Dean Portrait
Dean Winchester - drawn in soft carbon water soluble pencil
Process pics under the cut
I’m playing with my carbon pencil to see what I can do with shading😄. For this Dean picture I started with a light 2B pencil sketch on watercolour paper (because I have to be able to erase and change my first sketch. No way I can go straight in with permanent lines 🤷🏻♂️😂)
When I was reasonably happy with it, I outlined the sketch with the carbon pencil.
My idea was to use the outlines as the ink ‘reservoir’ and spread the shading from them. So I used some water in my brush pen to pull the carbon around the page.
This method kind of worked. I was able to get some nice light layers where the lines were sparse and some dark shading where they were more abundant, but I had also forgotten that I’m rubbish at watercolour painting. And this was very much like painting in black watercolour. I either needed to do all the areas of a similar value at the same time, or I constantly needed to be cleaning my brush and testing the new value. In the end I started using the pencil like a watercolour block to recharge my brush when I wanted more pigment but I found it hard work.
I’m fairly happy with the end result, as far as my watercolour painting skills go 😄. But for next time I think I might see if the carbon pencils will accept white kohl or charcoal on top. I much prefer blending different values with pencils as opposed to using water. Plus the carbon pencil dries fairly powdery on the page, so it might play well with charcoal. We shall see 😄