190-191 Works in Progress

One pastel, one coloured pencil both using the same photo reference of my dog when he was a puppy. I'm finding pastel to be a tricky medium and I'm struggling to get the right colours from my 24 set of  Faber Castell pastel pencils. I probably need to invest in a few more colours before I progress on this one. The pencils used for the top drawing are Derwent Colour pencils and whilst I'm quite pleased with them, I do feel they could do with a broader range though. Next time I think I will start with a colour wash in watercolour just to get a base put down first.

189 - Squirrel

Earlier this month I came across an artist called Colin Bradley who works in pastel and was inspired to give it a go. This is my first attempt at painting with pastels using a photo taken at Penrith Centre Park. I started with pastel pencils and then switched to some soft pastels because I was struggling to get the colour right. 

186-188

More Mort Drucker sketches inked with various pens and brushes.

185 - Inking practice

Admittedly, this is not a great copy of a Mort Drucker illustration, it's meant to be the Godfather. However it did give me the opportunity to try out a couple of new pens and it was a good exercise in inking. All of the pen work was done using a Tombow ABT dual brush pen and it is one of my favourites at the moment. I bought mine from Cult Pens in the UK and highly recommend them. I was going to do a wash for the grey tones but the paper was too thin so I used Copic Markers instead. 

178-184, TV Sketches

I recently discovered a great feature on my Panasonic TV, a Hold button which freezes the current image enabling me to do a quick caricature or sketch. I used the technique outlined in Tom Richmond's book on caricature for doing a 'live' caricature and was quite pleased with the results. I only spent about five minutes on each drawing and then added some shading with Copic Markers. I'm not quite ready for a real 'live' session yet though and probably never will be, but it was a fun exercise and I will definitely be doing some more. 

176-177 TV Sketches

A couple of sketches drawn direct from the TV, ballpoint pen and coloured pencils. 

170-175 Strictly Sketches

I thought it would be a good exercise to do a group picture of some of the Strictly Dancing cast so these are 'the start' of my trying to get a likeness sketches. I'm a big fan of the 'Mad' comics and artists like Mort Drucker and Tom Richmond and would love to do a picture in a similar style.