Drawing a Portrait in 3 Colors - Complete Walkthrough

Hello everyone. In this video I'm going to show you a three-color portrait drawing from start to finish in real time, and I'm going to watch it with you and ramble on a bit about the technique, the medium, and my thought processes throughout. I hope that you enjoy it. And as I get started here, I wanted to just briefly touch on the idea of a three-color drawing. These kinds of drawings have been around for hundreds of years, and they're usually done with black, white, and a warm reddish color on toned paper. And while those three colors usually stay the same, the medium and the technique can vary quite a bit. My approach to this drawing today is not the traditional one. I believe the way this technique is generally taught is that you start with the warm sanguine color, and do a lot of the drawing with that, and then gradually work in the black and the white, because it's advantageous to start with the middle value and add in the extremes. You could also choose to blend these colors together to create secondary colors. You can blend your black and your white together to create some cool grays, or make pinks and lighter flesh tones by blending the white and the red. But spoilers, I'm not taking that approach for this drawing. Almost the opposite, actually, but trying to achieve similar results. I'm starting with the black, obviously, and developing it as a black and white value drawing. But then, towards the end, I'm going to selectively warm some areas up with that reddish sanguine color. And for the rest of this video, whenever I refer to red, sanguine, warmth, or Conti, I'm talking about the same thing. I'm using a stick of willow charcoal for the black, a sanguine Conti pencil for the heat, and a white charcoal pencil for, unsurprisingly, the white. And if you're not familiar with Conti, it's similar in texture to compressed charcoal or hard pastel. And although I've used these three together before, and they work together just fine, they all have a somewhat different consistency. The willow is kind of powdery, the Conti is a little bit oily, and if there's a problem, child, it's actually the white because it has a slightly waxy feeling. But as I said, I didn't really plan to blend them together much, or at all for that matter, so I wasn't really worried about it. I'll talk more about that when I start using the white and the color, but if you plan to do a three-color drawing of your own, and especially if you plan on doing any blending, you may well want to choose three of the same medium. In other words, black, white, and red Conti, black, white, and red pastel, black, white, and red chalk, something like that, where you can be fairly certain that they're not going to fight with each other or react in some way that's undesirable. All right, enough with the setup, let's talk about the drawing a little bit. The way that I'm constructing this drawing is to start off in a fairly geometric way, in that I'm creating shapes, filling those shapes with value to create shadow masses, and then nudging those masses around to start to organize it and find the form. And I'm using my finger to keep things very vague and ambiguous. I don't want to get married to anything at this stage, and I want to keep moving through the drawing and get my initial guesses down. At some point, there is usually an aha moment where I start to see it, or I'll start to see something that I can latch onto and use as an anchor. And when that happens, I can start to make more thoughtful decisions and accurate adjustments. But until then, I want to keep my charcoal wandering around and not really committing to anything much. It's a bit like sculpting, starting with big blocky shapes and gradually making those simple shapes more complex. Occasionally, someone will comment that my faces look good right from the start, and I always think, they do? Because I've never thought that about my own work. On the contrary, I've always thought that my drawings sometimes get there towards the end, but they usually go through a long, awkward phase to get there. Like now, for instance. I'm a big believer in the end justifying the means. So if what it looks like now helps me get to an end that I'm happy with, that's what's important. Okay, here. A lot of people ask about this horizontal hatching, and why I do that. And if I were using a white paper, my answer would be that the main reason for this is to introduce some value into the light halftone areas. But on a toned paper, the light halftone is already taken care of by the value of the paper. So it's not really necessary. So why do it for this? And my answer is that that horizontal hatching also has a way of bringing everything together and starts to connect the different elements, literally. The features at this stage all seem sort of disparate and separate. In other words, there's an eye here, a nose here, a mouth here, and an ear over there. But they're separate from each other. And that simple horizontal hatching and subsequent smudging has a way of bringing it all together and turning all of these different elements into one thing. And it gets me to start thinking about the relationships between the features rather than simply their relative position to one another. I'm juggling things still, but the chaos will begin to settle. I know a lot of it is likely wrong at this point, but I haven't figured out which parts yet. I am hoping to find out though, so I'm going to keep asking questions. I have a lot to work with for my reference this time. Great light, nice range of values, and a great subject. This is John Carrusco. He's an artist's model, and if you look at a lot of portraits and figurative art online, you've probably seen him before or seen drawings and paintings of him. He's got a great face, a great look, and I don't know of any portrait artist that doesn't love a beard. Apart from being just kind of a dramatic element that you can design and take some artistic license with, it also means that you don't need to draw the mouth, which can be notoriously difficult to get right sometimes. So, bonus points there. Here, what I'm doing is basically what I was just talking about. I'm working on the relationship between the nose, the eye sockets, and that form that sits between them all, which is the glabella. It's a very important shape to pay attention to. It's sometimes called the keystone shape, because it locks everything together. This part is done with a larger diameter stick of charcoal. I've snapped off a piece about a half an inch long, and I'm using it on its side to really efficiently mass in some value. And to be honest, I had fully intended to come back at some point and do something more with that. Maybe something with a little more finesse, or let it sort of gracefully trail off or extend down into the beard. I just threw that band of dark value in there to have something to work that edge against. But as I worked on it, and the longer I left it there, the more I decided that I just kind of liked it, and I thought it created kind of an interesting balance between the soft handling of the face and the boldness and severity of that band on the side. It was interesting to me graphically more than anything, really. Building up a little more value here on his nose, and still treating this drawing like a straight charcoal drawing for the most part. I popped in a little highlight there on his nose, and that highlight there is just to help me keep track of the topography. I'm going to be using white on this, and of course the white is going to represent the highlight. So that little spot there is going to get rubbed out or covered up eventually, but mentally having it there at this point helps me to see it three-dimensionally. I realize the eye is droopy and it ages John, but I like it, so I'm going to leave it alone. In an effort to keep this loose and fresh, I'm not going to chase the likeness much today. That and a few design choices usually gets labeled illustrative. I find illustrative is one of those terms that can be used in a complementary way, describing the way you use line or shape or something like that, and then other times it's clearly meant as an insult, as in, your work doesn't meet my standards of what fine art is. Which is okay. You can have that opinion if you like, Mr. Highbrow. But why the backhanded insult to illustrators? Some of my all-time favorite artists were illustrators, and an illustrative style is defined as using line, shape, texture, or color to convey a mood. Well, who's not trying to do that? I mean, are some of you not using visual language to help communicate the mood of your work? Why not? To put it simply, the purpose of an illustration is to convey a message, while the purpose of fine art is simply to exist. It's its own thing, right? But the line between the two is very, very blurry, and getting blurrier all the time. You have fine artists using illustrative techniques, and illustrators using traditional fine art techniques, and the same artist can have paintings hanging in galleries and illustrating books at the same time. Maybe it's just me, but that whole conversation kind of smacks of pretentious nonsense, but whatever. I'll stop ranting now. But coincidentally, this is right about at the point that I would make that kind of a decision. Do I want to settle in for the long haul and really focus on likeness and accuracy, or is the handling and an expressive result more important to me? And if it's something I'm doing on my own, i.e. something I haven't been hired for, I invariably choose the loose handling. I just like it better. It's as simple as that. And I'm starting to think about the white now. I'm still not ready to put it in yet, but I'm just starting to consider both where it's going to go and how much of it I want to use. I need to remember that the paper represents the light halftones, so I don't need to represent all of the values with charcoal, and I need to remember to leave some room for the white to work and not squeeze the value scale too much. My preference when I do use white is to use it very sparingly. I just think it's more powerful that way. I just want to use it for the hot spots. I would call that the graphic choice. Some artists prefer to use lots of white and use it to render form throughout the light areas. I would call that the realistic choice. Neither is right or wrong, it's just a different vibe, but I'm getting way ahead of myself. I'll try to point out what I mean when I start putting down some of the white, but for now I'm simply trying to not overdo my halftones. Some of this here is just doodling, or thinking out loud so to speak. I'm playing with the edges of his beard and visually experimenting before committing to anything. And at this point the drawing is starting to take shape, and it's starting to make more sense to me. But I'm still not quite happy with some of these outside edges, and I'm still messing around with those some. And as you can see there at the top of his head, that I've taken six or eight different guesses at where the top of his head is, and frankly none of them are right yet. But I know that if I just hang in there and keep taking guesses at it, I will get there eventually, or at the very least I will arrive at a place that I'm happy with. I'm massing in some halftones now. It's going down fairly dark, but I know I'm going to run my finger across it, which will lighten it up quite a bit, as well as removing some of the noise or any unintended edges. That's just one of the nice characteristics of the charcoal. And here I'm taking yet another guess at the top of his head, and that angle right there solved some of the riddle up there. That was one of the things that was off, I think. But honestly, that way of taking guesses, adjusting things, taking another guess, working on something else, and then five minutes later you take still another guess, each time getting a little closer, is pretty characteristic to the way that I draw, and the way that I figure things out. I prefer to guess and adjust than stopping to measure constantly. That's one of the reasons that I use a lot of soft charcoal. It's just very, very forgiving, and it allows me to take those guesses, knowing that I don't have to live with them if I don't want to. It gives me the freedom to just relax and enjoy myself and just draw. But don't get me started on all the reasons why you should draw with soft charcoal, or we're going to be here all day. I took a little break there, and I must have nudged the camera or something. This video isn't sped up, but I have edited out long pauses where I'm sharpening the charcoal or walking away for a few minutes. Lately I've been making it more of a point to take little breaks. Even in a half-hour study like this, just a few minutes away from it, looking at something else can really refresh your eyes and give you a much better perspective when you get back to it. It's sort of like, have you ever repeated a word to yourself so many times that it starts to sound strange to you, and you can't remember how to pronounce it or spell it, and it starts to lose all of its meaning? I think that drawing too long without giving your eyes a rest is the visual equivalent of that phenomenon. You can be so focused on something that you start to not see things right. So you should definitely take breaks when you're drawing. And don't stare at it while you're taking your break. And when you do come back, look at it from a little distance and assess things before getting back into it. What I'm doing here is thinking about and planning what I'm going to do with his beard, and specifically if I want to use any white, or if I can get away with it being the paper color or the paper value, actually. I mentioned earlier that I wanted to use the white very sparingly. And although the beard is light enough that I certainly could have chosen to use white there, I would rather reserve it for the highlights in his face. And one of the reasons for that is that at this point, I've decided to leave that band of value on the left as it is. In fact, more spoilers, I've decided to mirror that background value on the other side, but I haven't put it in yet. And if I was going to have those two bookends of value in those places, it was going to force the focal point to be between them, which is fine. But if I put a bunch of white into his beard, it's going to draw the eye down there, so I chose not to. Strictly a design decision rather than a realistic one. You could also argue that accenting the beard with white would have been an interesting design decision too, and you wouldn't be wrong. It's just a different choice, and you can decide for yourself if you think mine was an effective choice or not. And you might think that it's a missed opportunity to handle the beard in a way that's much less dramatic. But I kind of like the idea of downplaying things like that. It's unexpected, or just less obvious in a way. I like to understate the eyes sometimes in a portrait for the same reason. It's expected that of course you're going to put all kinds of details and highlights into the eyes. It's the first thing people look at. The eyes are the windows of the soul! And yeah, I get all that. But you don't have to do that every time, and it can be equally as interesting to throw the focus somewhere else. Now I'm not doing anything groundbreaking here with my focal point right in the middle of the page and framed with dark values on either side. The point is that it's something to at least think about. Again, it's a design decision. But it's one that can give your drawing a completely different feeling that has little to do with accurate, realistic rendering. I feel like I'm talking a lot about design in this commentary, and I think it's because I was doing a little more planning ahead than usual when I was drawing this. We haven't seen anything but black up until this point, and even though the vast majority of this drawing is charcoal, the other colors do require you to plan for the future a little bit. Just a few seconds ago in the video, I erased that little highlight on his nose that I had put in earlier. And that's what I meant about leaving room for the white on toned paper. If it's a large-ish, round form, like the nose or the cheeks or the forehead, I want the highlights to have some breathing room. Okay, starting to introduce some of the white now. And the idea here, of course, is to look for just the brightest, whitest spots, and then understate those. That's kind of the way that I look at it. I really want to err on the side of less. This is one of those times where less is more. And as you can see, I'm doing what I was just talking about there, where I'm removing some charcoal to put down some of the white. And I'm not doing that because I don't want the charcoal and the white to mix together. I'm doing that because I want the white to be surrounded by the value of the paper. And I also want to have that same kind of loose handling with the white that I was using with the charcoal. And right there, I'm choosing to erase to the paper value. But I'm also choosing not to put any white there on that little form beside of his eye. And even though I think I go back at some point and put a little white spot there, I'm avoiding that for now, because again, I want to err on the side of less. Okay, so now I'm starting to develop some of the lightest parts of this image, which is up on his forehead. But I'm choosing to downplay those too, to some degree. Kind of for the same reason that I didn't put any white into his beard. There are very strong highlights on his forehead, and they're doing a lot of the work to sell the volume. But I also think there's room to understate the brightness of it some. And there, on the muzzle, again, I'm prioritizing the highlights on his face over the beard. You can see that the value of the muzzle, where I just put in that spot, is very, very close to the value of the mustache right next to it. But I'm going to choose to put a little light on his face and leave the beard alone, just to have a little bit of separation there. The thing to watch out for when you're putting in the white is that it's easy to get really enamored with what's happening on the paper. And you start to notice that you're getting this great three-dimensional stuff happening because of the white. So then you start sprinkling it everywhere. And the problem with that is that the more of it you use, the less strength it has, because it becomes common. I don't want to be timid with it. I just want to be very selective about where I put it. I've spent some time here talking about allowing the paper to represent the light halftone and getting the most punch from your highlights. And it illustrates the importance of getting some tone down on your paper when you're working on white paper. And a common issue I see is getting your light halftones and your highlights too similar, meaning that the halftone values are too light, which makes the highlights feel weak. It's much easier to control that and add highlights when you're actually putting them in with a white pencil. Of course, this whole discussion relies on a strong lighting setup, or at least supposes that you have the kind of light that gives you enough value range to be able to see the highlights and the halftones in the first place. And I'm putting down that other bookend of background value now. And I'm trying to apply it in the same bold and direct way. I'm really grinding it in there and getting it about as dense and dark as I can. And I can come back with my smaller stick and smoke out some of those edges if I want to. I'm using just a slightly lighter touch to get the charcoal to break a little right there beside the beard to suggest the character of that edge. The reason I'm waiting until now to put this element in is that I'm right-handed, and even though I have my paper on an easel, I knew I would get my fingers in it. And if I wanted it to remain crisp and abrupt like on the other side, I should probably wait until closer to the end. I wouldn't have done that if he were turned the other way, because I would have needed the value on that edge to help me to develop his face and work that edge against it. So I would have had to have either been more careful, or live with some smudgy fingerprints in my background. There are worse things, I suppose. And you can start to see how much volume you can coax out of your two-dimensional paper when you start to exploit the entire value range. I talk on some of my other videos about getting all of your values to agree with each other and make sense with respect to the light source, and I'm trying to do that here. That doesn't mean I can't make different choices and push things one way or the other, but I want to have a reason to. Problems start to arise when you have one shadow that you've handled differently than all the other shadows, or shadows that are just kind of all over the place and not obeying any light source. Now that I've gotten the white down, I'm cleaning up some of the charcoal and giving the white a little more breathing room in some spots. And it shows how the white changes your perception, because suddenly the upper end of the value scale is extended much further than it has been since you've started drawing. I'm also adding little touches of white here and there, too. I've gotten that initial application of white down, and left that alone for a bit. And now that I've gotten used to it, I can go back and add or subtract. But it's much easier to add, which is another reason to be stingy with it in the first place. That far eye seemed kind of vague over there, so I'm going back in and giving that a little more attention, trying to keep things symmetrical. A question I get asked a lot involves how you know when a drawing is finished. And it's a great question, and frankly, one that I wish I knew the answer to. I overwork things as much as anyone, but I do it a lot less than I used to, so I'm making progress. Of course, it has a lot to do with what you want the result to look like and the level of development. But if I'm shooting for something lively and loose, one of the ways I know that I should start to wrap it up is when I start changing things and then realize that I liked it better before, and then I change it back. And I'm kind of doing that with his far cheek on this one. It just seemed a little pointy to me, so I softened it and then decided to make it pointy again. That's what overworking is to me, taking something simply stated but effective and restating it to make it unnecessarily complex. Editing my own videos has taught me to notice when I'm doing that a little sooner, because I have a record of what it looked like five minutes ago. And it really sucks to have to admit to yourself that it was better at some point in the past than where it ended up. And now I'm just stalling, because I know I'm going to add the sanguine Conti soon. I don't need to clear a space for it, like the white, because it occupies some of the same places as the black. I also know from using these two together that the Conti will ride right on top of the charcoal, and they work quite well together. But as I said earlier, I'm not going to blend them very much, if at all. It's interesting to note that as it sits right now, nothing about this drawing is either warm or cool. But as soon as I start hinting at warmth in a few seconds by applying Conti, suddenly everything is assigned a temperature by comparison. Okay, finally, as promised, here in the last three or four minutes, I'm going to introduce some color. And I always feel like a drawing looks weird for a few minutes when I start adding color to an otherwise monochromatic drawing. And I have to fight a brief moment of panic and give the color some time to spread out a little before making any judgments. If I had developed the drawing in color rather than waiting till the end to add color, that shift in perception would never happen. The Conti is going to sit on top of the charcoal for the most part, or at least share space with the charcoal, because its value is darker than the paper. I want it to be soft in some places and more intense in others, like in the warm reflections under the brow line. Sanguine Conti is a really powerful, warm color. And the gray paper, as opposed to, say, tan, makes it feel even hotter, which is intentional. This paper is actually cooler than it appears on video. I tried to adjust it a little bit, but it was shot under a fairly warm light, so there's only so much that I could do. And just like the white, it's easy to overdo it, at least if you're approaching it in the way that I am. If you were using the sanguine first approach, it would be the black that I was trying to limit the use of. I do want to spread around the warmth more than the white, so I don't have some areas that feel too cold, but I also want to suggest both warm and cool passages, so I don't want it everywhere. That's kind of the idea with a technique like this, which is to suggest that there's more going on than there actually is. You're trying to mimic the illusion of flesh, and flesh is translucent, so it's never just one color. Flesh picks up all kinds of color hues, some warm and some cool, and that's what you're trying to imply. When I was learning to paint, I started with just burnt umber and white, and worked monochromatically for a while. If you're not familiar with burnt umber, it's just a neutral, cool brown color. And then when I got comfortable with that, I added burnt sienna to my palette, which is a much warmer, orangey brown color. And that's what drawing with these three colors reminds me of. The whole spectrum of color can be really intimidating and overwhelming, but just adding one color to your black and white comfort zone allows you to begin to explore color gradually by narrowing your choices to simply warm or cool, and it's much more approachable that way. And to illustrate what I'm talking about, take a look at the area of the temple in this drawing. Notice how it feels cooler simply because there is warmth above and below, and by comparison it's less warm, which is another way of saying cool. That's one of the things that's interesting to me about color. The moment you introduce just a little color, it opens up the whole temperature can of worms, whether you wanted it to or not. If you'd like to see a proper classic example for this medium, have a look at Rubens. He's probably the one most often associated with three-color drawing, or three crayons. I think he was actually using chalk. Really, really beautiful, and completely different than my approach. Very delicate. He really exploits the idea of implying that there's more color involved than just the three. I personally love to see all of the different techniques that artists use, and how they juggle value and color at the same time, and the choices that they make when they have just a few options. And at this point, I started wanting to not work on it anymore and call it finished. Not because I wasn't enjoying myself, but because I felt like it had a little life that I didn't want to render out of it. As of right now, my channel is only a couple of thousand subscribers away from 100k, and I just wanted to say thank you to all of you who have been with me over the years. I never thought I'd see a hundred thousand when I started uploading videos seven years ago, and I'm grateful. If you've made it this far, thank you for watching. And if you'd like to see tons more of this kind of content, have a look at my Patreon page. There's a link in the description if you're interested. Take care.