Drawing a COLOURED PENCIL Portrait in JUST 5 STEPS!

Hey everybody, welcome back to my channel. In today's video I'm going to be going through how you can do a full coloured pencil portrait in just five steps. And so this is just going to be one way that you can approach a portrait. Of course there's many different ways that you can tackle drawing a portrait in coloured pencils and this is just one of the ways that I use. So for this particular drawing I'm going to be using Prismacolor coloured pencils but you can use whatever coloured pencils you have and in particular I'm using their portrait set. And I really recommend this set for beginners if you don't have a large budget and you just want to get some colours that are great for portraits. This set has 24 colours in there, all great natural colours that you'll use for all of your portrait drawings. Here you can see the selection of colours that I'll be using for this portrait. It's actually quite a small selection, I'm only using six different colours. I'll be using a white for the highlights, I've then got a light peach tone for the blending. For a few brighter more vibrant colours and glazing I've got the peach and a henna which is more of a reddy tone. And then for some of the darker shadows I've got a light amber and a dark brown. But obviously the colours that you pick will vary depending on the portrait that you're doing. So a few tips before we start the portrait is number one always keep your pencils sharp. Number two is to try and shade with the side of the pencil and actually hold your pencils further back. This will really help you to get smoother even shading as when you hold it a bit more further forward you can get some sort of darker pencil strokes showing through because you naturally apply a bit more pressure to the pencil when you hold it more towards the front and when you use the point of the pencil. Whereas using it on the side and holding it further back you're able to get much more even shading and avoid messy pencil strokes. Also use circular motions to build up layers of shading. This is really really good especially when you're drawing skin because this again helps to make sure that you're getting really soft even shading and you don't have any lines showing through that can detract from the realism of your drawing especially like I said if you're drawing skin. And this makes it really easy to layer different colours over the top of each other to really build up a vibrant realistic drawing. Because when you're doing portraits you don't just want to use one colour, you want to build up and layer loads of different colours to get a realistic result. Tip number four is only apply pressure when you're blending everything out or when you're approaching your final layers. Don't apply loads of pressure early on when you're doing your first layers because like I said when you're doing portraits you want to build up loads of layers of different colours and if you apply too much pressure really early on then you'll flatten out the tooth of the paper and you won't be able to add as many layers after that. Now before we move on to going through the five steps to build up this portrait, if you want to see how I created this drawing in real time then the full real-time tutorial is available over on my Patreon at patreon.com slash Kirsty Partridge. On there you can get access to over 300 real-time tutorials not just for colour pencil but for watercolour, charcoal and a range of other mediums. Each tutorial is in real time with full voice narration and I talk you through step by step how to do each drawing in real time so you can follow along with me. Or if you're not interested in a monthly membership or you just want to focus on one medium or subject matter then over on my website I've got lots of individual courses to help you master the techniques that you need to know for your specific medium or subject matter. I've got individual colour pencil courses on there for portraits, animal drawings so I really recommend checking them out as well as courses like I said for watercolour and charcoal. If you are interested in my courses then you can currently get 15% off when you use the code SAVE15 at checkout and I'll leave a link in the description to both my Patreon website and my course website if you want to check them out but let's get straight into the portrait drawing. So the first step that I'm going to take in this coloured pencil drawing process is to actually build up a underpainting and you probably haven't seen this when it comes to coloured pencils. Underpainting is a very common thing to do for something like an oil painting but you can actually apply it to your coloured pencil drawings as well and so for this underpainting I'll be using my dark brown tone, so I'm using the darkest colour that I picked out for this portrait and I'm just using this to roughly shade in all of the values that I can see in the portrait. So this is just a monochromatic drawing that I go through from the face to the body, every part of the portrait and I'm just using it to sort of gauge the values in each area, wherever the shadows, wherever the highlights and then we can just glaze in all of our other colours over the top to really bring life and vibrancy to the skin and to the face and to make everything look a realistic colour. But at the moment I'm just going throughout the face and I'm just shading in the values for each area and you can see that where the skin has got a lot of shadow, especially where that hat is covering and overlapping onto the face and casting a shadow, I'm using a bit more pressure on my pencil and building up a bit more layering with that dark brown. In areas where it's a very light value or just a mid-tone value, you can see that I'm making it a lot lighter by, like I said, using the side of the pencil and holding my pencil further back to really build up that light shading. So that's how you can make the variations in the lights and the darks just by using that one pencil. It's really important if you want to get very light shading with a dark pencil to hold your pencil on the side and hold it further back because that will naturally give you some lighter shading, not as much of the pencil will come off onto the paper and then if you want to make something a lot darker then you can just keep going over it and building up more layers until you get it as dark as it needs to go. But this is a great way to establish the anatomy of the face by getting in the contours and where all of those shadows are and it's very important when you are drawing a portrait to make sure that you're looking at the shape of those shadows, so how are the shadows curving around the cheeks and for example with the nose, is there more shadow at the side or underneath the nose? The nostrils are the darkest area normally of the nose so look for the darkest parts of each feature and get them in. I'm now focusing on the mouth and normally the darkest part of the mouth is that middle sort of line where the upper and lower lip meets, especially when the mouth is closed. So look at each feature in detail and pick out where are the darkest parts of each feature with the eyes, here it was where the eyes are closed that was quite dark and then look at where the highlights are and you can see that the highlighted areas I'm pretty much leaving white, you don't have to add the brown pencil everywhere, this is just an underpainting, we are going to be building up a lot more different colours over the top, so just because you don't add the dark brown to a certain area and you leave it white that doesn't mean that it's going to stay white because we have got loads of other colours to layer on top of this and also don't be afraid to go darker in some of those areas that are more shadowed, it is super important that you do get a range of values within your portraits, so you can see that I have got some of the highlights which which I've just left white but then I have got really dark shadows where I've pretty much burnished and applied a lot of pressure with that dark brown pencil and this is what's going to really make your portrait pop, to make a drawing stand out you need to have contrast in your work, so you need to have a range of values, you need to have those really dark shadows and those brighter highlights and really I'm just looking at the reference, I've got the sketch already down on my paper, I did that with a HP pencil and I made sure that it was nice and light before I went in and added the coloured pencils but you just want to examine the reference part by part and identify where those shadows and highlights are, don't get too bogged down and distracted by the fact that you're drawing a nose or a mouth or the eyes because that can be quite intimidating, so then once you've finished the underpainting we can move on to step two which is layering in those mid-tones, so for this I'm going to start off by using the light umber which is that lighter brown tone that I picked out at the start of this tutorial and I'm just going to use this to go over a lot of the mid-tone areas where we haven't added too much shading with that dark brown because obviously it would have made it too dark, so we really want to make sure that as we build up more and more layers we're getting rid of that white grain of the paper and in the mid-tone areas and those lighter areas we're going to have a lot of the white of the paper showing through at the moment because we wouldn't have added much of the dark brown in those areas, so it's important that we do go in with these lighter colours and fill in where the mid-tones and the highlights are so that every area has got enough pigment down on the paper and every step that I go through I'm still using the exact same technique to actually apply the pencil shading to the paper. You can see that I hold the pencil pretty much halfway up the actual pencil lead and I'm always using it on the side unless I'm doing really small details like the nostrils or the slits of the eyes where I need to be really precise. Most of the time if I'm just shading in the skin I will keep holding it further back because there's no need to use the point of the pencil and I'm going in circular motions a lot of the time as well like I said at the start to avoid getting streaky lines showing through. If you're using circular motions you can't see where your pencil strokes start and end they all just sort of overlap which gives you a really nice smooth even look but don't worry too much about it because we are going to be building up so many different layers that it will all come together and the colours will blend and fuse together as you go. Now step three is to add some of those vibrant shades in. At the moment we've just added pretty much brown colours and so the skin doesn't really have a healthy glow, it doesn't look very vibrant and that's where these other more natural skin tones are going to come in. So I'm going to start off by using the colour henna and this is that red raspberry tone that's going to bring a lot of that pink tinge and that pink undertone to the skin. So in the reference photo I could see that the baby's forehead had a lot of pink undertone to the skin and normally you'll need to look to see if there's a pink undertone to the skin or more of an orangey warm undertone or even a yellow like a yellow ochre undertone to the skin or more of an olive base. So look at your reference closely and pick out the colour hues that you can see and that will help you to pick the colours that you want to glaze over the top of your underpainting and once you've added in your mid-tones. I'm especially using this colour a lot for the lips to give them that nice rosy tinge to them and I'm even going over where I've added in that dark brown. You can layer the to make everything fuse and look very cohesive together. Of course I'm also adding that henna to the cheeks to give them a really nice warm rosy glow to them and I'm still just using that same technique being very light with my shading because you can always build up more and more layers and build up some darker tones and more pigment with the colour but if you add too much it's hard to erase it and keep everything smooth at the same time. So I like to go really slow and build things up gradually and then again for the areas that are really dark and got a really intense pink tone to them I am using some more pressure. You can see that there's still areas of the skin which I've left white and those are the brightest areas that I'm just going to be using that light peach tone on. And the next colour that I'm going to use is this peach colour and this is going to be to fill in the majority of the skin now because we've just got this peach and then the light peach for the really highlighted areas to burnish and blend those out but the peach is going to make a nice base colour for our skin so we're going to be really adding this colour all over the skin. We can use it as well to burnish which basically means applying pressure to the pencil to blend an area out that's what burnish means. So we can use the pencil to burnish out the darker areas where we know we won't need to add the light peach tone to because the light peach is a super light colour so if you was to add the light peach to these darker areas you'd probably lighten them up and wash them out a bit too much. So at this stage you can use that peach tone to start to burnish out those darker areas and also lightly layer it over the top of some of those highlighted areas as well if you need to. If you feel like there's areas that aren't super light but they are lighter on the value scale than other areas you can go in and layer a bit of that peach to those areas as well. So at this stage the areas of real highlights that you have should be decreasing with each layer and each colour that you add in. So moving on to step four this is the fun part because this is where we're really going to blend everything out and it will remove that graininess and it will start to make it look more like a painting and a realistic drawing than just a grainy sketch. So I'm starting off by going in with that peach colour so the colour that we've just used and like I said I'm going to start to burnish out some of the darker areas using this pencil and now this is going to be the stage where you want to add more pressure to your pencil to get everything to gel together and all of the pigment to fuse and give a really nice solid block colour and you need the pressure to really mix those colours together and get rid of all of the graininess of the paper and to fill in all of those little nooks and crannies in the paper texture. So don't be afraid now to go in with a bit more pressure now that we get into those final layers of this coloured pencil portrait. But also if there are other areas that you want to add more pink tones to or more shadows then do keep that in mind and leave a bit of wiggle room so that you can go in and build up some more layers and make final adjustments if you need to As you can see I'm also using the white pencil to blend out those lighter areas and you can add some light peach to those highlighted areas if they aren't super bright but for example the tip of the nose and at the top of the mouth and the corners of the mouth those areas were quite light and quite bright so I didn't add too much of the other colours to those areas I wanted to keep those bright so that we do have a large contrast in our drawing and so that it really pops because if I was to have added too much light peach to every area then we wouldn't have those intense highlights which gives the drawing the contrast that it needs. Once again when I'm using the white pencil I am applying a lot of pressure in there to get all of those colours to blend. So step five is just adding in the final details and finishing off the work to make sure you're happy with it and that it matches the reference image so like I said this is where I'm going to go in and maybe add some shadows if I need to darken an area up or glaze a bit more of the henna if I want to give an area a bit more of a pink tinge or use a bit more of the peach colour if I want to make an area a bit more orange toned and darken that up a bit but you shouldn't have to do too much with this sort of step because you should have added in all of your layers before you blended and burnished everything out but there may still be a few adjustments that you want to do before you call it finished. Mainly I'm using this step to go in and add some of the dark crisp details with my dark brown pencil but I'm also using my exacto knife to create a few details for the section of hair and I love using an exacto knife to create hair texture because it scrapes off that coloured pencil and reveals some really pretty highlights so you can use it for textures in the lips and in the eyes all over really and if you're drawing someone that's older you can use it to create really fine wrinkles so I've got lots of videos on my channel about that and those techniques so you can check them out if you're interested in learning more about how to use the exacto knife but it is definitely one of my favourite tools for coloured pencil drawings. So those are the five steps that you can take to create a full coloured pencil portrait. I hope you found that an easy enough sort of technique that you feel confident that you could give a go. I like doing videos like this because it can be really intimidating when it comes to coloured pencils in particular to know where to start and the steps to go about completing a portrait so if you have just a simple method like this a step-by-step that you can go through with any sort of portrait then that can make it a little less daunting I hope if you want to tackle one if it's your first time. So just to finish off this portrait I'm actually using a marker base for the hat. I like to use mixed media quite often so if I think something can be sped up by adding in another medium then I do that and in this case I used the markers to create just the base for the hat. It was a really really cute hat and it was one of the main reasons why I picked this reference and then I'm going over the top and I'll build up all of the details with coloured pencils. But one of the great things about using a marker under base is that it fills in the white grain of the paper already so you don't have to worry about that you can just shade in all of the highlights and shadows over the top you don't have to worry about burnishing all of the white grain of the paper so I find that a lot more fun to do than having to build up loads and loads of layers. So that's pretty much it for this tutorial I'd love to know in the comment section below what techniques do you use to create coloured pencil portraits what is your method have you got a step-by-step that you want to share for how you approach each drawing that will make it easier for beginners and any beginner tips that you have would be great to hear in the comment section below because coloured pencil is definitely one very tricky medium to get started in and so it's great if you guys could give your advice for others down in the comment section. So I'm just finishing up the hat now as you can see with that coloured pencil layers on top it really brings that hat to life and it was a lot quicker to do than if I was to have done it all in coloured pencils and here you can see the final drawing I love how this one turned out and I think the skin looks really nice and smooth and it looks really nice and vibrant. Now if you guys are interested in watercolours then I do have a free two-hour watercolour tutorial when you join my newsletter you get that for free so if you are interested in that as well because I know a lot of you guys follow me for watercolours then you can get a free real-time watercolour tutorial when you sign up to my newsletter so again the link for that will be in the description but that is it for today's video I really hope you guys enjoyed it if you did please give it a thumbs up and subscribe if you're new around here and even tick that bell icon so you do get notified on my future videos but that is it from me and I'll see you guys in the next video bye everybody