Week 23 - Virtual Tour - The National Portrait Gallery
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This week,
we used references gathered from a virtual tour to inform the production of a
coloured portrait.
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Colour is
an added level onto drawing that can complicate the process; colour is made up
of a value as well as a hue, so finding the perfect combination of the two when
you are in the process of learning one step already can be quite a challenge.
For this reason, it can be useful to analyse works from old masters who had
learnt how to combine the two in a realistic, aesthetically pleasing way.
Reference:
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My choice
of model for this piece was someone with a richer, yellow undertone skin tone,
which meant I had to find a portrait that reflected the same richness of the
skin tone and contrast in image. Most portraits from Europe especially were
very pale people, however I found this portrait of Sir Richard Southwell by Hans
Holbein the Younger which had a saturated colour scheme to match my reference.
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The
colours on the face were split into 3 different groups of hue on top of the yellow
undertone of the skin: Yellow for the forehead, red for the cheeks and nose,
and blue/grey for the jaw and chin area. Black was used minimally too, as it
was used for the clothing to create some strong contrast with the face. The
background was a rich, saturated peacock blue also to act as an opposite colour
to the yellow skin.
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Gallery Reference |
Initial sketch:
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I started
constructing the sketch by lightly working out the general shapes, such as the back
of the head, the lines of the eyes, mouth and nose, and the general proportions
of the arms.
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This
sketch I thought was mostly accurate, however the nose was too low on the face,
and the arm size was a bit too big. In the final drawing the arms are mostly
cut off anyway, so it is not a massive problem like the face proportions.
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After
this, I lightened the sketch with a putty eraser by rolling it into a sausage
shape over the whole piece and began adding colour.
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Sketch (apologies for the phone shadow) |
Adding Colour:
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I used
chalk pastel pencils for this piece, which meant I could have a lot of control
over the medium as opposed to full chalk pastel sticks that would lose the
detail in the piece. I mostly made the colours through layering and began a
base layer of pale yellow over the skin areas since that was the undertone of
the model’s skin tone.
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I
focussed on keeping the red tones to the centre of the face and in the cheeks,
and the blue/grey tones to the chin like my reference from the gallery uses
too.
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In areas
like the eyes, I used a dark brown pencil for the darkest areas. I restrained
from using black for a lot of the areas, unless it was layered over another
colour like brown in the hair or the skin colour when marking out the shadows.
This was because black has a habit of muddying a piece and is very hard to
remove from the piece overall.
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I really
struggled with this medium because I struggle with feeling the pencil scrape
against the paper, especially blunt pencils when the wood scrapes on the paper –
so this was a hard piece to finish when my pencils became blunt very quickly
through use. For this reason, I did not add a contrasting background too – and I
thought the piece looked complete with the same white background as its reference.
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If I were
to do this again, I would try and find a different medium to fix this issue – I
feel like I cannot use those materials again comfortably, so I might benefit
from using watercolour pencils or oil-based colouring pencils that are smoother
to use.
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Final Piece |
Final Conclusions:
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I am
happy with my result this week; I was expecting to struggle with colour a lot more
than I ended up doing. There are some issues in construction like the back of
the head and the arm size, but the actual face proportions for the most part
look correct.
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If I were
to do this again, I would have smoothed the face out to remove the paper
texture and have done another layer of colour after fixing what I have currently
to refine the result further.
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