To me, my pet portraits are mostly technical exercises. They are fun for maintaining, sharpening, and challenging my skills in value, texture, color mixing, and media mixing. Because I am replicating a pre-existing picture, they put minimal demand on creative skills. The subject, composition, lighting, and most colors are already figured out for me. Really, the only creative choices I am making are how I chose to throw in bits of blues, greens, pinks, purples, and other non-fur colors. Today, I wanted to give a walk through on exactly how I make these portraits.
Of course, I need to start out with an outline. I use an HB pencil and block out large, basic circles, rectangles, and triangles before moving in to make smaller details. Besides drawing physical features of the animal, I also draw the borders for significant changes in value (for example, areas where there may be sudden transitions to dark shadows or harsh highlights). The outline is like a roadmap for the rest of the piece, and I want to do as much advance planning as I possibly can! However, I don’t bog myself down in outlines for very slight changes in value. For starters, that would make a huge mess of the outline. But also, I can produce such small variations with a slight increase or decrease in the pressure of my pencil when I’m in the shading stage. I only use outlines when the value shift is great enough for me to warrant switching to a different pencil altogether. To reference my previous example, if a midtone area suddenly shifts to an area of deep shadows, I will need to physically change my pencil, likely from something like a 3B to an 8B or 9B.
Speaking of values though, they follow the outline! I always use graphite pencils to make an underdrawing before adding color layers. I know it’s rather unorthodox, but I feel like having a layer solely dedicated to establishing some shadows helps eliminate extra, possibly risky work in the subsequent coloring stages. (I will touch on this more in a bit).
My brand of choice for graphite pencils is Derwent. For my pet portraits, I use their Graphic Soft line. The set runs from H to 9B, although I never use my H pencils. I am not particularly fond of hard pencils, and I find that even something as mildly hard as H produces too scratchy and permanent of a line for me. The only part of my pet portraits where a hard pencil could possibly be used for is the outline. But, as I mentioned earlier, for the outlines I prefer the slightly softer lead of an HB mechanical pencil.
It’s also somewhat uncommon for me to use the HB and B pencils as well. I mainly use 2B and 3B for light areas, 4B and 5B for midtones, 6B and 7B for shadows, and 8B and 9B for truly deep shadows. I prefer to use very light pressure with multiple layers as opposed to harder pressure with a single layer. I also use tiny, circular strokes. Working with such soft pencils does get messy, but I don’t pay attention to any smears that I make. They just get erased at the very end. I really try to make the values as thorough and accurate as possible. I always tell myself, when I am finished with the underdrawing, the piece should already look as if it could be called a finished piece.
My next step may also come across as a bit weird: I do a lot of erasing. Although using graphite does make a nice underdrawing for color to sit on top of, the graphite cannot do ALL of the shading and value work. Colored pencil is not very visible atop very dark layers of graphite, and so for darker areas of fur I still need to use darker colored pencils. I’ve had situations where I tried to apply color to relatively dark areas of graphite and the results did not look good at all. The colors appeared muddy, the graphite competed with the colored pencil in the layers above it, and overall the results were poor quality.
Anyways though, to make sure that my graphite layers are light enough for colored pencil to be easily visible atop, I erase a lot of the underdrawing. I would estimate that I make the underdrawing about 50% lighter before adding color. I use a Faber Castell kneaded eraser for this step. The eraser’s putty-like nature makes it easy to mold to any shape I need, such as a small tip for working around tiny details or a flat disc for lightening large swathes of values all at once. Faber Castell’s kneaded erasers in particular are very soft and easy to manipulate right out of the package.
On the other hand, I’ve found that most brands of kneaded eraser, like Artist Loft’s and General’s, are far too hard and difficult to manipulate. I have even tried wrapping these erasers in a plastic bag and relentlessly pounding them with a hammer, however, they were still too firm for my liking! Whenever I am working through this step, I am always reminded of the Spongebob episode Artist Unknown. There’s a scene where Spongebob shows his process for drawing a circle, which involves drawing a very realistic human face and then erasing it down to said circle. I can’t help but laugh, feeling like I work though a similar, albeit far less extreme, version of this in my pet portraits.
Once my underdrawing is adequately lightened, I use Faber Castell Polychromos pencils for coloring. These pencils are of medium firmness; they are hard enough to be sharpened to a point, but not too hard that they leave scratches in the paper. They have a buttery smooth texture. Like my value layering, I also use tiny circular strokes here and light pressure for colors.
I find that yellow is a good base color no matter what the actual fur color is, and so I always started with a pale yellow base. I then move in with a more vibrant yellow. After the yellows though, my choice of colors is of course going to change depending on the fur color. However, I always work from lighter colors to darker colors. It’s very easy to make a too light color darker, but it is quite difficult to make a too dark color lighter.
For white fur, I continue with a combination of tans, pale oranges, light blues, and pinks. Browns, reds, darker oranges, and midtone blues are used for shadows. Golden and brown furs follow quite a similar process, just with more thorough layering of the yellows, oranges, and reds to get much more saturated colors. And of course, the brown furs will use much more orange and red than the goldens. Fun fact, my white furred portraits actually start out with relatively yellow/orange fur that is then lightened.
For gray fur, I use the aforementioned colors as well as some greens and purples for some additional shadows. My pressure is still relatively light here, although it is definitely more firm than the pressure I use for white fur portraits.
Black fur is very challenging and definitely the most time-consuming fur to shade and color. It involves many many layers of numerous colors; virtually every color is used here: yellows, oranges, blues, greens, they are all layered into my depictions of black fur. Furthermore, due to how dark I need to get colors, I inevitably have to start using firmer pressure when coloring these portraits. I will prioritize distinguishing between black fur and then “deep black” fur.
Both of these types of fur are initially colored the same with the aforementioned variety of colors, however, the deep blacks are then aggressively burnished with black, indigo, royal purple, and dark red. Meanwhile, the regular blacks still have those colors layered over them, but this is done much less aggressively. I am rarely satisfied with the initial outcome of coloring black fur and so both my regular blacks and deep blacks will be tweaked with various colors. There’s also a chance I might make an area darker than I should have. For that, I just grab my kneaded eraser and gently work the area.
Besides coloring the fur, I am of course coloring eyes, tongues, colors, and any other non-fur parts. These usually go much more quickly than the fur due to the relatively small amount of space they occupy. After I am finished with my colored pencils, I erase all the pencil smears I have inevitably created on the piece.
But, I still have one last thing to do! I take a very fine tip paint brush and add very tiny highlights with white pain. These highlights are usually in the eyes but could also be on the nose. If the animal has white whiskers, I will also very carefully paint on the whiskers. It is MUCH easier to make the whiskers this way than trying to draw them on, as the paint can be applied directly on top of the colored pencil layer and does not have to actually compete with the colored pencil below it.
Now that the piece is done, I just sign it and then apply fixative. I use Grumbacher's workable matte fixative. It works well enough to prevent any smearing that may otherwise occur when the piece is handled and framed.
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