Happy Easter everyone!
I’m working on a Labrador portrait today but I have another YouTube tutorial coming tomorrow :D. I’m going to be adding the voice over to that today.
One thing I wanted to talk about is the importance of contrast. I speak about this in every single one of my tutorials regardless of the medium I work in. This is what makes the difference when we are aiming towards a three dimensional look to our portraits.
To demonstrate this I have taken one of my Patreon tutorials of Tom the black and tan Cavalier King Charles. The one on the left is my finished portrait and on the right is the same drawing but I have reduced the contrast. Contrast is our values – darks and lights. Poor contrast like on the right makes black fur look dark grey and you can really see here how it makes Tom look flat.
I focus on contrast far more than exact colour because of how much values effect our finished portraits. Colour is important but if we spend hours on getting the exact colour and the contrast isn’t right then the colour won’t matter either. Even when I choose which of my pencils I should use for a colour in my reference photo I am thinking; do I need a light or dark version of that colour so that again falls down to contrast.
Colour selection is something I am asked a lot about so I focus heavily on this in my Patreon tutorials alongside contrast. I have a very simple method for selecting what colour I should be using and how I should mix that with my layers to get the colour I can see in my photograph.
My Giraffe pastel tutorial on Patreon is a great real time tutorial where I focus on contrast and colour. The left side I have done in black and white to show how to achieve
good contrast and the right side is colour based. For this side we implement all of the techniques we have learnt on the contrast left side and incorporate that into the colour selection process to achieve the right side of this portrait.
As always if you have any questions regarding this or anything art related feel free to ask =).
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