The key to doing that again, is to keep it quite light and not as heavy as you would in the shadows because you still want this to read as part of the light. Now, this photo maybe a little bit tricky because I think the model may be wearing a little bit of eye shadow. So I'm going to try to indicate that very carefully though. Again, I want it to read like it is in the light. I don't want to confuse with the shadow. So I'm doing that ever so lightly. Here I don't mind, because this part is actually in shadow here. I'm going to redraw this shadow shape because I got lost a little bit. I'm constantly redesigning them and pushing things in the light or pushing things into the shadow, because I'm not a hundred percent sure right off the bat. I want to show that there is a bit of nostril there, but I want to keep it crystal-clear in that shadow shape. So that's why I'm going over it with pencil the entire area so it falls into that shadow shape. I'm going to very carefully indicate just a little bit of a changing plane there for the nose, extended up to the bridge, and a little bit too dark there. So the key is to not get distracted by every little dark value that you think you might be seeing. Because notice how light I went along the nose there, but I think that's enough to show that that's a nose. I don't feel the need to go very dark there. Now I'm going to bring some of this value down to the chin. If the light is coming from above, the chin is going to get less of the light. But here I'm being very careful again, because I want this part of the face to be grouped within the light shape. I'm not going as dark as I would here, because I don't want it to read like it's part of the same shape. Again, bringing a little bit more value down towards the chin because that area is going to receive less light, judging by our photo reference, and also this side of the face as well. Since the light seems to be coming from this direction and on, and also the neck appears to be darker as well. But notice that it's still in the light, because we have the strong shadow shape that is clearly separate from this. I'm going to lighten it up just a tad there. I'm going to clean up the drawing a little bit. This is basically my process when it comes to drawing portraits, as well as painting portraits. Even though I'm using color, I'm still thinking of this value relationship. If you wanted to show the texture of the hair, I would indicate just a couple of major clumps you might be seeing. I wouldn't go in and try to do all of them, because that tends to be very distracting. Usually when it comes to hair, I find that less is more. I like to approach it with an impressionistic kind of approach, just barely suggesting it. Notice how I am going back and erasing a lot of these values that I've just created, because it's too dark. I wanted to read it like it's part of the light because that's how I grouped it. So that's the challenging thing about hair, is trying to balance how to show just enough texture so you understand what the hair looks like. But you don't want too much, because then it looks a little bit too busy in drawing form. In photos, that's perfectly fine, but in drawing form and in painting form, it just doesn't look right. Something seems a little bit too convoluted. We just don't need to say it as much. We don't need to spell it out basically for our audience, you just need to suggest it. See, I'm bringing in some nuances by adding the darkest darks, anchoring those corners of the mouth, and just refining the shape of the lips. Also, I'm going to bring a little bit of value to the lips, the lower lip as well, try to go around that highlight on the lower lip there. Now I have that down, I need to dark in the shadow underneath here again, because it doesn't look as dark anymore. So managing these values is all about context. It doesn't look dark against. The values are [inaudible] or doesn't look light against the values that are next to it. You got to always be adjusting. If I wanted this to read like a shadow, then it's got to read darker than the values next to it, and vice versa. The last thing I'm going to do is I'm going to try to indicate a slight curvature of the skull. So lights coming from here and it's going to gradually get darker along this side. But remember, this is our shadow shape and this is part of the light. So that's why I'm keeping it very, very, very gentle, very light, so it doesn't get quite so dark. There's still this very smooth transition. You get the nuance of the feature that head is turning, is curved, curving away from the light, but still reads as part of the light shape, and that is how I like to organize my values. Let's get that [inaudible] Organizing values is incredibly helpful to convey a sense of form. But how do we now translate this skill into color? Looking at the photo for inspiration can help, but what if you wanted to go beyond what suggested in the photo? In the next lesson, I'm going to show you how you can set your portrait up in color, so that you can pave a clearer path to a finish. 5. Pt. 1 Block-in & Shadow Shapes: The next series of lessons will be a real-time demonstration of a portrait based off of this photo. I recommend while watching that you follow along with me by doing the same portrait based off of the same photo that I'm using for the demo, so you can really absorb the information and follow the process, or if you want more of a challenge, choose a different photo you'd like to work with and see if you can interpret my process into your own portrait throughout the demo. For this demonstration, I have chosen this photo to work with and I like this photo because there's a very clear distinction between what is in the light and what is in shadow. As you can see, the shadows on her face are very clearly defined. Whatever portrait I like to start with a drawing, so I know where I'm going and I'm going to block it in with my mechanical pencil. I'm going to go in with the block-in, and I want the portrait to be about this big on the page. I like to start off by roughly getting a feel for how big I want that on the page. Because the silhouette of her head is so clear, that's what I'm starting with here. Actually, may want to go a little bigger and have it maybe about this big. I like to use the pencil because it is very flexible and I can adjust the drawing as much as I want without being committed to it. When I'm doing the block-in, first, I just want to figure out where everything is. I am not really thinking about the shadows at this point, I'm just looking for what is the shape of her face? Where are those ears? Where are her eyes and the nose? Right now I'm not thinking about the shadow shapes at this point. I just want to get everything down. It's just a clean line drawing to start with. I'll draw guidelines like this, so I can place my eyes on the same plane, find my nose and the general placement for the lips. The block-in doesn't really have to be perfect, but I like to make sure that I like the drawing before I start coloring it because then you don't have to worry about the drawing as much while you're working with colors, because colors is added layer of difficulty on top of everything else you're doing. I don't think I gave her enough space between the nose and the mouth there. I'm going to draw the highlight of the eye. Here's a quick drawing of this portrait and this is above the point where I start giving consideration to the shadow shapes. Again, I pick this photo because I see such a clear distinction of what the shadow shapes look like. I'm going to start by blocking-in those shadow shapes that I'm seeing. I'm going to start with the one on the nose because I see it so clearly here. I'm just going to simplify and draw a straight line there but I am going to slightly curve where I expect there to be the ball of her nose here. Then there's the fill trim of the nose, that little shape there and I see a straight line coming down to the lips there. Then on the lower lip I see a line that curves like this, following the contour of the lip and underneath the lip, I see that very straight line like so. Following the contour of her chin, there's a more curved line like this coming down onto the chin. I'm just going to keep following here, down to the neck then a less clear line somewhere along here down the neck. I'm just going to simplify this shape into a straight line. Because I've studied anatomy and I understand there's this muscle, for the neck here, that's shaped like this, I understand why the shadow is shaped the way it is. If you don't know, then that is all the more reason to pick a photo like this because it is so clearly stated what that shadow looks like. All you have to do really is to just copy it as best as you can and as simply as you can, not trying to create too many shapes, too many divides and turns. Just try to keep it as simple as possible. We're going to go back up to the face. I'm going to indicate the anatomy of the ear here and draw all these shapes inside here. I'm now going to go in and draw that little patch of light on the shadow part of her face here. Thinking in negative shapes now, I see a shape that looks something like this. This doesn't have to be perfect. It is up to the artists to design it how they see fit. The drawing stage, it really doesn't have to be perfect because I'm always adjusting the design of these shapes as I go along with the color pencils. Because sometimes I'll realize I don't like the way I've drawn it out. Along the forehead here, compared to this line on the nose, it's a much more gradual transition. I don't know exactly where to place the line. I'm just going to make an educated guess. That's really the best that you can do because at the end of this portrait, I'm not going to have a stark line here. This line is just for me and for you when you're doing this part of the process, to know that beyond this line here, this is where the face turns away from the light and therefore casts a shadow here. It is part of the form that is in shadow. Really it's just an indicator for me to know that while I'm shading, this side is where I'm going to be shading darker and this side is where I'm going to be keeping lighter. It's really just a tool to help you, so don't feel like you have to do it so perfectly or to some kind of rule, there is really no rule here. It's something that should help you, not hinder you. Now I'm looking at the shadow shapes in the light part of her face. There's a little bit of a shadow that I'm going to draw out along the lower eyelid here, and also up on this side of the eye here. It's not super clear to me, but I'm just going to just draw it. I'm just making my best guess because none of these lines are set in stone. We can always adjust things as we go. The drawing looks to be coming together. At first, I didn't love how the drawing looked. But with the shadows in place, it actually does a lot to give this drawing some sense of structure. That's what I think is so great about photos like these, the clear sense of shadows. It helps you see the structure of the face a lot easier, and it also makes it easier to draw a face that has that sense of structure. I'm especially paying attention to the features, making sure the proportions are correct and I'm getting the nuances of their features because that's what makes a person stand out from the rest of their individual features. If anything else, I want to make sure I get their features as close to how they look as possible. With that, I think we are ready to proceed with our portrait and start setting it up. Here is how my block and drawings typically look when I am ready to start bringing in my color pencils. 6. Pt. 2 Wash & Lighting Statement: Now, what I'm going to do is actually take my kneadable eraser and blot and erase some of the lines so that I don't have such a clear line drawing. I want to be able to just see what I'm working with but not have a very strong drawing showing through while I'm working. Because for me personally, I find lines very distracting when I'm working with colors. I don't want the lines to remain at the end, but I still want to be able to see what I'm doing. I'm just going to take my kneadable eraser and just start lifting up some of the lines just enough so I can still see what I'm doing and where I'm going, but light enough so that eventually it won't even show through when we're done with it. Here's how the drawing looks after I've lifted up some of the excess graphite. All I'm left with is a ghost of a drawing. This is the point where I feel ready to go in with my color pencils. I'm looking at my photo and I'm thinking about how I'm going to approach this. It is very important to run these steps through your head as well before you approach color pencil portraits. Because with color pencils, there's definitely ways of approaching it that will be a little bit more advantageous. For example, going light to dark instead of dark to light. It is much more difficult to go from dark to light with color pencils as you probably know it from experience. You have to think about it in terms of steps. With this portrait, I'm looking at the photo and thinking what is the best step that I can start with that will not make it difficult for me down the line. With this portrait, I'm going to start out by doing just a quick wash of color and laying it down very lightly to start with. When I go to this side, what color I will lay down as the wash. I'm thinking, is this a warm tone photo or is this a cool tone photo? If I had to pick a color, what is the color that I feel? What is the color that I see? What is the overall impression color that I see when I look at this photo? For me, I get a very warm beige orange tone. That is what I'm leaning towards. I think I will start off by laying down a very light yellow color for the wash. I am keeping it very lightly to start, because the light side of her face is already quite light and I worry if I go into a little bit too dark with a wash, then it's going to be too dark to come back from because I want to preserve that light side of the face. I think I'm going to start off with maybe a color like this, is an extremely light yellow. I'm going to start off by laying down a very light wash. There is a light yellow color all over the drawing, because I want that yellow to come through the layers I will be putting down later and that way it will mingle together, harmonize all the colors together. I'm just not really caring about staying inside the lines or coloring the hair first or the skin first, I'm really just going all over the drawing here and putting that wash of color down on all aspects of the drawing. Trying to do it as evenly and as lightly as possible so that I still get that little hint of color, but there's still a lot of room to go darker if I choose. The hope is that this wash of warmer color will influence the other colors that I will be putting down over top of it and give it that warm appearance at the end. There is our first step into the setting up process. I think the next step we're going to do is actually start addressing the shadow shapes. I like to define my shadow shapes early on in the drawing because I find that it really helps you you a sense of the drawing a lot quicker. It gives you a lot of contexts because you're establishing the darker tones of the picture and so you can really see the relationship between the light and the darker values. Because right now all values are the same because all we did was just lay down a light wash of a very light value. The hard work that we did in the blocking stage, this is where that comes in, in this step. What I'm going to do is, I'm going to find a darker color to use for the shadows. The color I like to use for this job is a neutral leaning towards warm color, like a medium brown or a dark brown, depending on their skin tone. This is a color that I just grabbed. I'm just going to swatch it to see if it's going to be the color I want. I think that this may be a little bit too dark for the shadow color that I want. I'm going to try this one. This one seems a little bit too yellow for me, so I'm going to try another one. This might work, but it doesn't have to be perfect. We're just looking for a color that is darker in value and is leaning a little bit towards the warm side. Because the colors on our faces tend to be warmer because of how light works with our blood and skin and tissues and all that stuff. Basically, I'm going to use this color to shade in a lightly and block in all those shadow areas that we blocked out earlier in the drawing stage. What that is going to do is, it's going to give this drawing a very quick sense of three-dimensionality and structure. You'll notice how quickly by filling in those shadow shapes, how much of the drawing comes to life so early on by doing so. I'm going to start off by being very light. Really the color doesn't have to be perfect. This might be a little bit redder than I would like, but you can adjust that as you go later on. That's why I'm being very light so that we have room to adjust things. Even though I see that that's an ear and that's her hair, that's her face, when I'm thinking just about what is in the light and what is in shadow, I see that all this area here is in shadow. Even though her hair is a different color from her skin and all that, I'm just going to treat it as if this drawing is a two tone drawing. It is either this color or this other color that we started out with. It really helps to think about it in that respect, just working with two tones here for now. I'm just filling out the shadow areas that we had established in the blocking stage. Try and do it as evenly as possible. Even though you might see a little variations like part of this cheek is darker and part of this cheek is lighter, for now, just try to lay it down as evenly as possible, erring on the light side so that you have room to go darker if you want to. Getting lost in the details right now is not advised. We really want to keep it as simple as possible to begin with. I'm noticing now that I forgot to draw out the shape of the lighter patch of her hair here, so I'm just going to do it. I'm just going to draw around or shade around that there and here as well. It really doesn't have to be perfect. Notice how doing this it makes a drawing come to life so quickly. It gives it that three-dimensionality and actually I'm going to put her eyeball in shadow here as well, because it's turning away from the light there as well as here. When you're doing this, really try to see the big picture and try to combine these shapes into one. Try not to see everything as disjointed little pieces and try to see them all as connected into a bigger piece. Every little thing connects and through this overall shadow shape. Notice how in the photo there's a sliver of bounced light underneath her chin here and along her jaw. But I just grouped it as part of a shadow shape here and I didn't make a distinction here, because what beginners tend to do is they over-exaggerate how light the value of the balanced light is. What they usually do is they carve out that shape and make that into the light shape. What that does is then you're saying that, that bounce light in the shadow is as light as the light part of her face. Bounced light can be really tricky even though it may appear as bright as was in the light, it just simply isn't true because bounced light occurs in the shadows. All we've done so far in this drawing is basically establish this drawing in terms of two tones. The darker tone representing the shadows and the lighter tone representing the light. From here, we're going to build over top and establish the local colors for all the different elements, which is going to give a lot more life to this drawing. 7. Pt. 3 Local Colours: The next step that we're going to apply here is the local colors. Now, the local colors here, I think, are very simple. What is her skin color? I would say it's like a light, peachy, olive skin tone. Her eyes are a medium, amber brown and her hair is a very dark, green brown. I'm not sure actually. I feel like it's got a greenish tinge to it, but I have no idea. But I feel like local color is less about something that you need to know and get right, it's more about just making that decision and establishing it, and following through on that so that at the end it looks like they have that color for their hair and they have that color for their skin. It doesn't look like they have rainbow hair and rainbow skin. They have a designated hair color, or they have a designated eye color. That's really what establishing local colors is about. It's just making the decision to say they're going to have this color for their skin, they're going to have this color for their hair and following through on that to the end no matter what kind of environment they may be in. They may be in a very reddish colored environment. You can still tell what each element is. With all that said, let's establish the local colors here. So for her skin, I'm just looking for a very light, peachy toned color. I think I'm going to go with this one here, and I'm going to lay it over the entirety of her skin even in the shadow area. It's not going to look too extreme to start. I'm just laying down a light layer of this color here. Really this step is maybe the easiest and quickest. Really is just like filling in a coloring book. Now, I'm going to go in with her eye color. I'm not sure what brown to use. I'm just looking for a color that I think is the closest to her, the local color of her eyes, which is like that ambery, warm brown color. When you do this, you don't have to get it right off the bat, and you actually don't want to get it right off the bat. I like to think of it as going in maybe 70 percent, maybe even less. I'm not going in very hard here. I'm just trying to establish that her eye color is different from our skin color, and I think that does the job there. I think I'm pretty happy with that, and let's establish her lip color. I would say, a pinky, rosy color like this will do, and then I need to establish the local color of her hair. Now her hair appears to be very dark and with very dark hair, I don't like to go in with a very dark value right off the bat at 100 percent strength and opacity. I like to really gradually build up that color so that at the end I have all these colors that mix in together to form that very dark color instead of just using one single color to achieve that value. Like I said, I feel like I see a greenish tinge to her hair, so I'm going to look for something like this. Actually, I think this will work perfectly for the hair here. Again, I'm going in very lightly even though I can see that her hair is very dark. With art, you will find that, oftentimes, you don't have to go that dark, as dark as the photos, you can leave some areas to be much lighter. But if you understand your values and you understand color, you can manipulate those two things to create the illusion that it is dark hair. But actually, if you take the eye dropper tool and you pick out the color in the hair, it is not actually black, even though it looks like it's very close to black in our eyes, and that's what's so magical about art. Again, actually, I should go over this light area too. So just going over the entirety of her hair and establishing this greenish tone so that it looks separate from her skin. I realize that this right now doesn't look so hot, but trust me, we're going to build upon this. It is actually quite easy to take this and make it look really good. When you get to a stage like this where things look a little bit weird, it looks a little bit awkward. If you did all the hard work of doing a decent block and drawing and figuring out your shadows and establishing the local colors, if you did all that, then the rest of it really will fall into place according to the plan that you've established. Don't get discouraged when things look a little bit strange in between these stages. Trust me, we're going to work on it. Before we go any further, because we've layered on a few more layers, the drawing is getting a little bit lost. I'm going to bring back my shadow color. You don't necessarily have to use the same color that you did in the shadow, but I like to use it just because it keeps you from introducing a whole new color which may complicate things and because it's already down on the page, it's already very cohesive. But what I'm going to do is I'm going to bring this in and just start to define some areas of the drawing and also reinforce some of the darker shadows. For example, underneath the eyes they're not quite as defined here, and now is a good time to start committing to the drawing a little bit. What that means is I'm going to go in and pick out certain darker shadows. For example, in the ear here, there's this little shape that is darker like that, as well as this little shape of the ear and just defining some of the lines and committing to the drawing, committing to the design that I've laid out like so as well as picking out some of the details that I see in this line of the nostril here. Not too quickly and all over the place because then it's just going to look like I have a line drawing again. I want to do it gradually along with all the shading that I'm going to do and the coloring. I want to bring these lines back over time. I've seen what is necessary and what isn't necessary because the lines are hard to go back on once you've made them. But these darker lines underneath the eyes indicating the shadow of the eyelid there, I felt like I really needed that, and it's going to make the eyes pop a lot more. I'm using this as my just universal shadow color. Even though it may not be the exact color of the photo, it doesn't really matter. I mean, I can go in and adjust the color later to match the photo, but you'll find that once you start developing your photo like this, it doesn't really matter that you get the exact color of the photo down. You'll find that as long as you are getting the right value relationship down, then it really doesn't matter getting the exact hue of the color down. The majority of the impact that we feel when we look at a photo or a drawing is in the value relationship, not in the colors. That's why putting an emphasis on the values is the way to start being really adventurous with colors. Because, as long as you get the value relationships right, then you can really get away with using any kind of color combinations. Just reinforcing some of the anatomy like the corners of the mouth. Just bringing back parts of the drawing where you want a bit of the hard edge. I call this stage, the drawing stage, so I go back and forth from the shading and drawing. Even though I am introducing all these things in steps, you'd really don't have to be so rigid in each step. Just try to understand why these steps exist, but you don't have to follow them so rigidly. Of course, you can establish the local color with many different colors. If you don't have the desired color in a single convenient color, then of course, you can use many different colors and mix them together to get the desired color that you want. Again, you don't necessarily want to get the desired color right off the bat anyhow. Because, building everything up very gradually is how you get that rich depth of color in the end. Don't feel pressured to get everything 100 percent right off the bat. I'm bringing in this light yellow color that we use to lay down the light wash in the beginning because I feel like this part of the skin in shadow is a little bit cooler than I would like, so I'm trying to bring some of that warmth to come through underneath a little bit. Actually, I might as well just go over the entire area to reinforce that warm wash. Whenever you move on to the next step, you'll realize that you actually have to go back and reinforce a previous step because as you start to work, you'll realize you didn't quite go far enough and that's good because like I said, context gives you a better idea of how to approach it. You always want to go, not all the way to leave that little room so that you can go back and say, oh, okay, now I know better how far I should go. You can make a more informed decision when you are ready. I'm going to throw in this gray color for her eyeballs. Eyeballs left as a white of the paper often look a little bit too stark. I like to establish a little bit of a darker value for the eyeballs. Now that I've done that, her irises look very pale. I'm just going to go in and define her iris a little bit with a darker value here, and you'll find as you continue to work, you will have several colors out on your desk. I find that, as time goes on, sometimes I don't even really look at the color that I'm reaching for. I'm really more concerned about the value of the color that I'm reaching for. For example, this green color, I wasn't really thinking about it. When I reach for it, all that I was thinking was that it is a darker value and I needed a darker value for the job. Using all these colors all over the piece, repeating these colors in different areas of the piece is a really easy way to create a harmonious look in terms of the colors. That's something to keep in mind. Instead of reaching out for a brand new color that is completely new in your piece, think about using a color that you have already used in your process and just see how that looks. You might be surprised that it actually looks pretty good even though you're thinking, oh, I need a purple for this. You might be a surprise that actually green works totally fine. Because like I said, like I want to really just drive home with everyone, the color that you see in the photo doesn't have to be the color that you actually put down. You'll realize over time how little that actually matters. 8. Pt. 4 Bringing Life into the Skin: So the next step is to establish the warmth of her skin so that her skin feels a little bit more alive. Even though in the photo, I don't really see a very strong sense of warmth, where we would normally expect to see it, for example, along the cheeks and along the nose. I can see it subtly along the nose and the shadow and along the cheek here, but it is a very subtle, probably because the photo is very overexposed. The light part of her face is just very overexposed. It took a lot of information out, so we don't really see much variation in that, but we can still honor that lighting, but we can still take some artistic liberties and bring some of that warmth that we expect to see. Lets bring in some of that warmth along the cheeks, the nose, and the ears, and, also just along the shadows where you would expect to see warm bounce light. What I'm going to do is, I'm going to bring in some warm orange-y colors, and go over areas where I would expect to see some warmth happening. For example, the inside of the nostril here you expect to see some sub-surface scattering of that intense bright red light. Along the nose shadow here I do see a little bit of more intense orange color along that shadow. And here as well. You'll notice on the shadows on the skin, the transition, it'll actually be a more intense and warm orangey to red color, and that's what I'm trying to mimic here, by going between those transition areas and applying that bit of warmth. I find it really helps to just liven up the skin a little bit. It's such an easy way to make the skin feel more alive. As well, very dark, like crevasses like the creases of the eyelids, areas like that on the skin where you have those darker values, very dark values on the skin tend to be warmer instead of cooler. So that's why I also like to go over those areas with a warmer color. I find that it just gives it a much more naturalistic quality to it. Along the hairline where the hair meets the skull, I find when I observe those areas, they tend to be warmer as well. I also give some warmth in that area. It becomes a nice transition between the hair color, and the skin color. Even though the picture is very blown out, I'm still going to indicate a very subtle rosiness around the nose. Like so. I'm going to bring in some rosiness around the cheeks. I've grabbed a cooler pink here so that hopefully it stands out a little bit from all those warm colors that I have down so far. Actually, I might have gone a little bit too heavy there, but that's okay. We will go hard on other thing, so hopefully it will reduce the strength of that. But I don't think that it looks that bad actually. To balance out on the other side, I am going to go in with a very light pink here, and try to kind of even that out or balance that out, but not too much. I'm not going in nearly as dark and pink as the other side because I still want this area to read as one light shape. Maybe a little bit of orangey tone here, actually I am going to go a little bit harder on the lips. So bring in a stronger pink there to reinforce that local color. Something that I am always trying to reinforce all the time is the shadow shaves, because as you work and as you start to apply darker values to other areas in the painting, your shadows are not going to look quite as dark as you had perceived before. So with the new context, you have to constantly go back and reinforce those shadow shaves. You can start to now define some of the nuances and the shadows as well. For example, this kind of ridge of the eyebrow here, I see it being a fair bit darker than the rest of the shadow here. So making that distinction is perfectly acceptable at this point. It's much easier to do that after having established a clear sense of light and shadow. So you know how dark you can go. As well, this side of the nose, appears to be a bit darker. So darkening that will help. I'm going to strengthen this edge here, so that light shape really pops. But I'm going to keep this side much softer looking, well, partially, like so. I think that really strengthen the sense of that little light patch there. I love trying to accentuate things like that. To me that's what makes a picture really interesting, like little patches of light here and there. Bring some warmth along the chin here. I think I made that a little bit too strong and now her chin is a little bit too razor sharp looking, so I'm going to try to tone that down. Whenever I can, I try not to go dark to light. I'm always trying to go light to dark when I can, I find the result is better that way. If you want to smoothen out some of the texture and therefore you want to go dark to light, that's perfectly acceptable, it's just try to do it intentionally and not because you have to because you made a mistake. Once you go lighter, I find is just becomes much harder to lay more colors over top of it. If you continue to go light to dark, then I just find that it gives you just a bit more flexibility and more room to move around than going dark to light. I'm going to bring in a dark brown color because I feel like now is the time to bring a much darker value for some of the very dark values in the picture. I'm actually going to sharpen this one, so that I have a much finer point to work with. I'm going to bring some of the darker values in the eyes. I find that the eyes just need a little bit more of, but I want to do it sparingly. With this darker value, I am going in and getting in those very dark values like the nostrils for example, or just darkening the shadow in general. Defining what's going on with her mouth there, a slight ajar position of her mouth. It's a lot easier to do that with a darker value like this and with a sharp point of a pencil. I like to do these more detailed steps towards the end, because once you go quite heavy with these marks, it's difficult to go back from that, and so you are making a commitment to these lines. You want to make sure that you're quite happy with where you're positioning them. I'm also bringing this value in her hair because her hair is a very dark value and we've not yet gone far enough on it yet to convey the value over here. I'm hoping that brings some of this and will do the job. Getting those deep crevices of the ear anatomy there. It's just so much easier with a very fine point like this and a darker value, but you would definitely want to be sparing with it. I'm always looking around the drawing and seeing what has changed and what now needs my attention. You're always changing the context. It really is juggling after, you're juggling 20 balls in the air, probably more. Now I know that the colors in this piece are not exactly very exciting, and that is on purpose because the color lesson is coming up and where I will teach you guys how to incorporate all kinds of different colors into your portrait. That's when I will be showing you the decisions that I make, when I start to bring in all kinds of different colors, because I feel like if I did that in this demonstration, while we're just getting familiar with the setup, that might be a little bit confusing because I can't explain every single reason why I'm reaching for a certain color until I show you why I am making those decisions. Don't worry, we're going to get there eventually, but we got to know how to lay down this solid foundation first before we get into the nitty-gritty of color. In the next lesson, I'm going to show you guys how you can take something like this, which has a very solid foundation and find ways and opportunities to inject more color into it so that you can have a much more interesting statement with the colors. If you feel ready to move on to the next step and then join me in the next lesson, I'll see you there. 9. Pt. 5 Colour Temperature: In the first part of the demo, we did the hard work of figuring out our value statement and setting up the foundation of the local colors. In this second half of the demonstration, we'll focus on having fun with our colors and bringing more artistry into the portrait. In the first half of the demonstration, when we were setting up our portrait here, we used a lot of colors that fall within the same warm color family and what happens when you tend to use colors from just one side of the color family. At best you end up with colors that work together, that very easily work together but are dull and at worst, you might end up with making very muddy colors. The first thing we're going to address in this second half of the demonstration is the color temperature of the portrait, and specifically dealing with warm versus cool. What we have here is a very warm leaning portrait. I use a lot of browns, a lot of oranges, a lot of reds and so to me the portrait feels a little bit too hot, a little bit too warm. So let's start introducing some cools into this portrait. When I say cool, I don't necessarily mean a very saturated blue like this one here. This is quite a dark and saturated blue and I think for me, it's a little bit too dark and too saturated and too cool of a blue for the purpose of adding a little bit more cools in this piece just yet because right now our piece is so hot, so warm that I think this is going a little bit too far, too quickly. I am going to reach for more of a blue like this one, which is slightly less saturated than that Teal blue and also a little bit lighter and then I also reached out for this one, sky blue which is an even lighter blue than that one, and I think it's also a little bit less saturated. That might be a good option for us there and then there's also this one. This is a saturated blue but it's leaning towards more of a green. When I'm choosing an opposite color, like this opposite to the colors that I'm working with here. I'd like to typically opt for a lighter color because darker colors are harder to fix. If I go in a little bit too heavy to start off with, a light color that has good color payoff like this one is usually what I would go for except I don't know if this one is going to work for me. I don't know if I'll quite like this picturing it on here, I don't know if I quite like that. I might look at some greens now and see if I'm going to like those better. Here's a turquoise green, here's another grayish periwinkle color here. I think I'm going to start with something like this one, that's more periwinkle color. When we look at our photo, I don't think I'm seeing blues, I'm not really seeing greens, I'm not seeing any of those colors but the whole thing about art is that we don't have to do what we think we see in the photos. Otherwise, it would be a very boring piece of artwork. If we tried to copy exactly pixel by pixel what we see in the photos, that would defeat the purpose of doing a portrait like this in the first place, at least in my opinion because we can never compete with how accurate the camera is. For artists, we have to forget that we're trying to aim for accuracy, we have to feel free to go beyond the photo and explore and have fun. Certainly we can glean from the photo and take what we can see in the photo and use that as a jumping off point and that's exactly what we're doing in our demonstration but we don't have to feel bound by the photo at all. As I've said, I don't necessarily see any cools in there, I don't see any blues, I don't see any purples, I don't see any greens but I want to incorporate those colors into my piece so that we have a wider range of colors in here. This may be a really scary stuff for a lot of people, bringing a color like this that you don't necessarily see in the photo, so you don't know exactly where to place it but you can look at the photo to give you a little bit of guidance as to where to apply those colors. When I look at the photo, I can see that along the side of her face, on the side of her neck here, the value seems to be a little bit lighter and it doesn't have to be a slightly towards the gray side then here where all that warmth is. I'm going to go in with this color very lightly and see if I can add a little bit of cool here along the edges of the face and the neck. It gives some of these warm colors a little bit more meaning. I'm going to go in and add a little bit of cool and see what happens and observe how that makes this whole piece feel overall. I'm going in very lightly here, I might have to change colors if I see that it is not giving the effect that I want and I am going into the hair here actually too, because that hair actually needs to be cooled down as well. I'm not sure how I like that but we will follow through on it and continue on to the neck here. I think it is definitely adding another sense of dimension by introducing the cools there. I'm also going to go into the ear here, the ear's feeling a little bit too hot. Maybe go in with a purple over top of that area. Well, we'll let that marinate for a little bit, and also going to go in with a cool here. Cool down that nose a little bit. Because I went along on this side of the face as well as the side of the neck, I'm basically treating any side of the face that is facing that same direction, I'm trying to affect with the same color as well so that it looks consistent, so that it looks like every element feels like it's affected by the same lighting scenario. That's why I also went into the hair here since this side of the hair would be affected by that cool light as well if this side of the face is being affected by the cool light. I'm going to go in with a cool color to affect this side of the face, the side of the face that's receding away from us. This is not a rule per se, but it is something that I like to follow. Anything that is receding into space and that is turning away from you, I like to treat that side with a cooler color because it is further away from you, and it is further back into space and being affected by the atmosphere light. Remember that we still need to think of our drawing as a three-dimensional object. The human head is a three-dimensional object. It has front planes, and side planes, and top planes, and bottom planes. When I'm looking at this drawing, I'm imagining lines that divide those planes. A really great way and a really easy way to show structure in your drawing by indicating those planes is through your color use, specifically through color temperature. Here how I added the cools on this side, it really separates that a side plane from the front plane of the face. Now what I want to do is do the same but on this side of the face, the receding planes of the face, so along the nose here, along the face here. Just imagine a very thin sliver where you can see just a little bit of that plane receding into space. What that's going to do is also give this side of the face a lot more dimension with very, very little work. I pick this kind of minty green color because this side of the face is so yellow and warm. I thought that this minty color would land a very subtle contrast that doesn't create too much attention on this side because I think I want to keep the attention and the drama on this side of the face. We'll see how it goes. All these moves I'm making, I don't know 100 percent if they're going to be the right move. If for some reason it doesn't look great, then there's always something we can do to fix it. I'm going to go in with this green here, and I am going to very lightly bring that green in on this side of the face. I wonder if that's picking up on the camera even. Yeah, I think it is. I think it's landing a very nice but subtle bit of contrast. Of course, doing things like this really helps if you understand facial anatomy going into it. I definitely recommend that you brush up your knowledge on that. Otherwise, really try to pick a photo that shows a very clear sense of the structure of the face so you can really clearly see where those planes are turning. Here, I am picturing this forehead here, and this side of the forehead is turning away from us. It is turning away into space, and therefore, I'm bringing this minty green color in so that it stays consistent, so it feels like there's this minty color atmospheric lighting on this side affecting those planes facing that direction. Again, in the eye here as well, little bit of the lower eyelid. I'm really liking how that green is toning down the warm colors so far. This side of the mouth here turning away from us, and this side of the chin here as well, and as well as the neck. I think that already helps add a lot more interest to this piece so far. Now that we've established some cool colors, I feel like we can go even a little bit bolder with the warms. I'm going to try to reinforce some of the warms here. You can't forget this part of the hair here. It would be getting that minty light as well, as well as here, any plane that's turning away from us. You can't forget the eyeballs too. The eyeballs also have planes, and they're also being affected by the light. Got to bring in those cools into the eyeballs as well. The key really is to stay consistent as much as possible. It may seem like you're doing something wrong, but I think as long as you're consistent, it'll look right, as long as you're consistent, as long as you follow through. It may not look right in the sense that it is scientifically right, but it looks right in the sense that it looks very intentional. 10. Pt. 6 Injecting More Colours: The next thing we're going to do to inject more color into this piece is, to look for a large, solid patches of color. Large patches of solid color, like basically this whole area of her hair here, they are really great opportunities to inject a lot of color into them. When we look at our photo we can clearly see that her hair is a dark-brown, but that doesn't mean that we have to take the dark-brown color like this and just fill it all out very uniformly and solidly as we can see it in the photo. In the photo, as I've said, it doesn't show the brilliance of colors, it doesn't really show any variety in terms of colors, to our eyes, it's just a solid dark-brown, but it doesn't have to be that way in our portrait, we can add any colors in there that we want and get away with it. As long as we get the value right, as long as we save this as a darker patch or value than this, and as long as we get the overall color to look like it's brown, if we want brown hair, then we can really cram in all kinds of color in areas like this. We can throw in purples, we can throw in green, blues, yellows, pinks, any color we want, we can throw in here. Same goes for the eyebrows. The eyebrows don't have to be all uniformly colored like this. For me actually, eyebrows are a place where I really like to have some fun with colors. As I've said, we can pretty much bring in any color in the hair that we want. Let's just pick up some colors and have some fun. Here's some turquoise. As long as the overall impression that we get when we look at it is dark-brown hair, we can really get away with a lot. Bringing some pinks here. You know what? I am going outside of the line so to speak, because we don't need to stay within the lines, we can make a mess and have some fun here. I just realized that on camera the color variation that I'm trying to achieve here is not going to show up very well because the value is already quite dark, and the camera pushes the contrast a little bit, so appears even darker. What I'm going to do is, I'm going to take a needle eraser and I am going to lift up a little bit of the valley here because it is a little bit darker than I would like in order to have that play with colors I was talking about earlier. I am going to lift up some of that value. Do not panic. All will be well. Once I do that it'll be a lot easier to lay some of those colors down. Because as you know, the more color pencils you lay over top the harder it gets to lay more colors. That's just the way it seems to work with color pencils. That's why in a way you do have to think about your next steps and think before going a little bit too far in value. You do have to consider the colors at the same time as well. That is why I keep stressing this step-by-step processes, is more for the purpose of teaching, and once you get familiar with using color pencils, then you will develop a more natural process where you combine all those steps into one or two and you won't have to do as much backtracking like I am right here. Lifted up some of the values there. The hair should be now easier to work with when we try to bring in some colors. I think I'm going to carry on and add some purples here. Because why not, and carry on some of that periwinkle blue color that we use on the skin earlier. Really I'm just trying to eventually mix to a dark-brown color. On-camera it may not be picking it up super clearly unfortunately, but trust me, layering your colors like this and your values like this, it lends to a much more layered and more dimensional look in terms of the colors. It's no longer a uniformly brown color, but it's got depth to it, it's got little variations in there that are subtle, but when you look closely at it, you can make out little individual colors, and that to me is very exciting. I like to incorporate areas like that into my work as much as possible. There's no rule that says the hair has to be all uniformly and solidly brown. Just because that's how it appears in the photo, doesn't mean we have to do that as well. I'm really using pretty random colors here. Just making sure I'm going dark enough so it still looks like her hair. This side is facing the same direction as this side of the face and neck where I apply the similar blue. This is keeping consistent with that imaginary lighting scenario that I set up. One of the most frequent questions that I get in regards to color is, how am I putting blues in hair or greens in hair when there are no blues and greens in hair? It's just believing in the fact that values carry the drawing, and if you have solid values, then you can really get away with adding any color you want. If you stay consistent in applying that color in areas where it has the same directional plane, then you also convince the viewer that there is a sense of structure there. You do that all with these subtle color variations. I'm giving a little bit more strength to the hair in certain areas where that hair meets to ear, bringing a little bit of a harder edge there and a darker value. Let's go in with the eyebrows. I'm going to use the same minty green color that I used earlier, and I'm just going to throw it in here and see how I like that, and here. The thing about eyebrows is when the eyebrow is so uniformly colored and in the same value, it really flattens it out on the face. The eyebrow follows the contour of the brow bone, and your brow bone, like this side of the eyebrow, the wing side of the eyebrows here, they face a different direction than the front plane of the eyebrows, and so I like to separate the two with colors. Here for example, because we went in with a cooler color on this side, I'm going to do the same with the eyebrows. Unfortunately it's not showing up very well because the paper's already quite saturated there. I'm just going around it to give the eyebrows a halo effect of color. I'm going to strengthen the local color of the neck here a little bit. It's getting a little bit too close to white. Always go back and reinforce everything, because as you work the context is always changing, and it makes you realize if you went a little bit too far or you didn't go far enough in the previous steps. I'm just reinforcing that local color of her skin, and also going over the little minty area, little green areas, it does tie them together a little bit better as well. I like to just scan the drawing over and see if anything needs adjusting. Notice I'm just using a singular brown color for darkening the values again. It's just to keep things simple, just so that I don't have to go and pick up all these different colors while I'm trying to focus on doing the values. Picking a neutral color like this, it just helps you keep it simple. Notice how now I am committing to some of the lines a little bit more. Now that we have a little bit more finish on the picture I feel a little bit more confident going in a bit harder. 11. Pt. 7 Edges & Transitions: I really like where this is going so far, and now I think we're ready to start looking a little bit more critically at our edges and our transitions. In our picture we have a lot of edges, we have hard edges like the one on the nose here, and along the neck here and the shadow as well as lost edges. Lost edges like this little green bit here with the side of the cheek, it's barely there, you can just make it out. Almost a lost edge here where the hair meets the skin here. Why we want to look at edges is one, now that we want to really commit to our drawing here. We want hard edges where we want there to be that strength. A good portrait has a very nice balance of hard and soft edges. Now is the time where I feel a little bit ready to commit to some of these edges and make some of them harder, or make some of them softer. But two, edges are a really great place where you can also find opportunities for injecting some interesting plays of color. An edge is created when you have one color butting up against another color. Here, for example, you have this cool reddish color butting up against this very light pale yellow color. That is what I would call a hard edge. I left that a hard edge on purpose, because I really liked that striking contrast on this eye. I want this eye to be the focus of this portrait. But there are areas where I don't want that edge to be quite so hard. Back in the stage where we were bringing some life into the skin, we already did a little bit of this where we added some of that really warm orange in the edges along the shadows. That's the same idea with this as well, except I really find any excuse to throw down colors in between these edges here in order to create a more interesting and seamless transition. How you find these opportunities for more colors, just scan around your drawing and see where there is an edge. Like this one, for example, along this side of the cheek here and this part of the hair in the back. Now, I personally don't think I want to do anything with this edge, but that is an edge, for example, where you can add a color in between here to create a more seamless transition, as well as introducing another color between this brown color and this cool purpley color. But here, for example, where the hair meets the skin, there is an edge here and I definitely want to throw in a third color in there to make it a little bit more interesting, and I'm going to use a warm orange color here. Butting up colors closely like this, it gives context to these colors, it makes these now look not quite as warm as this color and makes this look not quite as warm as this color, it makes it look darker. It not only softens up that edge, it just creates another dimension to those colors as well as giving it some context. I'm going to repeat that on this side as well. Where else? Again here, right under this eyebrow, there's quite a stark edge here. In terms of colors it's boring, you have this purple here and you have this light pinky beige color there. I'm going to throw in this orange here in between there to divide it up a little bit. Even that as just another element in there that gives all these colors meaning. It gives all these colors around it meaning because it gives it context. I'm going to do the same thing on this side of the eyebrow. I'm going to go and reinforce the hair here a little bit stronger so the hair really looks lifted from the head instead of looking so flat on the head. The highlights here in the hair is a very actually ripe opportunity for this scenario, where there is a transition from the dark part of the hair to the highlight. Right now it's ambiguous, there's little bits of color spilling out, but right now it just looks like it's going from the white of the paper to very dark color. I'm always looking for areas like this where I can create a smoother transition and be able to throw an extra bit of color in there as well. For me, with the hair here I think I want to go in with a warm yellowy color like this one. I'm going with a warm color because we use a color like this initially when we started out to lay down a wash. I want to carry on with that, and the highlight is going to take on the color of the light. Because we establish the light as a warm yellowy color, we're going to keep it consistent and see it's yellow as well. I'm going to apply the yellow here along the transition, between the darker value and the lighter value, and throw in that little yellow edge there. On this side as well, and it's not going to be perfect, but I think the yellow still comes through really well. Taking this creamy color and going over the dark areas a little bit. I didn't give myself enough room there for the highlight, so I'm backtracking a little bit. Now we're going to look at the shadows along the neck here. It's feeling a little bit too same, I want there to be a balance between hard and soft edges. If I make all of these edges here very stark and hard, this whole shadow is going to look like it's a cutout. It's like this piece of paper that was cut out and pasted onto the neck there. We don't want that. We want a nice play of hard and soft edges. You don't have to make that up, you can look at the photo for our help for this. I'm looking at the photo right now and I can see clearly where some of these edges are harder and some of them are very soft so I am going to honor that. I'm going to go in with an orange color here. See that little band of color there, it really adds a punch to these colors. To keep a consistent, because I went with this warm orange color here for this hard edge, I'm going to do the same with the hard edge down here. Here as well. Here as well. The rest of the edges there, I want to do it with a different color. Maybe a yellow, maybe it is this yellow here. Just to break things up a little bit. It's not totally uniform. Our eyes are really crave variety even in a simple portrait like this. Also, this hard edge under the chin here and then a softer transition here. Up until this point, we were looking at these internal edges in the portrait. But now, I'm going to turn my focus onto the external edges, basically, the silhouette of the drawing, because I know that this is a really great place to add really interesting color variations. Notice how I did keep my edges very soft and it's because I wanted that room for flexibility. My rule of thumb for these outer edges is really just to not use one singular color to go around the entire edge because that will flatten out the image. We got to remember again that every edge here, everything faces a certain direction, the head is a three-dimensional object in space, and so all these edges here. If I did a singular colored line here all around this edge, it would really flatten out the image and put it all on a singular two-dimensional plane. I personally don't want that. If you want that effect, then that is totally fine, and that is your taking artistic liberties with it. For this, I'm going to explain whether I'm making that edge a hard edge or whether I'm making a soft edge, and why I'm using the color that I'm going to be using. I think the first thing I'm going to address is the edge of the hair. I'm going to use this purple color to outline that edge of the back of the hair there. Actually, upon doing that, I think I want to actually use this blue instead. As we go up to the top, I don't want to carry on with the same color. I want to use a different color because that will be a different plain. I'm going to go on with this minty color here for a change. Actually, I'm going to use this color again here because they look like they're facing the same direction. Then for here, I want this yellow color to be bleeding out from there. I'm going to do that. I think these little bits of color peeking through it adds a lot to the colors next to it. Actually, this area to me is a little bit too red, orange, warm, so I'm going to randomly throw in this blue here along this edge because why not? Just there. It's different, doesn't have to make sense. You know what, maybe I regret that, but that's okay. That is just how art gets made. Sometimes you can regret things. This edge of the face here, I want to add this lavender color, but I don't want to go in too strong because I don't want this edge to flatten out that side of the face because I want it to recede into space softly. I'll repeat it with the ear, where that same plane would be. Also the neck here. But notice I'm not going all the way up here because I want this side to read differently from this part of the neck. I never really want to connect everything altogether in a uniform way, that would flatten things out. I think I'm going to bring in this blue color on this side of the neck here, but I'm not going to go up all the way because, again, I want that contrast between hard and more defined edges like this one and it's just softer edges like that. Just adding a bit more pink to her cheeks here, reinforcing her skin tone a little bit. I'm just bringing down the light part of her skin in value a little bit. Now I feel a little bit more confident that this is what I want. Earlier, I have to leave a lot of room just in case. But now with every thing in place, I can see that I can go darker. You always have to constantly check what the new context is. I was feeling that there was a little bit too much contrast between how light the light values were and how dark the dark values were. That is why I'm bringing down the light values just a tad so they work better together. Otherwise, they will look a little bit too stark, too much contrast. Again, just scanning around for any edges that need little bit of attention. Actually, this edge right along here, I want to add a little pop of blue or purple or something just to contrast this intense orange here and all this warm tones here. Now, I got to be careful with this because I can't backtrack. But I think I actually might make it this purple color. We'll see how that feels. I think I like it. That's really more of an artistic choice here to draw an edge like that because that's not something you see in the photo, but it's something I just felt inclined to do so. It's funny how doing that made me want to go in here with an orange, again, to accentuate that a little bit more to balance that out. I guess we're at that stage where we are coming to a finish here, and we're making our final marks on the piece. I'm going to go in the hair here again and add some cool colors in that transition. I'm not even going to justify why I am putting certain colors down where because I don't think we needed a reason for everything. I guess grab for a purple because of the yellows there and I wanted there to be that contrast. These transition areas are really great places for some unexpected colors. Still, the whole hair reads brown. As long as the whole hair reads brown in the end, you can really get away with a lot.. 12. Pt. 8 Levels of Contrast & Finishing Touches: The next very artistic thing we're going to be dealing with our portrait is areas of low and high contrast. If everything in the image has a high level of contrast, then that's a little bit too strong for our eyes and we don't really know what to look at because everything is screaming for attention. That's why I like to balance those areas with areas of lower contrast and I like to call those areas, areas of rest. At a certain point, I like to really take a look at the image and look critically at the level of contrast in it. I'm scanning the image and seeing where my darkest dark values are and I'm seeing a lot of those dark values along the hair here, as well as the eyes and the eyebrows. A really great way to add a lot more depth into a portrait is to vary up those levels of contrast. For example, this side of the face here, this side of the hair is closer to us and therefore, this strong contrast is justified. But on this side, because this side is the side that is receding into space if we decrease the contrast on this side, that's really going to make this area pop and it's really going to make this side look as if it is receding into space. Right now, I feel like the darkness levels are pretty similar from side to side. I think it's something worth playing around with. If you're someone who really wants to inject a lot of depth into your piece, then definitely look critically at your contrast levels. Not only is it a tool to create a lot of depth because you are changing the values, you are also changing the colors by lightening some of these areas up where there are these darker values, you are actually introducing more colors into the piece because changing the values of colors, it changes how the color appears. I'm just going to try to find a color that's pretty light in value, but also has a pretty strong saturation in terms of the color. I'm actually going to go in with this light blue here for the eyes. All I'm doing is I'm bringing in a lighter color than the color that I'm going over like the dark part of the eye here, in hopes that it will lighten the value and impart some of that color there. It may look a little bit mysterious at first, but trust me, I think at the end, when you looked at the overall picture, it will start to make sense. Especially, once I reinforce some of the harder contrast on this side. I'm really just lightning it up as long as maybe imparting some of the color as well. Fortunately, again, I don't know how well this effect is showing up on camera. Now, I'm going to go in with the eyebrow here. Let's try something quite different there and go in with neon yellow color to really lighten that eyebrow up. It feels different from the side here. It may feel like you're going backwards and you're ruining all that hard work you did but trust me, this is really a fun way to add a lot more interest to your piece. It's very tempting to want to make every single aspect of the piece stand out and we tend to err on the side of creating more contrast than less. But what we want is a nice balance between the two. I'm going to go in to the hair here. I'm just going to use white. I'm just bringing down the value. By doing so, even with a white, it changes the color. Now, it looks more purple rather than brown. We're coming to a close here and I'm assessing what else needs to get done. I think what we're lacking with this portrait so far is a little bit of texture and the place where you can definitely add some texture is in the hair because that's a different texture from the skin and as well as the eyebrows. I'm just going to go in to the hair and indicate a little bit of the texture in the hair. Primarily along the transitional areas around the highlight because that's where you typically see a little bit of texture indication. I'm just creating a little bit of texture along the hair. Trying not to go too heavy. Indicate a little bit in the eyebrows here. It doesn't look so uniformly drawn on. Honestly at this point, I'm really not even thinking about any rules. I don't even impose on myself. I'm really just letting the mind go where it wants to go and letting my hand go where it wants to go. Because I'm thinking really more about the whole picture instead of individual little parts. I'm looking at how everything is in relation to another and really looking at it from a design point of view. I'm almost going back into drawing mode here and throwing in the last few little finishing touches. I think the very last thing I will do on this portrait is working on her eye over here. I want to add a little bit more contrasts. I want to darken her pupil a little bit more. I feel like it's not quite as dark as I would like. I'm bringing in this very saturated blue color in hopes that going over the brown will make this a very nice and deep color as well as value. Hopefully, it makes this eye pop even more and also making that white of the eye pop. I think it's working. That's a really great tip by the way. If you want a very nice, deep dark color, then mix two saturated complimentary colors together and you'll get a deeper appearing black than even black itself. This is what I like to do instead of using actual black, I will mix two very saturated dark colors together. It doesn't even have to be that dark, but they mix together, they will appear quite dark, I believe that really made the eye pop quite a bit. Actually, I might do it on this eyelid here. Separate a little bit from the eyeball or the iris. Some last-minute detailing with the eyelashes. I really like to be pretty sparse with this detail so it doesn't look like it's too much. Just giving the image a nice little scan over everything one last time. I like that little pop of color there. I'm accentuating a little bit more. Looking at each of the features one last time, making sure they are as defined as they should be. Cutting some interesting colors in those edges as I always like to do. Anytime I create a new edge, I like to throw another color and then another, just another little variation. I want to lighten this part of the hair up a little bit so that it separates this ear, hoping this ear pops forward a little bit more. Also, I want to make this area look a little bit stronger. By lightening this area up, hopefully, that will achieve that goal. Also I'm going to maybe lighten up the bottom of the hair here so it receives a little bit more into the background. Because it doesn't need to be all that forward. Again, I'm constantly checking my levels of contrast all over the image at all times, really. Not just towards the end, but towards the end it's easier to compare. But there you go. At this point, I'm ready to call this one finished. I feel like I have done pretty much everything that I want to do to it. I like how the colors all work together and I like the little bits of hard edges that I threw in there as a design element, I think it keeps my eyes bouncing around the composition. Ultimately, it leads me back to this focal point of her eye here. I think compared to what we ended up in the first half of our demonstration. It looks a lot more interesting, at least to me, in terms of the colors. I really hope that this half of the demonstration gave you some ideas on how you can take your portrait and find ways to throw in some unconventional colors in their. Colors that you don't even see in the photo reference and how you can still make it all look cohesive if you know how to go about doing it. 13. Class Project & Final Words: I hope by now if you haven't been already, feel excited to bust out those color pencils and draw some portraits because we've reached the end of our class. Now it's time for you to go work on your class project. But before you start on your portrait, I want you to practice your values and your shadow shapes. Remember how crucial shapes are for this process. Practice your understanding of shapes by doing simple exercises and pencil and breaking down the values of a photo into just two values. Then once you feel warmed up, choose a photo either from the class Pinterest board or one of your choosing, and take the steps outlined in the class to create a portrait from start to finish. Do a solid block in drawing and indicate the shadow shapes showing where your darker values are separated from your lighter values. Establish your lighting statement by filling in those shadow shapes. Establish your local colors. Remember, they don't have to be true to the photo, you can choose any color you want here. Bring a quality of life into the skin by paying attention to things like translucency, subsurface scattering and bounce light. If you feel bold, try bringing a wash of color to the entire picture to establish a color scheme. Balance the color temperature. Is it too hot or is it too cold? Pay attention to edges and transitions. Is there a nice harmonious balance between the hard and soft edges? Finally, make a lasting impression with your finishing marks. Be bold and have fun. If you've made it this far I really appreciate you being here and I truly hope you got a lot out of this class that you can take home with you and apply into your own work. I was humbled by the amazing work I've seen from my students in my first class, so I cannot wait to see what you'll accomplish here. For those who are still hungry for more learning, I'll leave with you a bonus real-time demonstration of this portrait. In this demo, I was less focused on trying to show a rational progression through any kind of steps, but rather focus on just following my own natural rhythm of working. I find this way of working less way more spontaneous and playful outcome for me. I think it might be really insightful, especially for those who are a little bit more advanced and can follow along while I jump around the portrait. Thank you all once again, and I can't wait to see what you can do. Until then, take care and have fun. 14. BONUS Real-time Demo Pt. 1: The next step at this point, I like to look at the photo and assess what colors I might be using during my process so that I don't have to constantly reach for my pile of pencil crayons. It doesn't mean that I could only use those photos that I have pre-selected, but it really does help reduce the amount of time that I spend rummaging through the pencil crayons and trying to find one that works. What I do is I just look at the photo and first I decide, do I want to stay pretty faithful to the photo. When I'm using photo reference for my portraits, I don't intend on straying too far from it, but I find that in the process, I do end up coming up with my own color palette from what I'm seeing in the photo. Don't worry about trying to invent the perfect and unique color scheme right away. I suggest just using what you see in the photo, and then naturally, through the process of applying the color layers, you will find that you are increasing levels of interest through color and you will start to stray away from feeling bound by the photo in any way. I feel like I'm going to need some of these very light pinks, peachy pinks for her skin, slightly darker peach tone. Basically, I'm seeing a lot of pinks, reds, and oranges for her hair. I feel like I'm picking up on a bit of purple, especially on the top of her forehead, so there's a purple there and I'm picking up a little bit of yellowish hues around the nose and the mouth area. You always want to pick some complementary colors and some neutral colors to tone down some of the more saturated tones. I'm going to pick a gray there, a lighter gray and the green, some deeper browns, reddish browns, I need a bright pink for her lips, maybe this will work, and white. Of course, white is always handy for lightening up any areas. I think that might be enough to start with. It's already a big selection of colors. I don't know if I'll use it all, but it gives me a good jumping-off point. I'll definitely be reaching for more colors as I go along. I'm trying to decide if I want to lay down a light wash so that I have a nice base to work off from. That is going to influence my subsequent layers of pencil [inaudible]. When I look at the photo, I'm seeing this gradient almost where there's a concentration of light at the top here, and not as much a light here. I want to emphasize this movement throughout the picture. Also, it follows her eye direction as well, so I feel like this is a general movement that I want to emphasize with my color decisions so that it corresponds with her eye direction, and I think that will be interesting. When I look at the photo, I'm seeing there's more cooler light at the top here and a warmness down here. I think a general cooler at the top and warmer at the bottom color organization will be interesting. That's how I want to set up my drawing here to start. Let's start with laying down a warm tone for the wash. I'm going to take a scrap piece of paper and I'm going to test it first to see that it's what I want. This might work, it's a little bit darker than I would like, it's a little bit darker in value than I would like. Maybe this one. Yeah, actually this is a more mid-tone orange. I know in the photo that this big shadow underneath her chin is very dark, but I want to inject a lot of life and color into this area. I'm not going to just go straight in with a dark color here because I'm going to gradually build up to that similar value, so it's going to read as a shadow there. But if it's going to have a lot more color variety than going straight in with a dark color and blocking that out. Again, I'm going to go in with a warm orangey color and I'm going to create this gradient so that any color that I put down here afterwards will be influenced by this color. Then after I'm going to bring in a cooler color and grade it starting from the top here, so that there's a nice even transition between them. Here we go. I'm just trying to keep it as light as possible. I don't want to make any hard marks when I am applying this wash layer. I'm not really concerned about staying within the lines or anything like that, especially down here where I hadn't really drawn a clear outline. Because I'm going to be treating the hair a little bit more impressionistic and build up as I go. I'm trying to be as even as possible. As you can see, I'm going over the lines. I'm not trying to stay confined to any area. I do have to be a little bit careful around the face because the face is very pale and I don't want to go too dark with this because it is a slightly deeper value. When I'm getting closer to the top, I am going to go in much lighter so that it will be an even gradient once I bring in the other color. Time to bring the other color. I feel like I'm seeing a pinky tone, or maybe we'll go in with the purple. Is that too crazy? I don't think so. I'm going to go in with this purple here. Well, maybe it is a little crazy. Maybe it is a little bit too dark. I'm trying to see if that is indeed what I want to do. Maybe I should play it a little bit safer and go in with this peachy tone. I'm going to go in a little bit safer and apply this peachy tone. Then I'm going to assess from there. In any case, it just helps to keep things moving, because you're not going to know right off the bat if that was the right decision or not a lot of the times, because I mix my colors so much and I keep such a light hand. It's not always going to be apparent whether that was the right decision until the layers really start to work together. I'm going back in with this orangey color. I am paying attention to the shadow shapes, and bringing this darker value into it so that I'm starting to see the value relationship coming through. I'm going under here under her nose because it's the darker value there. Under her brows, just lightly, enough for me to be able to slowly see that these areas are in shadow here, and it gives a lot of structure to the face and underneath her hair here. This step is really exactly how I would treat my portrait drawings in pencil, where I just shade in the shadow shapes. Notice how I'm not really taking consideration of what color each things are, I'm not looking at the lips and thinking, well, the lips are a different color there, like a pinkish color, and then going for a darker pink. Because I can do that after I've done this, and it will still read as pink. But I want all the shadow areas to be influenced by the same colors. I want it to read very consistently. I'm seeing some warmth around her hairline, so that's why I'm going to bring some of this orange in. Actually I'm going to go in with a more yellow or toned orange here. My natural inclination is really to jump around a lot, but I'm trying to do it in a more systematic way for you guys so that you can more readily follow along and understand what I'm doing. Now I'm going to try to carve out this larger shadow shape underneath the chin here, around the cheek a little bit, and then this part of her hair, so that it really gives a lot more structure around the face. I'm not going to go in too dark to do that just yet. Maybe just green model, I don't want to introduce too much color to begin with. I don't want to confuse you guys. I'm just going to keep it all in the same color family and use this darker orange color to do the job for now. I'm trying to find these shadow shapes again that we've blocked out earlier in the block and lightly going over to darken these areas. Normally, I would look at this and think, "That's too much orange, I want to bring in a cool already." But I'm really just trying to keep it very straightforward at this point, because I know that we can bring a cool color to temper some of this orange color later on. Because pencil is so versatile that way, because it can be layered together. Again, really stressing the fact that at least in this early stages, you really want to keep a light hand, so that you remain as flexible as long as possible. Bring this dark here, I feel like it really pushes this side of her head back into space. It makes this cheek stand out more. I can slowly start to throw in little bits of hard edges. I don't want to lose all the hard edges. Before you do that, before you throw any hard edges in, definitely make sure that that is what you want, because it is harder if you go in harder to fix anything. But once you are really starting to see the value relationship coming through, then definitely feel free to lock some of the drawing elements down as you go. In general, a warm color to start building up the values is a safe bet because of how skin works, in that the colors just tend to be warmer around the face and the skin in general, especially around the shadows. Instead of going in with a really stark cool color, a warm color like this is generally a safe bet. Again, if it starts to look too hot, then you have the choice to temper it down with a cooler color like a gray or a green or a blue, or whatever you choose. I'm going in with a yellowy orange here just to add a little bit more hue variety. Now I think I'm going to concentrate on bringing the local colors out of the different elements like her skin, her lips, her hair, and it's a very easy step to do. That's going to do a lot of work in making the portrait look a lot more finished. It will give you more to play with in terms of color, because it will start to introduce a lot more colors into the piece than what I have currently. I'm going to start by applying a little bit a warmth around her face here, and I'm going in with a very pale yellow so that it doesn't affect too much of the value. I'm just affecting mostly the hue. When I do this, I do go over the shadow areas as well, because I want it to influence all parts of the skin, not just the area in the light, otherwise, all these separate elements are going to look quite disjointed. There I'm seeing some of that yellow coming through. I think that's probably as yellow as I wanted to get, because I don't want it to get any yellower than that. Maybe around her forehead a little bit too, and I'm going to bring it down here as well. Now I'm going to bring some color to her lips. I feel like I'm seeing a little bit of a purpleness, and the top lip here, maybe some of those bright neon color. Try to block out that highlight on the lower lip. I'm not trying to really finalize anything just yet. Still keeping it fairly light because I still want some flexibility. I don't quite know how I want to treat all the colors just yet. Slowly building up the values. Let's establish a color of her eyes. I'm going on with this green even though I know it's going to be a little bit too contrasty, but I'm probably going to tone it down later as we go. Actually, by a lot. I am going to try to tone down that green color with this yellow here. In the beginning, everything is going to look a little bit too out of place because there's just not enough colors to give every color a context yet. I'm not too worried about that for now. I'm going to go in with the hair. Actually, before I go in with the hair, I think I'm going to work on her face, build up the values in her face, start to establish the colors that I see around the cheeks are a little bit warmer, around the nose, a little bit warmer as well. I'm going to build on my values and refine the drawing a little bit more so I feel a bit more confident going into it. I just have a little bit more to work with once I have a bit more context. You're just going to see me trying to build up this drawing. Really at this point, I'm not really thinking about the color. I'm mostly thinking about the values because that's what I'm concerned about, I'm concerned with the drawing aspect. Basically, finding the drawing again, and finding just a little bit nuances of the forms. Anchoring things down like the corners of the mouth here once I feel like they're in the right place. A great way to darken an area without just looking for the dark version of it, is to bring in a complementary color and layering it over top. Like this, how I'm bringing in the green here. Yeah, I think I'm seeing a bit of purpleness around this side. I think I'm going to, again, reinforce what I was trying to lay down earlier, this side being more cool and this being more warm. I think slowly I'm going to try to reinforce that. Try not to get lost in the nuances of the hair, just treating it as a big shape first and then I can curve out the smaller shapes later once I've established the values and the general color. Notice how now there's a lot more color variety and things are starting to come together a little bit. I going to bring in this very bright neon color for her cheek. Neons are really great for tinting the color very strongly, getting it more saturated, without affecting too much of the value underneath. I'm trying to darken this whole side of the face. Maybe that's a little bit too dark. I have to go in with a white here. A lot of the times when I'm grabbing these colors, I'm not really looking at what color it is specifically, but I'm thinking about the warm and cool relationship. Do I want to make this color warmer or do I want to make this color feel cooler? I think I'm mixing a lot of different colors under here because it is a more neutral color in the shadow there as opposed to the hair which is a clear reddish-orange color. I'm also going to bring it up here as well. Yeah, I'm trying not to go in too heavy with any really dark values. I'm trying to achieve the appearance of darker values with mixing warm and cool colors together and creating more of a neutral tone. That's because I just want to keep it as light as I can to remain flexible but also because a lot of color information is in that mid tone range. If I go to dark, I'll start to lose a lot of the color variety. I'm liking how the colors are turning out so far and it's giving me some ideas on how to take this further because I'm really liking this purpley color here. There's no rule that says I have to make this hair look as warm or red as it does in the photo. If I wanted to, I could just take this and run with it, and make it more pinky purple like this. But we'll see. I'm still working through it and I'll know better once there's just more information down on the page. Yeah, I really like how that purple works with the green of her eyes. It's giving me a bit of an alien vibe, which I'm digging. I'll define the side of her nose a little bit. The sides of her nose here. I feel like I see a little bit of a greenish yellow, that's why I'm bringing this green in, and also, it helps find ways to use the color all over the piece. I really want to be very gentle in this area, but I'm going to go in with this neon pink and tint the ball of the nose a little bit. Back to a yellowy color. Blend it all in. I'm trying to protect this highlight of the nose here because I feel like that's really selling the angle of the nose that is turned up. Just a little bit of pink here. Slowly and slowly, throwing more hard edges in the moment I feel more confident in the shapes that I'm getting, with the slow building up of the pencil crayons. I'm using some artistic liberty around the eyes here because what I'm seeing is not really quite this pink under the lid of her eye, but from just studying human anatomy, that area tends to be more reddish because that's the exposed area of our eyelids. I really like bringing any bit of warmth whenever or wherever possible, so I tend to go a little bit warmer there then what I'm actually seeing in the photo. This is a great neutral color for our palette right now with her skin tone, so I'm using it to build up the values. I'm not really thinking about the colors because it's so neutral. The color is not really going to cause any major issues, if I go into a little too heavy with it. I don't want to go too dark with it cause that's harder to fix. It's just bringing some definition to her eye socket here. Picking up on the dark values that I see in her eyebrows. I really like to treat the eyebrows in a very layered way. I feel like if I try to do it all in one fell swoop, then it has a tendency of looking just like a tattooed eyebrow on the face. Eyebrow has actually a lot of variety, I find, because there are little hairs and they pass a lot of light. I really like to inject a lot of color into my brows. Honestly, I don't think it really makes that much sense. I'm really just trying to pick up on any subtleties I see in it and just run in with it. This is the darkest color I'm bringing into it at the moment because I really want to throw in a hard edge right there, because I want to make this ear pop, this top of the ear there. I won't be bringing that dark value in anytime soon again, because I really want to concentrate in building up the colors without the help of very dark values just yet, because you can really achieve the look of darker values with your use of colors. Darker values again. Yeah, it really sucks out a lot of the color information. A lot of the really dark values, I like to bring in at the very end if I feel like an area needs that level of contrast, let's say around the eyes or just around the features. Whenever I feel like a little bit lost on what to do, I always go back to my shadow shapes. How are my shadow shapes looking? Are they looking as defined as I would like? If not, let's go back and bring them back out, like I'm doing right here. Again, going back to our color mapping, I want to concentrate the warmth down here as much as possible if I want that movement that I want to make with the colors, cool at the top and warmer at the bottom. I want to keep that consistent. But we'll see. We'll see if I really stick to that. Sometimes throughout the course of the piece, I do end up not staying completely faithful to what I had set out on and that's okay. I don't try to stick really rigid to any plan I had initially because I feel like problems just present themselves and you're going to have to come up with solutions on the fly. Sometimes it just means going back on the plan. Don't feel the need to feel hindered by the planning that you do. You make the rules. It's your drawing, painting. It has to work for you. I really like this neon orange color. With neons, really try to keep it to an isolated area like this. If I try to bring it all over, then it's going to lose the impact of that neon color there. I want this area to feel special and that's the way to keep it looking special. I can bring it in little isolated areas, but not all over the piece. I'm trying to build up the value in this ear here. Again, using this neutral color because it's easy. Yeah, as you progress through your piece, you will start to discover what your neutral color for your palette is and it's really handy and also not just your neutral color, but you tend to gravitate towards certain colors you've already used for your shadow areas. You'll realize you're really reaching for a select number of colors. I don't feel like I used that many colors in this one, for example, but I feel like I'm getting a lot of variety out of it already, which is great. I'm really liking this color scheme so far. I'm going to bring in a bit of warmth right here. Notice how I'm not really worrying about where all those highlights around the hairs are. I'm just treating it as a big shape initially. Then what I can do is go in with the darker values and then draw around the highlights so that this area then becomes the highlights there on. Because the highlights oftentimes people will think that they are much lighter than they are, so they will try to draw around it, and I do that too. I make the mistake of thinking highlights on the hair are actually quite light, when in fact, compared to the highlight, let's say on her eyes, they're much darker in value. We can start off with a much darker value for the hair than we sometimes think. That makes it a lot easier for our eyes because then we don't have distracting white values in the hair to compete with the rest of the face. I rely on that knowledge and I don't think about all the little waves that I'm seeing in the hair, I try not to anyway, sometimes I do get a little bit distracted and I want to point out too many things, but really I found that treating the hair as a simple shape is the way to go. I'm going to take this light bluish gray color and then going to darken this white of her eye here. Because I think I want to make this the focal point, because it reinforces this direction that I'm trying to achieve. But I'm going to go in very lightly because I don't want it to be too dark. There, I think that's enough. I'm just trying to decrease the contrast in this eye in favor of this eye. Going forward, as I bring those eyes out, in definition, I'm going to apply that as well, just bringing out this eye more in definition. If you can see it, while I'm working, I'm thinking in all the layers all at once. I find that that is the best way to preserve the brilliance of the color, because if I approach it in a very layered approach, just one step by one step, that in theory is great, but in practice, that might lead to situations where I can't get a certain color again because I had gone a little bit too dark in terms of what's on the paper. That's why when I work, I'm bouncing around from one point to the next. I'm thinking about the levels of contrast, I'm thinking about the overall color mapping, and I'm thinking about the general color, like the local colors. It's just a lot to think at once and so I don't want you guys to feel overwhelmed and trying to do all of that at once as I tend to do. If this is very new to you, then definitely just approach it one step at a time, but keep in mind that you don't have to do it that way either. Eventually you'll find a way that feels most organic to you and how you like to work. For me, I tend to spend a lot of time on these portraits because I'm constantly changing the color that I'm using, and you definitely don't have to work like that. I recognize that it is time consuming, but because I care so much about how the colors turn out, I find that I do place a lot of importance on color, even though I know value is really what is carrying the color. That's why I tend to spend a little bit longer than maybe others typically do on these portraits with pencil crowns, but I really like the look that I achieve at the end because it looks so layered with so many different colors. Looking at what I have down now, I'm really liking the color variety that I'm achieving and the color scheme that is there. I don't really want to disturb that too much by introducing a whole bunch of other colors into it just yet, I think I'm just going to concentrate on bringing everything to more of a finish, and then maybe play around with a little bit more colors from that point. But right now I think I'm just going to concentrate more on bringing all the features a little bit more to a finish, but I'm really liking what I have done so far. Because of her very bright green eyes and just this purplely hair color, I'm getting a bit of an alien vibe which I totally I'm on board with. It's not what I would have expected going into it, but it is just what came out through the process of just putting down colors, and so this just goes to show that I don't always know what I'm going to end up until I get into the drawing itself. I really like to let the drawing tell me what it wants rather than trying to get the exact color of the skin that I'm seeing in the photo and the exact color of the hair. While I was trying to go towards that direction, I realized that I don't need to, because I really like what I'm seeing right now. That opened up a new door for me that I didn't even realize was there. I guess my point is, definitely use the photo reference to help you to give you a springboard to work off from but don't feel bound by it at all, let things progress as they do and stop once you come to a statement that you like and see where you want to go from there. I feel like if I tried to make this hair as warm, brownish red like I see in the photo reference, that's going to ruin this spacey look that I'm getting right now, and that would be a shame because I really like this statements so far. A lot of the times this is how I end up with the color decisions I end up making. Because I'm often asked, do I know what colors I'm going to use before going into it, and the answer is no, I really don't. It is the process that informs me. It is the act of trying to put this thing together, that's what informs me and leads me into a direction that I didn't even realize I could take. That's why art is fun that way. I could make it look exactly like how I see in the photo, but where would the fun be in that, other than the satisfaction of getting it exactly photo-realistic or very true to the photo. Anyway, just letting you know that I'm going to run with these purple hair, green eye, spacey type of theme going on, and just going to try to define the features and throw in a little bit more edges and clean up the design a little bit more. Then we'll go from there and see what other colors that we can inject to really make this thing pop. I think really my biggest secret to injecting a lot of color is I'm just thinking about the values here. For that little cat eye of the eyeliner, I was just thinking, "Well, I need a darker value for it," so I just reached for this green to contrast a little bit of pink there. I think that's cool. Instead of just automatically reaching for what looks like black, just think in terms of getting a darker value and see what color you can get from that. I feel like I see a really bright color here. I like it, and I want to accentuate it because I feel like it really brings the attention up to the eyes. At this point, I am paying more attention to my edges. You can see I got rid of this edge here because I didn't like how I had this hard edge here and another hard edge there. Because this whole area is in the shadow shape, I've just merged these shapes together. I'm always looking for areas where I can do that to make a simpler statement because I think that makes it more appealing because it relegates the focus to more important areas. I want to emphasize her chin area, it's been neglected a little bit. Maybe I go into her to echo some other greens here. Whenever I feel lost, I always go back to the shapes. Just focus on bringing out the shapes and then everything will fall into place because it is hard to juggle all these different elements; color, and design, and values. Hard to manage all these colors and make them look appealing. That's why whenever I feel a little bit stuck as to what to do, I just go back to concentrating on getting the values to read. That's why I have to refrain myself from adding too much variety of color because that does get more difficult to try and manage altogether. I feel like I'm seeing a little bit of a pink on that tip of the ear. I'm bringing this neon pink that I used for the lips because I think that nicely ties it together. Now, the hair is definitely going to be a little bit tricky and something I'm hoping will come together eventually towards the end. But I do have to pay attention to it a little bit before it gets away on me. I feel like I went in a little bit too dark here, so I'm lightening that up. You got to be careful with shadows too. I find that you can't quite go as dark as you see in the photo, otherwise it will have this really lightened deadening effect. You really have to pay attention and just look at it in the context of the overall picture instead of trying to get it exactly as dark as you see it in the photo. See how with all these layers of leering over top with the pencil crayons, this is just like a collection of so many different colors together that creates the same neutral color. But it's more interesting to look at than if I had just gone in with a dark black or a dark brown here. This is much more interesting for our eyes to look at because it has much more variety. You can actually see little bits of colors peeking through. 15. BONUS Real-time Demo Pt. 2: I'm just working on bringing some definition to the mouth area. It's feeling a little bit flat. The face is a little bit to evenly light. I want to make sure that I'm conveying that around the bottom here, it's getting less of the light, so it's going to be a little bit darker. I'm ending up with too much contrasts around the chin line, which is not what I want. I want all the the contrast to be up here. So that's one way to think about values. Just always look for where you are getting contrast, where you don't want to get contrast to go in with the nostrils probably. The nostrils are a little bit tricky because they appear quite dark, but I find that if I treat them quite that dark, it doesn't end up looking very good. So I always try to have a very light hand when I go in with the nostrils, just barely suggesting it sometimes. I really like to take a lot of steps back with each stroke to see if that is enough. For now, probably I'll come back to it later. I'm starting to be a little bit braver with applying more darker values now. Around this point, I really should be making more brave and bolder decisions just to keep things moving. I'm going to indicate this area of the hair that's going back into space. I like the shape that it creates. It has this upward motion and then pick out just a few hair strands. Also I'm trying to pick out this curl here. I like it because it leads her eyes back to the eyes again. What else? What can we do here? I like this big general curl that I'm seeing because it balances out this curl. I'm really thinking in terms of negative shapes with the hair here, because I want this strand to pop out so I'm just darkening the areas around it. Remember how we said that this area was going to be more warm and then towards the top it was going to be more cool. I'm still trying to honor that, but obviously not striking to it very strictly. White is great because it really helps smoothen out the appearance of the marks because it fills in, it just blends out all the pigment so it ends up filling out the white of the paper. I try not to do it all over because it makes it difficult to lay more colors over top. But once I'm pretty sure that's what I want and I want to smoothen that area out, then I like to go in with the white. Now, I want to concentrate on drawing in some of the harder edges to clean up the design a little bit. I feel like the design is getting away on me a little bit, and that's bound to happen as you build up your drawing. Once you feel more confident about everything, definitely go in and throw in some of those hard edges to help ground you're drawing down. Otherwise, it starts to feel a little bit mushy. This is where I like to really do have fun with some color. I'm less looking at the actual reference at this point and just seeing what I have on the page and accentuating certain colors that I already have down. Because why mess with something that's already working by introducing different colors into it when you can just take what you already have down and just push it a little bit because you already know that it works. I'm very careful with the chin area because of the foreshortening of the head angle. If I just drew a strong line connecting these two, it's going to make the face look like a mask sitting on top as opposed to letting this area be a lost edge. Be really sensitive to outlines because outlines can really flatten areas out. For example, again, just all around the hair line here, notice how this edge is lost, so this edge is also lost. If I had a strong line going in all over the hair, where the hair meets the face, it's going to make the face feel like a mask. I like to break up those lines as much as possible. Cleaning up the edge of the hair here. I really like to have a lot of fun with the hair, and treat it more in a design sense rather than trying to get it accurate to what I'm seeing because hair is difficult and I find when I try to get it accurate, it doesn't turn out as well. It ends up taking too much attention away from the face. The hair is actually where I like to have a lot of fun with the mark making. Because I can get away with leaving it more loose and having it just be about the design of the lines, and the colors like that. Besides, the photo might not be ideal in the way it's designed, so it's really up to us to create a more appealing design out of what we're seeing. For example, I'm repeating these shapes here in a way that I find is reinforcing this hair strand and that's appealing to me. That's not necessarily what I see in the photo, but it's just one way to problem-solve. You might problem-solve it a different way than I did, and that's what makes art fun. Like one photo reference can produce just an endless amount of different interpretations. Right now I'm not even really looking at the photo, I'm just looking at what I have done on the page and problem-solving what I have. The white is because I felt like this area got a little bit too saturated so I'm toning it down. I want this to be like this passing area, I want this to be an area of focus, but this in the middle, I don't really need it to take too much attention because there's already more interesting areas to be had here. Between these areas of interests, I want a passive area where the eyes can rest. I don't want every area to be very saturated and interesting to look at, and that's fine. It acts as a supportive character for the more important areas. Whenever I don't really know what color to reach for I just reach for a neutral color like a gray, and then go from there. Is usually a safe bet. Bringing out this cheek a little bit more, I think I want to start being a little bit more bolder with my lines. Really start to commit to this design and allow some of the marks to be a little bit chunky, instead of, I'm feeling the need to blend everything out. I see a lot of concentration of saturation around the hair here so, I'm going to maybe try to mimic that. Maybe like so. There are certain point with pencil crayons, if you start layering too much, it does become harder to apply anything over top of it again. In that case, usually helps to go a bit darker, like that. Yeah. let's start being bolder, I want to see a bit of a green concentration on this side to balance out all the purple up there. Lighten this up a little bit, it's a little bit too heavy feeling. I'm going to try to find a way to divert a lot of attention here. I think I'm going to darken the side of the face slightly, so that the side receiving the most light is on this side. I want to make this area, the more contrast the size, I'm trying to just decrease the amount of contrast on this side now. Which is a little tougher to do because that area is very heavily applied. It's got a lot of layers of wax. I'm trying to decrease the level of saturation here, since I want the most amount of contrast here I want this area to feel the most saturated. Notice how I'm treating this whole thing as one shape. This is exactly how I would treat it if it was just in pencil as well. Just a little bit of a darker value there made it pop so much more. I'm going to darken this patch of hair. It really draws a lot of attention to this side of the face. I think what I need is to really strengthen this side of the head. Now the lines I'm throwing in for the hair here it's not necessarily because it's based in reality, but it's more of a design element to help strengthen this side of the face. A little this orange color here to the nose. A little bit of more, I think to the cheeks. Maybe show a little bit of the hair texture. I'm trying to find, again, the shadow shapes to indicate the little clumps of hair. I always hit a stage where I feel a little bit lost as to how to go forward, and I feel like I'm at that stage now. In this case, I have to force myself to really focus on the drawing and less on the colors. The hair, again, I'm going to be quite impressionistic with it. I'm not trying to indicate every hair strand, but just suggest some curls peeking through. If you want to spend more time in the hair than I do, then by all means have a fun. But I found with my portraits, that's not really where I want the focus to be often. I like to suggest it a lot more loosely like this. I almost want to knock this whole eye back down because I feel like, I don't know. I want to do something with this area. Maybe I'm not brave enough to do that just yet, but I want to knock it all down a little bit. I feel like this green here is helping cool down the purple a little bit, and the purple is feeling a little bit too saturated for me. I like that better. The hair here is getting just a little bit too smooth. So I'm going to throw in some hard edges to suggest some of that hair texture. I'm varying up the colors as I go just to keep it a little bit more interesting. Let's clean up the edges here a little bit. That got a little bit too smuggy. I'm liking the top of the head more now that I threw some texture in there. But I think I'm going to go clean up the shape a little bit. It's a little too jumbled up looking. What color should I do for the highlight? Maybe something like this, which means I probably have to replicate it here on this side of the hair highlight. Now I think I want to clean up this area a little bit. I throw in that really hard edge for the chin or the jaw line. I'm always paying a lot of attention to the hairline because I don't want the hair to feel like a wig, so there has to be a very gradual transition from the hair and the skin. Very soft edges and typically reddish around the hairline. Being a bit bolder there throwing in those hard edges, going in darker than I had before. Then going in with that green to temper that brightness of the purple because I don't really like that bright of a purple, because there's enough warms going on that if I go a little bit too purple, I think it'll end up being too contrasty. I'm surprised how well the needle ball eraser is working out for erasing away these light areas, the first few layers that we did. Surprisingly, working out pretty well. A little heavy on the oranger but I like it so I'm going to run with it. As long as I don't go with heavy orange all over, I think it will look intentional that it was a design purpose for being there. See how this little bit of purple really contrast against that green? I like that. I know you might just leave that there. I'm going to put a little bit more definition to the lips. I'll strengthen the blows again. Now that there's darker values in the picture, what looked dark before, doesn't look as dark now in context. I always need to go back to darken some areas. Same with the nose, I feel like now, the nose doesn't really have much definition as it used to. I'm going to go back in with those darker purple value and just start bringing some definition to the nostrils again. Going slowly and checking if I can stop there. I want to make this area a little bit lighter, if I can not lighter, but just decrease the amount of information in here so that this area really puffs. I'm going to try to lighten this area up here. I'm making these marked on purpose, these really vertical striations in here. I feel like that mimics my drawing style as if I were doing this with pencil. In contrast, I'm going to go a little bit harder in these areas. Hopefully, the result is that your attention is brought up here and less so down here. I'm to intentionally trying to pick out these vertical marks. I'm throwing in little bits of yellow, maybe a little bit of this pink color. At this point in the process, I think is when I like to really bring in a lot of colors. I think it already has a lot of colors now to begin with, but this is a point in the drawing process where I really like to have fun with my mark making. Let's bring this ear out forward a little bit more. Throw some purple values in there. As I draw a tool close with this portrait, I like to go around and make sure all the features are feeling defined enough. Not that they have to be super defined but it does give a level of finish. If one of them as not as well developed, it does a little bit off, so I have to do the rounds, go around, and make sure they are developed to the point where I feel like they look finished. That often means either building up the values dark enough or cleaning up the drawing, cleaning up the design, all these things contribute to it looking finished. For example, I'm going to very delicately suggest a teeth here in her mouth to make that look more finished, maybe slightly turn her corners of her mouth up to make it a little bit more like she's smiling as opposed to not smiling. It just gives more of an expression as opposed to something obscure or ambiguous. Give me a little bit more definition to the eyes by darkening the shadow from the eyelid. Then the nose, I do want her nose of feel a little bit more chiseled that I have it at the moment. I think I want to bring hard edge right there like that. I think that might make a big difference. I want to emphasize this line here. I might have to go in with a different color. It's not really taking very well. There. Then go back and look at this one. I like just a few dark lines there, give the nose some more structure. I want to define the lips a little bit better too. I really feel like I didn't do the best job on the lips. It's looking a little flat. I think I want to decrease some of the contrast on this side of the hair, got a little bit too saturated. I think I'm ready to go in, so I'm finishing marks here. This is where I really like to have fun with color. Just let some of the colors stand alone and pop up, like that. They are really like putting colors next to one another in blocks instead of trying to blend them out. Let's start with that. Combination of throwing in some hard edges, as well, putting in big chunks of color. It's like a statement, I feel like. I'm making a statement with it. When an area is feeling too saturated in one direction, as you know, I like to bring kind of an opposite color. Not opposite but opposite enough so it cools it down a little bit. At this point, I just want to strengthen my design and just be unapologetic with it. Whatever I have down is what I have done. I'm always scanning the picture to make sure that there aren't any super distracting light values, especially in the shadow. But I'm going to use, for example, an area like this as an opportunity to bring in some pop of color. Let's see what color should we use? Actually green would work really well because it will contrast, it'll help balance some of these purples out a little bit. I'm always trying to balance out the colors. Make them unique in a way but also balanced, so it doesn't feel too out of place. Just strengthening my value statement again. You can always strengthen it further and further. I really like that. I feel like there's this sense of movement here, there's this sense of movement here. Always checking my value relationships. Always just look to what's next to it, for example, this ear's in the light and this side of the cheek is in the shadow so make sure that it's lighter than the area that's in shadow. Always cross-referencing to check that your value relationships are correct. Right now I'm trying to make this ear pop a little bit more by putting dark values around it. Really like this burst of green there as well as on this side. I feel like it really compliments the amount of really bright purples and pinks there. At this point, I think I am pretty much ready to just make my final finishing marks here. Just doing a last minute scan of everything, making sure I got everything here. So when I look at this, I want to do something at the top of the head. Basically, I want to draw chunks of color and just leave them so I get a nice variety of all these softer applications of color and then the big chunks of standalone colors. I'm going to be drawing from the colors that I already have down, except maybe try to push it a little bit, either make it really saturated or just adjust the hue a little bit just so it stands out and makes that area really interesting in terms of the colors. This is what I like to do as my last finishing step. That is quite bright. That is brighter than I was a expecting. Maybe I can tone it down with this orangey color here and then maybe I want to bring that color. I don't know if it's the right move, but let's try it. Just around the edge here, maybe that will do. I like that. I think it really makes that area pop a little bit. Just there's a lot of strength here, but I don't like how that area contrasts so much with this very contrasty purple up here, so I'm going to tone that down. I really try not to worry too much about blending at this point. I think the general statement is already there and it's looking good, so whatever mark I make, I'm just going to let it be. I want to break up some of the neatness and just make some fun marks that don't really make sense, but it makes it a little bit more sketchy because I think that makes it a little more fun. Just fun marks to make it look more sketchy. Just breaking out of that mold a little bit. That's crazy, but maybe that works. I like that actually. Looks like she's being abducted by aliens. I think we are drawing to a close here. Let me just make sure the eye is reading. I like that. I think I like those pop of this neon orange in these parts. Maybe pushing my luck there. This is something I would do with a pencil, but I don't want to go too overboard. I don't want to push my luck too much. There, I think that is enough. I really liked how this color in the eye makes it look like this color light coming through here. I think that's as good as it's going to get, folks. I think that's as good as it's going to get. Just scanning for areas that look like it could use a pop of a color like that. When I don't think about it too much, I feel like I'm able to be a little bit more bold. Like how that area looks like if you picture it like a digital game and you're having trouble rendering it or something and it's pixelated almost, but this area is more in focus. I feel like it wouldn't have the same effect if I replicated this look everywhere here. I think I'm ready to call this one finished. It took me a while but I think I got there. What do you guys think? I think it took a while but I eventually got there and I really like the result and still I can't put my pencil down, can I? But yeah, I was really not expecting to end up with a color palette like this, which is really interesting. This is just how my process usually ends up being. I discover the color opportunities as I go. I'm just letting the picture lead me in directions that I would never have considered before.