Odie portrait in progress 4

I’ve put in an underpainting on Odie to give him a nice “red Dobe” base color to work on top of. I chose cream Canson paper for this portrait to give a nice glow to the sky, but it’s a pale color that takes a lot of coloring with colored pencils to make large dark areas. So I do an “underpainting” to give me the base colors that I’d have if I was working on chocolate-brown paper.

It looks really weird with the "white eyes". But I wanted to leave the paper untouched in the eye area so I can do the eyeball details with colored pencil. I don’t use watercolor very often so I’m a lot more confident with colored pencils than watercolor. Eyes are so important in a portrait I don’t want to take a chance they would be less than perfect.

Odie’s cute face is starting to take shape. Although very crude at this point.