Six Heads, Three Sheets: Pushing Past My Comfort Zone in Coloured Pencil

Following on from Testing the Zorn Palette in Coloured Pencil, this one pushes further. I wanted to push my pencil work by rendering six heads across three sheets of cold-pressed watercolour paper, deliberately reaching for subjects outside my usual range -- different complexions, different ages -- rather than defaulting back to what's comfortable to draw. It's a means to progress some of what I've been studying recently and actually apply it in practice. I'm always looking to improve, and the best way to highlight my weaknesses is simply to make more art, then analyse and reflect on it once I'm finished.

I used a mix of Faber-Castell Polychromos and Caran d'Ache Luminance across the six pieces, plus the Notan Generator for the initial value read, Paint Mixing's colour pencil matching mode for sampling toward a specific brand rather than a general palette, and Shape Simplifier for checking the underlying design. One thing I noticed afterwards: I didn't record palette swatches for the pencil choices on these pieces, which I'm aiming to do for future work -- a useful reference back to all the colours used in a portrait and how the value gradient was built.

Sheet one: beard, shadow, and getting the brow right

Notes on the left head: I was actually quite pleased with this one. The beard was achieved through minimal texture, and I didn't have to worry about lips. I worked relatively soft with the shadows and layering, sketched the brow closer to the eyes than I normally would (I often sketch the eyes too low in the proportions, which in some of the other examples here makes it feel like the sockets are recessed too far into the skull), used observation and measurement more, and thought about perspective while blocking in the shadows.

Notes on the right head: I tried to focus more on shadows and pushing the value of the piece. I noticed I have to be more careful when separating shadow edges, working to darken values more slowly and intentionally. As with most of this learning process, reviewing it later I can see things off with the proportions -- but it's important to keep working through as many of these as I can.

Both were done with Polychromos pencils, simply dipping into the set and pulling whichever colour I thought appropriate for the representation. Two straightforward references pulled from Pinterest, chosen for having a clear shadow structure to support reading the form.

Sheet two: rendering age, and a callback to the notan study

Another two references from Pinterest, used to try two things: testing how rendering an aged person would change my approach, and testing how I could use a previous study to drive a new drawing. I used Caran d'Ache Luminance for the older character, and Polychromos for the woman.

That's the same reference behind Notan for Portrait Design's profile study -- the one left with its pencil construction lines showing. Coming back to it here, fully rendered in colour, made for a good test of how much changes once colour and layered value get added on top of a study that started as flat notan shapes.

Sheet three: pushing complexion and colour further

I wanted to push further again with these two studies, choosing different complexions specifically to test different pencils. The left head was rendered with Polychromos, the right with Caran d'Ache. For both, I used the colour-sampling tools in Paint Mixing, selected a range of swatches, and pulled the closest pencil match for each. In some instances the straight nearest match felt slightly off, so I leaned on the tool's hue suggestion to reach for a second pencil that captured the actual colour shift through the layers -- green in the shadows for the male head, blue in the shadows for the female.

What rendering reveals

I sometimes feel I've drafted a good foundation, and then as colour layering builds up value and depth, I start noticing the subtleties that are actually off in the underlying drawing. Rendering and shading can sculpt those shapes into something more representative, up to a point -- there's real value in that -- but there's a genuine limit to how much it can fix. It's a strong argument for getting the drawing stage right in the first place, rather than counting on rendering to rescue it later.

Not only the eyes -- I noticed this across all the features in this set, if I'm honest. I seem to have consistent trouble with eyes, noses, and mouths. As a result, I'm planning to dedicate a few pages purely to rendering out individual features, to push my problem-solving when it comes to capturing them.

Restraint over emphasis

Working with older muses on this set meant tackling the subtle shading that wrinkles and age cause in a face -- and in retrospect, I went too far with the tones in those areas. I'll need to be more restrained with wrinkles and texture in future work with aged subjects.

It's a reminder that, more often than not, subtlety has a more powerful impact -- once you step back from the piece -- than heavily emphasising what you're aiming to capture. Trusting the viewer's interpretation, and letting the mind fill in those gaps, tends to read stronger than spelling it out.

Where this goes next

Both of these threads -- the drawing stage mattering more than rendering can fix, and wanting more reps at getting proportions and features right before colour enters the picture -- point at the same thing: more time spent just sketching heads in pencil, at volume, across proportions, stylisation, emotion, and ages. That's likely its own post for the future -- and I can't wait to get stuck into some painting in the meantime.