Trois Crayons

My artist's journey into portraiture has continued with more pencil and graphite work and then into the classical "trois crayons" (three pencil) method used by many renaissance artists.  I learned this first from a video by Gunhild Hope on sktchy art school (in the class 30 Faces / 30 Days) and have taken it forward in half a dozen drawing since and am really enjoying adding the touch of colour from the sanguine pencil and the toned paper.

The idea of trois crayons is that you do the main part of the sketching in sanguine pencil (sangine is the colour of dried blood) and then darken it where necessary with a black pencil and then add final highlight with a white pencil.

I obtained my materials from the Faber Castell Pitt Monochrome set of 12 items (available at great discounts from various art outlets). and I found that a good paper to use is the Strathmore Toned Tan.  I also tried Daler Rowney Ingres paper but founds it had too much "tooth" (it was too rough) and wouldn't give me the smooth drawing effect I was looking for - a shame, as its very high quality paper. 

This set has an interesting selection of materials.  The black and sanguine pencils are like pastel pencils but are oil-based - this means that they don't smudge as easily as an ordinary pastel pencil. The white pencil used for highlights is a normal pastel pencil.  In addition there is a brown pastel pencil , a charcoal pencil and a graphite 2B pencil (perfect for doing an initial sketch as its so easy to erase mistakes).  A putty eraser is include and also 4 square block chalk crayons - like Conté crayons, which are useful for large areas like backgrounds. Also, a 6B Graphite stick.

The only thing you need in addition to this is a couple of blending stumps (made of rolled paper and available cheaply on ebay).

Anyway, here are some drawings I've done with trois crayons.  These are all drawn from sktchy photographs.

I've really enjoyed doing these and I'd like to develop the technique further so I can do more detail in the drawings and get a more artistically refined result.

Waiting

Winter is well underway in England at the moment although being on the south coast we get quite a bit of warmer damp weather to break up those lovely frosty mornings.  For me, I find myself quite pleased to get to December.  It always seems quite a short month and near the end we have Christmas - with all its many reasons for enjoying it. 

This is a pencil portrait I did which I've called "Waiting", suggesting the season of Advent when we wait for the festival of Christmas. It comes from a photograph I found on Pexels - a resource of royalty-free photographs which I've only just discovered.  This photograph was taken by Engin Akyurt who is a brilliant photographer with many images contributed to Pexels.  Thank you Engin! 

Google Photos never ceases to amaze me.  I was down at the beach last week and took a photo with my phone of the waves crashing on the cliffs.  A couple of days later, Google Photos gave me a notification that it had done something with the photo and when I looked at it I saw that they'd transformed it into something really nice by bringing out the colours in it and making it really sing. 

And finally, here's one more drawing I did last week - the model was Rick from sktchy. 

The sktchy app

Well, having had a major birthday last month (one ending in zero) I finally got hold of an iPad - I've resisted all things Apple for a long time now, but I've had to admit that when it comes to art apps, its hard to beat.  In particular I wanted the sktchy app which presents you with a portrait photograph every morning for you to draw or paint.  I also wanted ProCreate - perhaps the best digital drawing app.  Neither of these apps are available on Android tablets or phones. 

I've loved using sktchy and have done a number of drawings from it in the last couple of weeks.  We went away last weekend for a couple of nights in the seaside town of Hastings, just up the coast from where we live. I enjoyed getting up early in the mornings and immediately looking up the portrait photograph of the day and trying to produce something on paper to do it justice.  Here are a few of my efforts.

Hastings itself is an interesting place with quite a few artists working in the town and a prestigious gallery called the Hastings Contemporary.  We didn't have time to visit but I would have liked to have seen the current exhibition by illustrator and cartoonist Quentin Blake.  

We stayed in a really nice apartment on the edge of the Country Park.  We saw a green woodpecker and a greater spotted woodpecker in the tree outside our apartment and a pair of badgers came around at night looking for food.   

The weekend was finished off by us replacing our elderly Vauxhall with a new(ish) car - a Citroen this time which is a treat to drive with all its various gizmos.  It makes me realise quite how old our Vauxhall was and how cars have moved on in recent years.