Pencilvember, Week 2: Truncated

Reference photo by Frank Koyama

After Pencilvember Week 1’s good times with soft Prismacolors, I changed to Faber-Castell Polychromos for Week 2. Although I had been planning weekly updates to align with my plan to use a different pencil brand each week, I’ve ended Week 2 early. Here’s why:

When I made all those colored pencil pet portraits the past couple of years, Polychromos had been my go-to, but that’s because I was going for a detailed, realistic look. The hard but highly pigmented Polychromos is ideal for that. What Polychromos is not good for, however, is speed. It’s best used in a traditional way, which is multiple, lightly applied layers – a time-consuming process. The slam-it-down method I use for speed works best with soft colored pencils.

I knew all that going in, but I wanted to challenge myself anyway, and most of these took more than my 20-minute goal – closer to 25 or 30 minutes. I’m not unhappy with the results, but they confirmed that Polychromos is not the best pencil choice when speed is of the essence. It just takes too long to build up dark values. I decided to end Polychromos week early, and I’ll choose a much softer pencil going forward.

On the upside, I’m pleased with other experiments Pencilvember is enabling me to try. Last week I mentioned in an image cutline that when my reference photos were taken in flat lighting, I used a yellow pencil to remind myself where the light would be, if it were more easily visible. This trick also works with subjects in good lighting, but when I don’t want to take the time to create contrast that would indicate the light.

12/11/23 My original sketch of Tucker on
the cover of a Field Notes notebook. The background was painted with ArtGraf water-soluble graphite.

Tucker turned out to be a fitting example of this. When I first sketched him two years ago (above, right), I painted in a dark background behind the lighted side of his face. This time, instead of trying to hastily scribble in a similar contrasting background with colored pencils, I used yellow as a shorthand to indicate the window light.

Tucker is also an excellent example of a point I brought up several months ago in my post offering tips on pet portraiture. If you have a model in good lighting or a good reference photo, the eyes of animals (as well as humans) will show a shadow of the upper eyelid. The strong, frontal light on Tucker’s face was ideal for indicating these shadows. Catching these shadows is not important if realism is not the goal, but they’re hard to resist when they are so clearly visible, which is rarely the case. (This was one of my favorite pet reference photos to work with – an unusual, challenging, three-quarter pose with beautiful natural lighting. If only all commission reference photos could be like Tucker’s!)