Working on the sky reflections in the lower right of the portrait.
The part I was working on when I took this shot is below and to the right of the sky-blue parts I’d completed. I don’t have a light blue pencil that is exactly the color I need, so I have to create those sky-reflection ripples by layering 4 different pencil colors. First I put in the basic shape of the ripple reflections with a very pale blue - it looks like white pencil in this pic. You can see where I’m outlining the shape of those sky-reflection ripples and then lightly filling them in. Thats the first pencil layer. Then I go over that lighter base with the lightest “sky-blue” pencil that Prismacolor makes, coloring harder and more solidly. That gets me pretty close to the color and tone (lightness/darkness) I want. Then I touch the surface of that lightly with two other blues that are slightly darker, one is a warm sky-blue (a touch of aqua), the other is a cool light blue (more of an “ice” blue). The first of those two gives it that nice sky-blue color (otherwise it would be too “white”), the cooler blue I use only in a few places to give shape to the ripples.
Photos taken with my phone in the studio don’t capture the subtlety of the colors. My next post will be a high-quality scan of the finished portrait.
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