Watercolor Pencil Portraits

1/29/23 Museum Aquarelles in Hahnemuhle 100% cotton sketchbook

With my portrait practice since last October, I’ve been focusing mostly on ballpoint, brush pens, graphite, dry colored pencils – almost everything except my favorite material for urban sketching: watercolor pencils. Although I think of myself as being fairly adept with watercolor pencils by now, human faces feel very different from urban scenes. Trees, cars, trash cans and buildings are more forgiving than the subtle planes of the face. But with more than a hundred portraits under my belt now, I pulled out a few Caran d’Ache Museum Aquarelles and gave myself a shove.

In my first try (at left), I used the technique I’m most familiar with outdoors – spritzing trees. I put in a heavy application of color on the shaded side of the man’s face (all reference photos by Earthsworld) and gave him a quick shower.

With a couple of portraits (below), I used an Uglybooks sketchbook, which is sized for dry media. Although I knew the paper wouldn’t hold up well to a lot of water, I tried it anyway, just to see what would happen. I applied fairly heavy layers of color, then used a waterbrush to activate. As expected, the paper buckled, and the color didn’t float at all. The effects I got weren’t necessarily bad – just not what I was after. It was interesting to try, anyway.

1/31/23 Museum Aquarelles in Uglybook sketchbook

1/31/23 Museum Aquarelles in Uglybook sketchbook

The rest of the portraits shown here are in a square Hahnemühle sketchbook with 100 percent cotton paper. (This is not the Akademie Aquarell book I use for general urban sketching, which is not 100 percent cotton.) Although I’ve used the 100 percent cotton book for many small urban sketches since last summer because it (barely) fits in my fitness-walking bag, these portraits made me appreciate the paper’s quality more than I usually do.

1/30/23 Museum Aquarelles in Hahnemuhle 100% cotton sketchbook

1/30/23 Museum Aquarelles in Hahnemuhle 100% cotton sketchbook

My general technique is to draw the hair and facial features and then drag a waterbrush downward through the drawing on the shaded side. (Of course, the risk is that I will use too much water or not enough – I only get a single shot – and my carefully drawn features might be "ruined." But that’s always the risk of using unpredictable water media, isn’t it?) If features get too washed out, I wait until the page is dry, then go back in with dry pencils to redraw details that may have been lost. The cotton paper and excellent sizing both keep the pigments afloat long enough to make the subtle washes that I like on faces. I don’t really take advantage of these paper qualities when I’m out on location, but here they really shine.

2/1/23 Museum Aquarelles in Hahnemuhle 100% cotton sketchbook

2/1/23 Museum Aquarelles in Hahnemuhle 100% cotton sketchbook

1/30/23 Museum Aquarelles in Hahnemuhle 100% cotton sketchbook

Most of these portraits capture a reasonably good resemblance of their models, but my favorite is actually the one that bears the least resemblance (the woman in glasses with short, spikey hair, at right). It achieves a level of looseness or freshness that I have been reaching for but didn’t know how to get. Maybe it just takes doing something nearly daily more than a hundred times for that freshness (or whatever it is) to finally kick in. That’s what creativity is: Not a flash of inspiration from a muse but just opening the sketchbook every day.

Even more inspiring now!

Incidentally, I am currently re-reading Portrait Revolution, a book I was introduced to two years ago by a sketcher on Instagram who has taken part in Julia Kay’s Portrait Party. The party originated as a worldwide Flickr group with local groups that have also met in person (hey, sounds like Urban Sketchers!). On Flickr, members must upload their own photos to be used as references by group members, and then they can also draw or paint from the photos of other members. I haven’t participated yet, but I intend to soon.

When I first read it, I felt inspired by the hundreds of portraits made in a huge variety of styles and media, but I didn’t do much other than a selfie. Now that I’ve been focusing on portraiture for several months, I’m much more ready to soak in the inspiration offered by the book. In fact, it was after I began re-reading that I started making these watercolor pencil portraits, so it is obviously giving me a push in some indirect way – as a good book will do.