House Portrait Sketch

About 6x8", across the spread of a Stillman & Birn Epsilon hardbound book

Caran d'Ache Supracolor Soft Ivory Black

This is a first compositional sketch for a house portrait commission. The client wants a painting that varies pretty significantly from the photos I was sent. In these situations, I like to be sure I'm on the same page with the client, so I do some preliminary sketches and color studies to find out if this is the direction the client wants for the piece. It always results in a very happy ending to work this way!

I really love working with these Supracolor Soft pencils for studies like this. I haven't pulled any of them out for quite some time, and I forgot how much fun they are! The S&B Epsilon surface is such a friendly support for pencil work. A wet brush with these pencils unifies the darks, and they wash beautifully. They don't erase well, but for preliminary work, I don't mind some stray lines here and there. For a more finished piece, I'd have made my initial marks in graphite, then switched over to the Supracolor when my lines were secure.

If you're concerned about lightfastness when using colored pencils/watercolor pencils (as I am), you can check out this PDF brochure, which contains lightfastness information for the individual pencils, and select ones from open stock with excellent ratings (***).

Deer Jawbone

Stillman and Birn Epsilon 5.5x8.5" hardbound sketchbook

Background prepared with diluted fluid acrylics

Drawing done with Prismacolor Pencils

Border and lettering done with an Eversharp Symphony Fine point fountain pen and 

Private Reserve Copper Burst ink.

While out walking last weekend, my husband and I came upon an area covered with tan and gray fur. There in the middle were both jawbones from a deer that must have fallen victim to a pack of coyotes or some other wild animals. It was pretty creepy, but wow, what a sketching subject! I had to bring this back to the studio. Colored pencils seemed an ideal medium for some of the details and subtle coloring of the subject.

Part V of Stillman and Birn Alpha Review --- Working on the White Paper

Early on in my Stillman & Birn Alpha review series, many viewers were asking, "What if I only work on white paper?" I am hoping that this installment of the review will be helpful to those of you who are wondering about the Alpha paper's performance with wet and dry media directly on the white paper, with no toning or other preparation of the surface. (If you have not seen the previous installments of this review series, click here to go to Part I. Each post will link you to the next post in the series.)

To help you see the differences in the various Stillman and Birn papers with dry media, I cut a strip of each type of their paper, made some swatches on them with Prismacolor Black colored pencil, Wolff's 6B Carbon Pencil, and brown ink (drawn with a fountain pen), and ink and wash, and glued them into my Alpha book. You can click the image below to get an up-close view.

My assessment is that for dry media like colored pencil, the S&B Epsilon book yields the greatest value range and smoothness of application. It's a plate smooth paper, so the pencils make fuller contact with the paper. The Alpha and Gamma papers, which have a little more tooth to them, don't cover quite as fully, but still perform well. The Beta and Delta books show the most white in the swatches, since it's even more difficult than the Alpha to get into the tooth of the paper. Those uncovered areas (which I refer to as pinholes) reflect light, which translates as not being as dark a swatch. I did a colored pencil sketch on the Epsilon paper a few months ago, and was very impressed by that paper. The Prismacolor pencils loved the Epsilon surface, and my fountain pen glided across the paper like an ice skater. The Alpha actually does well with dry media, just not quite as well as the Epsilon, in my opinion.

You can see in the pen swatches above that all of the papers took a Medium nib fountain pen just fine, and did a fine job with the wash too, though there is a difference in the feel when using fountain pens with less tooth vs. more tooth. I've been using fountain pens a lot on the Alpha paper and it's great for both pen and wash and pen alone. I have never encountered bleed-through with any of my fountain pen inks.

Below is a watercolor and ink sketch that I did across a two page spread of an 8.5x11" Stillman & Birn Alpha Hardbound book. I have been very pleased with the brilliance of the watercolor on the Alpha paper. The paper is sized internally and externally, so the paint sits nicely on the surface. The vellum surface, as you can see here, does not present a problem for pens.

There is some very minimal buckling of the paper with the watercolor. It would bother me in a painting that I'm going to mat and frame, but in a sketchbook I kind of like it. It gives the paper character!

I turned the page of the sketch above and photographed the top of the reverse side of  the page that has most of the writing on it. If you look at the image below, you'll see that there is a very slight ghosting of the watercolor border, page title and text. Initially, I thought this would really bother me. But in practice, it does not. Once I work on the reverse side, I only notice it if I'm looking for it. However, it does show in photos. When you photograph or scan your work, you might encounter something like this (below) which is visible along with your image on that page.

There may be times when this is an important factor, and other times when it doesn't matter. My suggestion is to skip a page when you encounter a situation where it matters. This can either be done by sketching only on the right hand sides, (skipping each left side), or sketching across every other two page spread, leaving the back sides blank. All of the ink samples in this post were written back to back on the paper, and you can see that even with these ink tests, the opacity of the paper was not a problem!

All in all, the S&B Alpha Hardbound book impressed me. I threw a lot of different media at this book, turned pages into envelopes, removed the center spreads of the signatures, used multiple layers of acrylics, pastel ground, pastels, Cretacolor leads, inks, watercolor, gouache and pencil. The binding held together nice and tight, and I didn't find one situation where I couldn't "follow the paint" and do what I wanted to do. I would highly recommend this as a multi media book. Even though officially the book is good for "dry media and light washes," I was able to do much more with it without difficulty.

Twelve Minute Portrait Sketches

(Click image to enlarge.)
These sketches were done using Sepia and White Cretacolor leads. The faces are pretty small, and I found myself wishing I'd used Prismacolor pencils instead, which can be sharpened to finer points. Nevertheless, the Cretacolors worked okay, and I just kept sharpening them as best I could. I set a timer to quickly sketch the first one. That took 12 minutes, so I kept that time frame when I did the others.

The white on the left side is a sheet of glassine, which folds into the center of the book to protect the pages from one another when the book is closed. (Click here and then scroll down to see how to make a glassine storage envelope in your sketchbook.) I did try spraying with fixative, but the color still rubbed off easily. I'd have to really saturate it in order to avoid that, and I didn't want to lose my lights. Glassine seems to be the best solution for me in a sketchbook.

As reference material for the sketches, I used the book Facial Expressions by Mark Simon. It is intended mostly as a reference tool for animators. As such, most of the expressions in the thumbnail photos of the book are very exaggerated. Still, I find it a useful reference, and each person starts off with a few more normal-looking poses.

Tree Study

This tree study was sketched from my studio window with my Stillman and Birn 5.5x8.5" Alpha book. I used Caran d'Ache Supracolor II Soft pencils in Umber and White. I felt I needed to be able to go just a hair darker, so I added a Wolff's Carbon 6B pencil toward the end. These are all water soluble. I wanted to keep the water option open, but I decided I liked it the way it was, and only worked dry.

There is gold acylic paint added to the Sepia background color. You can see a bit of that shimmer where the light glare is in the photo. A little touch of that glow on the pages is a beautiful thing, but it's hard to capture in a photograph.

The little bit of white on the top left is a lifted-up sheet of glassine that I glued to the page to protect the pencil work, to keep it from smudging onto the facing page when the book is closed or somebody's leafing through the it. I realized that if I do more work in pencil, charcoal, or pastel (and I intend to), I'll need to have some small glassine sheets on hand to put over the work as I do it; otherwise some of those pieces would be ruined before I even got home from my sketching location. I can also use a sheet under my hand as I sketch with smudgy media, to prevent my hand from smearing the page. I went on an anti-smudge campaign!

Yep, I made an envelope as part of the book to store sheets of glassine. I keep a glue stick in my messenger bag with my sketching supplies, so gluing it in on location whenever necessary will now be very easy. To make this pocket, here's what I did:

1. I knew this would take up extra space in the book, so to avoid bulging, I went to the very last signature in the book, and carefully removed the center page spread, tearing down the middle and removing both sides.
2. I selected the two pages I planned to use to make each side of the pocket, and cut a semi-circle out of the top of the first page, to make it easier to remove the glassine. (To do that, I drew the arc, then put a cutting mat underneath the sheet, and cut it out with an xacto knive.)
3. Using one of the pieces of paper that I removed from the book, I made a one-inch wide "tape" the height of the page, and folded it lengthwise with a bone folder. I did the same for the width of the page. Holding those two so that they overlapped on the lower right corner at a right angle, I placed them on a cutting board and made a 45 degree cut through all four layers. That way, when glued into the book, there would be no overlapping, and they would lie flat.
4. I used a glue stick to coat the paper "tape" and the outside page edges, and glued it all together.
5. I cut a 16x20" sheet of glassine into eight, 5x8" pieces, which fit exactly into the little envelope holder.

Voila! It's worked perfectly. The only thing I'll add is that when you glue glassine onto the pages, it's better to glue it from the side than from the top. The page curls at the top and bottom, so it's easier to lift the glassine from the side than it is from the bottom.

Bits 'N Pieces

(Click image for a larger view of the sketch.)
A couple of weeks ago, my husband and I were out exploring at our place up in the Catskills. Buried under the leaves in the dirt, we found fragments of old cups and plates. They were so interesting, and some so beautiful, that I brought in some of the pieces to see if I could trace their origins. Today I pulled out one of the large plate pieces to sketch. I used Prismacolor pencils, which turned out to be a great choice in this 5.5x8.5" Stillman & Birn Epsilon book. The smooth surface proved perfect for colored pencil work.

Well, y'all know me by now, and it wasn't long before I was noticing that I had both old Berol Prismacolors and new Sanford Prismas. I had to do some color swatch tests too while I was at it to see if they were really the same. It turned out that of the ones I sampled, only the Marine Green was significantly different, with the Sanford having a more yellow-green appearance when compared to the more muted green of the Berol. I compared them dry as well as washed with a bit of Turpenoid on a Q tip.

The green ink is Noodler's Sequoia --- one of my favorites for ink and wash. "Bits 'N Pieces" was written with Noodler's Bulletproof Black in an Eversharp Symphony Flex fountain pen with a Fine nib.

Here's a photo of the piece of the plate, along with the sketch and some of the newer and older Prismacolors. (This one is also clickable to enlarge.)