"Three is company" - first step (~5 minutes in)

Sommer recently asked: "Do you lay down your idea on the toned paper with a regular drawing pencil first or do you use the red/white/charcoal pencils from the beginning?"

I thought I'd go into that a bit, and this turned into a full early-stages musing session, so here goes!

Coloured pencil on toned paper is a great way for me to do complex, whimsical or emotional scenes that look great without committing me to two weeks of work, as most of my watercolours do (mainly because I can rarely paint more than an hour a day these days, so these things stretch endlessly). 

A full scene requires a bit more thought than a quick portrait sketch. I had the composition thought out over the last few days (a lot of my thumbnailing takes place theoretically, which is a bad habit, but since I spend most of my idle time each day mentally layouting stuff, I often get compositions right on my first attempt).

 I find that one of the weirdly most difficult movements to capture is walking. After trying this scene without ref, I realised I needed some of that, so I googled for "walking" (in several languages) but most of the photos that came up were of people seen from behind. Googling for the right images can be a real challenge, and sometimes the search keywords that yield the best results are quite funny and take a bit of try and error. In this case, the single best keyword turned out to be "sponsored walk". I got loads of (British) school kids in uniforms spiritedly bouncing along, photographed from the front, which was perfect for this piece. 

I then gave myself less than a minute to capture each pose. That often does the trick already; seeing where and how the body shifts with the movement, keeping it loose so I can fix things later while staying far away from the reference photo*. Keeping it loose also means that I can erase the coloured pencil. I have a tendency to sketch very heavily, and in order to keep myself from doing that, I grip the pencil near the butt end, which forces me to stay light and loose.

*There have been a few ugly run-ins in the art community recently over recognisable reference photos in finished artwork, so I have decided to get way clear of lightboxing again, which I'd started doing during the SmArt School class. I've been lightboxing occasionally since then, but I'd never really liked the results, so it didn't take much persuasion to stop doing it.