"You Are Like Me!" in progress 2 - Where dark and light outlines meet
Making progress on the puppy’s body. These two images show how I “build” the structures of the chest and front legs. Detailed info for Colored Pencil artists.
1
I completed the black areas of the puppy’s ear and neck with black, white, and a variety of grey pencils. Working my way downward with those same pencils for the black coat, I came to the rust chest patches. I wanted to continue working on the black coat before I switched back to my orange and rust-brown pencils. So I outlined the rust patches, as you see here, adding just a bit of the peach and orange highlights on the left chest-patch where they interface with the black coat. I have now “corralled” the orange areas and can continued downward with the black coat.
There are two small areas where you see X’s. That is something I do when there is a large area to be colored in solid black. Because I am working with sharp pencil points to create the coat details, I come back to those areas later and fill them in by pressing hard with my black pencil to completely cover the green paper. (I don’t want any green showing through there.) Coloring hard over large areas like that dulls the pencil. In fact I want a dull pencil point to do that — a large blunt pencil point that covers a larger area with each stroke than a finely-sharpened pencil does when making individual hairs. I will come back and fill in those “X” areas later on: there is a very large solid black area coming up on the lower chest. (See next pic.)
I have been using that [X-area = black] convention for so long that my brain and “eye” perceives those as solid black as I’m working.
2
I have continued working downward with the black and grey pencils I’m using for the black coat. I now have the lower chest outlined with black lines, which will be filled in with solid black. The reason I outlined that area with black lines the way I did: I finished the black coat on the left foreleg down to where the rust coat starts. On the right foreleg the highlighted edge of the rust (orange) area goes further up the raised leg. Where a black edge meets a light-colored edge, I always put down the light edge first. The reason is because an artist has to rub a pale cream pencil stroke right up against a black pencil stroke where those two edges meet. If I put down a solid, heavy, black line first, and then “rub” my cream pencil right along it….the cream pencil will pick up some of the black pigment and make dark smears in the cream area. The black pigment “contaminates” the cream pencil - on the paper and on the pencil point itself.
I want that cream area to remain bright and pure. So I made the cream/orange edge of the right foreleg first, then came along it on both sides of the leg with heavy black lines. The black pencil is more “powerful” and it doesn’t really pick up cream pigment. Not enough to notice, anyway. So it’s much safer to do the light edges first, and then bring the black edge right up to it (“along it” as I’m making the hard black stroke). Hence, as you see here, I have made a nice crisp cream highlight on the foreleg, outlined with black edges. Now I can continue filling in that black area on the puppy’s belly between the front legs, and the black coat to the right of the raised foreleg, working right up to those outlined edges without worrying about the lighter colors.
“You Are Like Me!”, in progress.
🎨 Prismacolor pencil on “Light Green” Canson Mi-Teintes paper, 13 x 15 inches.
🖼 This original artwork will be available for the Holiday season.
Fine art prints will also be available, with a portion of proceeds donated to Doberman Rescue.
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