Materials: Chalk-pastel coloring pencils, Charcoal Black Medium, Charcoal Black Medium Dark
Strathmore Bristol 300, Charcoal Primo, uni-ball Signo
Something that I think a lot of people will benefit from and that is working with portraits. Portraits is another really delicate subject to choose colors for and I see the same mistakes over and over again when I see people coloring portraits. In this picture, I wanted to focus on the skin tones. One of the major mistakes that people will make when trying to color a portrait is that they choose colors that they think are representative in tones and the problem is they end up limiting their colors dynamics because they're afraid to choose the right colors. In this drawing, I have this really bright yellow color, that a lot of people would be too fearful to lay down on to their drawing and I know how intimidating it can be because once you draw something and it takes you all that time when you're working with a very unforgivable medium like markers or colored pencils it can be kind of scary laying down the right colors so you should create a color palette beforehand. You can prepare yourself knowing that the color you're putting down is the correct color even if it doesn't look right at first glance you can see in this drawing, the color yellow is really bright on the highlights of her nose around her eye. It's really really important to make sure that you get those colors right to make the skin tone look real. The other colors that people might not choose right away are this orange color it's pretty bright orange and you can see this girl has orange reflecting on her skin and then also the shadows this is where I think people lose the most confidence when it comes to coloring a portrait, they are scared of adding real color and real depth to their shadows when they're doing a portrait. Her left hand has really dark shadow and this is where you get this dark brownish tan color and then this slightly brighter brown color. That is why developing the color palette before moving on to the coloring process really helps because you can choose the right color.
