Raising the bar a little

Ok, I'm totally out of my Comfort Zone with this one . As you can probably tell from my Flickr account I'm not a portrait artist by any means! However, I do feel like a little change from painting landscapes once in  a while and I'm quite happy with how this turned out.

I started with a basic outline in pencil and kept restating lines until it looked right. I then used a Pentel BrushPen for the line drawing.

Once this was done I erased the pencil marks and then left it all for a little while. I couldn't decide whether or not to add colour but I couldn't resist in the end and so out came the watercolours.

I used Yellow Ochre  and Cadmium Red for the skin tones with a little Ultramarine for the shadows. For the hair I used Cadmium Yellow for the light values, a Yellow Ochre and Burnt Umber Mix for the middle values and Burnt Umber for the dark values. I added a little coloured pencil in places after it had all thoroughly dried.

I've been trying various paper, media and techniques today and this was the result of that exercise.

Hope you have all had a good Easter :-)