Posted on

How to Find Your Next Subject

Let’s take a look at what some might call the most important aspect of drawing: How to find your next subject.

This might seem like an odd topic, but it isn’t really. Sooner or later, every artist finds themselves drawing a blank when it comes to choosing something to draw. If you haven’t reached that point yet, you will. So what are your options when it happens to you?

How to Find Your Next Subject

Most of us have favorite subjects. Horses and landscapes are mine. But every once in a while, I want to draw something different.

You’re probably the same way.

Or maybe you’ve never settled on a favorite subject, but enjoy drawing all sorts of things.

In either case, you might finish one drawing and find yourself undecided about your next subject. What should you do? Where should you look?

Here are just a few ideas.

How to Find Your Next Subject

Look at the Big Picture

Keep an eye on the big picture. Landscapes are great for this. They’re so wide and varied. They change from day to day and sometimes hour to hour.

But they’re not the only place where you should look at the big picture. If you like to draw cats, for example, stop looking at individual cats and consider the pride. This is especially helpful for portrait artists. Focusing on a group of cats instead of individual cats gives you a totally different perspective on your subject.

Find Your Next Subject inside the Big Picture

Also be aware that your subject may be a very small part of the big picture.

Remember the cat example from the previous paragraphs? Zooming in can be as helpful as zooming out.

Rather than considering a traditional cat portrait like this, why not draw just part of the cat? Maybe just the eye, or nose, or an interesting part of the fur coloring.

That up-close-and-personal perspective may present your subject in a brand new way.

What’s on Your Desk (or Easel)?

Still stuck? Take a look around your desk, easel, studio, or work space. What’s lying around waiting to be used?

Once when I was stuck for something to draw, I looked around my work space and found a stone I’d collected at some point. I drew that stone and published a short tutorial about it.

I’ve also sketched my pencil sharpener, my computer mouse, and parts of plants.

Review Your Photo Collection

I take a lot of pictures because I enjoy photography as much as drawing. So when I find myself wondering what to draw next, I sometimes go back to those collections of photos to see what might catch my attention.

You don’t take pictures? Now is the time to start. You don’t need expensive camera equipment to start. If you have a smart phone, use it!

Figure out a filing system for the photos (I file by subject) so you can easily find images, and you’re golden!

Look for the Ordinary

One day, I had a cup of coffee sitting on the table between me and the sunlight coming through a small window. Steam rose from the coffee and looked so artistic, I took some photos. There might be something there to use for a drawing. I hope so. The thought of a drawing like that is rather exciting.

So don’t automatically rule the ordinary. There are artists who build their life’s work around stunning drawings of ordinary things. Why not you?

How to Find Your Next Subject

Final Tips to Help You Find Your Next Subject

When searching for something to draw, I’ve identified two keys to keep in mind.

Don’t rule anything out at a glance.

Look for the thing that attracts your glance repeatedly.

What makes a subject interesting as a drawing or sketch has as much to do with how you see it and choose to draw it as with it’s innate qualities.

So take a look around and see what’s available.

Then take a little time to sketch it. You might be surprised at the results!

Ask Carrie a Question
Posted on

Do You Want More Great Colored Pencil Articles?

Do you love the content on this blog? Do you wish there was a way to get more great colored pencil articles?

If you answered “yes” to those two questions, have you subscribed to Carrie’s weekly newsletter?

What’s in the Newsletter

The newsletter includes a Featured Post and a Forgotten Favorite post, and links to all the content published here on this blog each week.

You also get a weekly colored pencil tip, and the opportunity to participate in fun and informative reader surveys.

Subscribers can sign up for special offers and new product news, and studio news.

New Exclusive Colored Pencil Articles

The newsletter now also includes an article written specifically for newsletter subscribers. Subscribers even have a voice in deciding topics for those articles.

The current series covers the basics for artists new to colored pencils, including topics such as layering, blending, drawing paper basics, and basic information about colored pencils.

Colored Pencil Articles - Newsletter Sample

Each article also includes links to published blog posts on the same topics, so readers can dive a little deeper.

How Much Does All This Cost?

Absolutely nothing!

That’s right. The weekly newsletter is free! All you have to do is sign up, confirm your subscription, and wait for the next issue to land in your inbox.

The newsletter publishes every Saturday. Read it in your email program or browser.

And if you find it doesn’t meet your colored pencil needs, it’s easy to unsubscribe, no questions asked.

Does that sound good?

Then click here to subscribe and start getting the weekly newsletter this week!

Sign up for Carrie’s free, weekly newsletter and get notification of new articles like this one.

Posted on

Top 10 Art Tutorials of the Decade on EmptyEasel

It’s my delight to share a “guest post” today by sharing today’s EmptyEasel newsletter, The Top 10 Art Tutorials of the Decade on EmptyEasel.

I’ve been a subscriber to the EmptyEasel newsletter since 2012. I’ve also been writing for EmptyEasel since 2012, and that’s why I’m sharing today’s newsletter.

The EmptyEasel editor compiled a list of the most popular tutorials over the last ten years, and I wrote three of them! What’s more, one of them is about colored pencil!

So I asked for (and received) permission to share this list with you.

The Top 10 Art Tutorials of the Decade on EmptyEasel

Whether you use only colored pencils or enjoy working with other media, there’s sure to be something you’ll want to read.

The Top 10 Art Tutorials of the Decade on EmptyEasel

2010 – 10 Steps for Creating a Successful Business from Your Art
This post by Padraig McCaul is a straightforward roadmap to building an art business from the ground up. (And it’s so good, we keep updating it each year.)

2011 – 8 Creative Ways to Add Abstract Texture to Your Next Painting
Pure fun. Get in there and get messy!

2012 – How to Blend Colored Pencil Drawings with Rubbing Alcohol
Our Pinterest feed blew up over this one. It’s a legitimately “painterly” technique to use with colored pencils.*

2013 – How to Paint Oil Portraits from Photographs
Brandi Bowman is an excellent painter and teacher—and if you like this tutorial, here are the rest of her tutorials via Google.

2014 – A Beginner’s Guide to Encaustic Art and Painting with Wax
Another great teacher and painter, Kellie Day, with a fun look at encaustic art!

2015 – How to Draw Perfect, Luminous Clouds with Graphite Pencils
One of the best cloud-drawing tutorials I’ve found anywhere.*

2016 – How to Draw a Portrait in Three Quarter View
This 9-part series takes you through the classical method for portrait drawing.

2017 – What are the Advantages (or Disadvantages) of Drawing?
After seeing this search term appear over and over in our visitor logs, Carrie Lewis answered this question in 2017.*

2018 – 7 Tips for Starting a Sketching Habit
Another one of our most-pinned articles on Pinterest!

2019 – 3 Oil Painting Rules You MUST Understand & Follow
A foundational article for new oil painters.

2020 – 7 YouTube Art Channels that EVERY Artist will Enjoy
Kick back and relax with even more tutorials on YouTube, ranging from pure enjoyment to detailed instruction!

And there you have it. The ten most popular tutorials on EmptyEasel.

I hope you’ll take the time to visit the EmptyEasel website. It’s a great clearing house for all types of art news, tutorials, business articles and more. The newsletter is sent out once a week and is free of charge.

It’s easy to subscribe too, so give yourself an early Christmas gift and sign up. Just visit the EmptyEasel website and fill in the subscription popup!

Posted on

Basic Composition for Beginners

New readers are always coming to this blog, just like new artists are always finding colored pencils. For those of you who have been drawing for some time, allow me to talk about the basics of composition for beginners.

Even if you’ve been making art for a while, it’s always worth reviewing the basics!

Basic Composition for Beginners

Artists can talk about composition for hours. How it works. Why it works. The rules that make it work. That’s not the purpose of this article.

You don’t have to know everything about composition in order to use it any more than you need to everything about your car to drive it. But you do need to understand at least a few basics.

That IS the purpose of this article. So I’m beginning with a basic definition.

What Is Composition?

When used as an art term, the word “composition” refers to the way a drawing or painting is arranged. It’s the things you chose to put into a drawing (and leave out of the drawing.) It’s the way you arrange those things within your drawing.

And it’s the sizes, colors and values of those things as they compare with one another.

This design very simple design has a composition. I decided what shapes to use, where to put each shape, what color to make it, and what size to make it. I also decided which shapes to put in front and which ones to put in back. All of those decisions are composition decisions.

Basics of Composition with a simple, graphic design.

You might be thinking, “But that’s just a bunch of shapes. What does it have to do with a portrait or a landscape?”

Short answer? Everything!

But lets start with the easiest reason.

Why Size is Important

If you have several objects that are all the same, but you make them different sizes, the largest shape looks closest. The smallest shape looks the most distant, with all the others in between.

Of these three purple triangles, which one looks the closest? The largest one, right?

Change those triangles to trees, and the same principle is true.

No matter how many trees you add, the smallest ones always look the most distant. It doesn’t even matter if they’re different kinds of trees.

I put together three different types of trees at different size and—wa-la—I have a simple landscape!

Basics of Composition - A More Complex Composition

A Couple of Other Principles of Composition

The illustration above also illustrated a couple of other principles of basic composition beginners need to learn.

Overlapping to create depth

When you overlap objects in a drawing, you create the illusion of distance, of space. The object that’s not overlapped by anything else is the object that’s closest. The more an object is overlapped by other objects, the further into the background it is.

In this drawing, the weeds are the closest so they overlap everything else. The sky is the most distant, so everything else overlaps it; even the rainy clouds overlap the sky.

The Basics of Composition for Beginners

Using value and color to show distance

The hills in the drawing above are different values of gray. The lighter the gray, the more distant the hill looks.

But even the closest hill is still lighter than the brown hill just beyond the weeds, so the brown hill appears to be a lot closer than the nearest (darkest) gray hill.

The visual path

One is something called a visual path. The visual path in a drawing or painting is the path a viewer’s eye travels through a picture. Most of the time, you want your viewer to look at the center of interest first. In an animal portrait, that’s most likely going to be the eye.

In a landscape, it’s the main subject. The star of the drawing.

But you want viewers to look at the other things, too. The supporting cast, if you want to think of it that way. That’s what a visual path is.

Let’s look at an actual landscape drawing.

The Basics of Composition for Beginners

The center of interest in this piece is the large group of trees. That’s the star. The other trees, the grassy meadow, and even the sky are all supporting actors. They’re important because they showcase the center of interest. They give it a place to be.

But they’re not as important as the center of interest.

The way they’re positioned in relation to one another leads your eye from the big trees, to the smaller tree at the left, then to the still smaller trees on the right.

The meadow is brightest around the center of interest so it contrasts with the center of interest, drawing attention. Those are all subtle cues.

The dirt path is a more obvious cue. It enters the picture at the bottom, winds it’s way through the drawing, and disappears near the big trees. I deliberately put in a path leading back to the tree to lead a viewer’s eye to the place where I wanted viewers to spend the most time.

Getting Beyond the Basics of Composition for Beginners

What I’ve described in this post are the most basic of the compositional basics; the things new artists should learn first. There’s a lot more to composition than these, though, so I encourage you to continue exploring composition no matter how long you’ve been drawing.

Sign up for Carrie’s free, weekly newsletter and get notification of new articles like this one.

Posted on

How to Decide When a Drawing is Finished

Is there a “works-every-time” way to decide when a drawing is finished?

How I wish there was! The truth is that there is no such method because every artist creates for a different reason. Many times, there are also reasons for individual drawings. I do portraits for a different reason (and with different goals) than landscape drawings.

But I’ll share a few basic guidelines to help you better decide when your drawings are finished.

How to Decide When a Drawing is Finished

Your Drawing Matches Your Expectation

Every drawing starts with an expectation. You see a finished piece in your imagination, maybe. Or you see something you simply must draw.

You also prefer creating a certain type of art. Realism, for example, or impressionism. Perhaps your style leans more toward illustration than fine art. When you know the type of art you want to create, it’s easy to know when a drawing succeeds.

If you’re like me, you also start each drawing with a specific expectation, and you know when your drawing meets that expectation.

The drawing below is not the type of art I usually make, but I had a specific purpose for it. I wanted to use one or two colors of watercolor pencil to draw trees in fog. Even though I didn’t draw a ton of detail (which I usually do,) I knew what I wanted it to look like. I knew, in other words, when it was finished.

How to Decide When a Drawing is Finished by knowing how you want it to look before you start.

You Don’t Know What Else to Do With the Drawing

Even the most experienced artist reaches this point with some drawings. You have the feeling the drawing needs something more, but you don’t know what it is.

Or you know what’s needed, but you know how to do it.

In either case, I’ve discovered over the years that it’s best to consider such a drawing finished. I learn more by doing another drawing than by fiddling with the current drawing.

Or worse, setting that drawing aside until I have the skill to finish it. What usually happens is that I don’t work on the current drawing and I don’t work on a new drawing. Lose-lose!

Here’s a drawing I really like. But it has problems I didn’t know how to correct when I finished it years ago. The main problem is the color of the horse. The hair is way too orange. But back then, I had neither the knowledge nor the skills to correct the hair color.

If the drawing is for yourself, you can go back later and use newly acquired skills (or supplies) on it. If it’s a portrait, the best thing to do is finish it and send it out for customer approval.

Do you have to go back and correct old drawings? No. Keeping them as they are gives you a beautiful timeline of your art.

But there’s no reason you can’t redo it if you really want to.

You’re Satisfied with the Drawing

If you like what you’ve done, then it’s time to sign it and start a new drawing.

Here’s a drawing from decades ago. I loved the pony when it saw it at a sale, and I loved the reference photo. I loved the finished drawing, too.

Years later, it still looks complete, but I now see problem areas. That’s not bad; it’s a sign of progress in skill level.

Ignore potential technical problem when a drawing satisfies you. No matter how skilled you become with colored pencils, there’s always room for improvement. So take those successes as they come, then move on to the next drawing.

Does that mean you ignore technical problems all the time? Not at all.

But it does mean that if a drawing meets expectation overall, work on technical problems in the next drawing. Don’t fuss over them in this drawing.

Those are Three Ways to Decide When a Drawing is Finished.

There are other ways, as well. Time limitations, for example. Work on a drawing for fifteen minutes, an hour, a day, or a week. The drawing is finished when the time is up. Timed drawing is great for sketching, practicing, or just having fun with art.

Every artist has their own guidelines. Those of us who have been drawing a while know almost by instinct when a drawing is finished and when we might be able to push a bit further.

If you’re new to colored pencils, or haven’t been drawing very long, I hope the three guidelines I shared above help you finish more drawings.

Would you like more in-depth information on this topic? Read How to Know When a Drawing is Finished here for tips on analyzing specific drawings.

Sign up for Carrie’s free, weekly newsletter and get notification of new articles like this one.

Posted on

CP Magic November 2020 is Here!

CP Magic November 2020 is now available and waiting to inform, entertain, and inspire you!

CP Magic November 2020 with featured artist Cathy Antkes Choyce

What’s in CP Magic November 2020

Featured Artist

Virginia artist Cathy Antkes Choyce is the featured artist. Cathy is primarily a portrait artist, but is also expanding into gallery art and teaching. She specializes in pet and animal portraits, but her “full scene” images are filled with eye candy in both composition and detail.

Cathy talks about her artistic journey, the motivations for her stunning equine, canine, and fox art, and the new directions her art has taken her. If you’re a beginning portrait artist, or if you want to become a portrait artist, she has great advice to get you off to a fast start.

Cathy’s tutorial features the wily fox in beautiful close up. It’s a beautiful blend of colored pencil work on the fox, and pan pastel work in the background. If you’ve ever wanted a closer look at mixing these two media, you don’t want to miss this tutorial.

The Great Art Adventure

With all great adventures come a variety of obstacles. Some are obvious and some are not. Those less obvious obstacles often catch us by surprise if we’re not careful. This month, Carrie talks about one of the least often recognized obstacles facing artists on a great art adventure.

CP Clinic

With the end of the year rapidly approaching, many artists are starting to think about goal setting. Did you know that not every way of tracking goals works for every artist? Did you even know there was more than one way to track goals?

Carrie takes a break from the more technical aspects of colored pencil art to share her thoughts on goal setting and goal tracking.

Also in CP Magic November 2020

Ask Carrie

Featured Photo

About CP Magic

CP Magic is a monthly digital publication written by a colored pencil artist—yours truly—for colored pencil artists at all levels. That’s you!

Each month features an artist interview and tutorial so you can meet the artist and see how they work. Other columns include the Great Art Adventure, CP Clinic, a featured photo, and more.

Get your copy of CP Magic November 2020 today.

Posted on

Can Studio Lighting be Too Bright?

A few weeks ago, I talked about ways to light your art studio. One thing I didn’t mention in that post was the brightness of the lights you use. So today I want to answer the question, can studio lighting be too bright, and share some of the reasons that’s important.

Can Studio Lighting be Too Bright?

How the Brightness of Light is Measured

The brightness of light is measured by something called the Kelvin Color Temperature rating. The color rating is a four-digit number ending in the letter K, and ranging from low to high. The higher the number, the brighter the light.

Natural sunlight on a clear day is about 5,000K and is about as bright as light gets.

The Kelvin scale also reflects the color of the light. The higher the rating, the whiter the light. Light rated lower on the Kelvin scale is more yellow. A 5000K bulb produces whiter light than a 2700K bulb.

So those sulfur street lights that used to be so popular are quite low on the Kelvin scale, while the white LED street lights now in popular use have a higher rating.

As a point of reference, a standard household fluorescent is 3500K.

Can Studio Lighting be Too Bright?

The brightness of your lighting affects the look of your work. Yes, bright is good, but it turns out there is such a thing as too bright. Here are a couple of reasons why.

The Brightness of Your Lighting Affects Your Color Choices.

When studio lighting is too bright, it makes your paper look brighter, and that makes all the colors you put on the paper look brighter. The natural response is choosing darker colors so they look right as you work on them.

The problem is that when you see the artwork in normal lighting, then all those colors appear as they really are. That medium blue that looked perfect under bright light is suddenly a bit drab in normal lighting.

Of course that applies to all the colors you chose, with the end result that your drawings look subdued.

And all because your studio light was too bright.

Lighting that’s Too Bright Also Affects How You See and Draw Values

What applies to color applies to values, too. Even for under drawings drawn in a single color, working under light that’s too bright influences the darkness of the values. Shadows become too dark and highlights may disappear altogether.

It’s very difficult to make dark values lighter with colored pencil. It’s also difficult to replace highlights once you’ve lost them, so getting too dark early in a drawing makes making adjustments later on difficult.

Is Your Studio Lighting Too Bright?

It’s easy to tell. Display several finished pieces so you can see them all together. Are they darker than you intended? If most of those pieces look darker than you prefer, then it’s possible your studio lighting is too bright.

Comparing finished pieces seen in normal lighting to the original reference photo is also helpful. If the finished piece is drab or dark when compared to the reference photo when you view both in normal lighting, then chances are your studio is too brightly lighted.

There’s a lot more to consider when it comes to properly lighting your studio.

You also need to consider the color of the lighting, as well as the position and angle of the lighting relative to your drawing surface.

But most of us think first about brightness and most of us think that brighter is better.

So I hope I’ve given you helpful information before you rush out and buy the brightest light you can find!

Sign up for Carrie’s free, weekly newsletter and get notification of new articles like this one.

Posted on

Ask Me A Question about Colored Pencils

Ask me a question. Any question (so long as it’s related to colored pencils.) Nothing is off the table.

November is just around the corner, so December isn’t far behind. December has been the perfect month for answering reader questions in the past and I’m planning another Q&A month this December.

So now is the perfect time to ask for your questions!

Ask me a question

Creating art can be a frustrating and painful process.

Colored pencils are, by their nature, capable of causing artists a seemingly endless amount of creative pain.

For me, it’s the time it takes to create even small drawings. I love the medium and I love the way a well-done colored pencil drawing looks. But it takes so much time!

What about you?

When it comes to colored pencils, colored pencil art, or any part of the process, what gives you the most trouble?

Questions can cover any method, material, or subject you like. Drawing. Shading. Blending. Preserving finished work, marketing, sales, or dealing with customers and clients.

If you would like more in-depth information on a topic we’ve already talked about, let me know that, too.

If you’re having more trouble with the artist’s life in general than with colored pencils specifically, ask about that, too. Living the life of an artist—even a hobby artist—is about a lot more than just drawing.

Ask Me a Question

Still stuck? Don’t know how to put your question into an email? Here are a couple of tips.

Tell me what frustrates you most about colored pencil drawing. Chances are good that others share the same frustration, and that I will share it—or have shared it—in the past.

Or tell me what you most want help with. You won’t be alone. Others want help with the same thing.

Email your question.

Ask Me a Question Sign

Whatever your question, now’s the time to ask it!

Just send me an email. I’ll “unwrap” as many of the answers in December as possible! If we run out of month before we run out of answers for questions, I’ll continue answering questions in future posts.

By the way, if you’ve asked a question in the past, but have yet to see an answer, ask it again. Things do have a tendency to fall through the cracks upon occasion.

Are you ready to ask me a question? I’m ready to read—and answer—it!

Ask Carrie A Question about Colored Pencils.

    By using this form you agree with the storage and handling of your data by this website.

    Posted on

    Why I’m Leaving Social Media

    After much thought, soul-searching, and input from loyal readers, I’ve decided it’s time to do more than just think about leaving social media.

    It’s time to act.

    Why I'm Leaving Social Media

    Before I do that, though, I want to answer the questions most likely to arise at this news.

    Why are you leaving social media?

    From my first Twitter account years ago, my primary goal has been promoting this blog. I followed the advice of bloggers and marketers who said I must be active on social media in order to direct traffic to this blog.

    So that’s what I did.

    That goal has motivated every subsequent decision about the venues I’ve chosen, the ways I’ve used those media outlets, and how I’ve interacted with followers through social media, this blog, and my weekly newsletter.

    And the response has been good in some ways.

    The problem is that although a lot of people follow me or like me, very few actually make the leap to the blog. That means that the return on investment of time, creativity, and persistence has been very small.

    Almost nothing.

    Putting that time into blog posts or the weekly newsletter would provide more and better content to you as a reader.

    Content on the blog is easier for you to find, and much easier to update than content on social media.

    I also have control over what I publish and how long it stays published. No banned posts. Nothing marked as spam by an unseen authority.

    Besides, as a writer as well as an artist, I’ve just always been more comfortable blogging than trying work around the limitations of social media.

    So it makes sense to stop doing what isn’t working so I can put more time and energy into what is working.

    Which social media accounts are you closing?

    I closed my Twitter account in August 2020.

    My Pinterest account has also been deactivated.

    As of this post, I’ll no longer be using actively marketing on Facebook. I will maintain my art page for the foreseeable future and blog posts will continue to publish automatically to Facebook.

    But further participation will be limited to when I have time or something of interest to followers and readers.

    leaving social media

    I have yet to make a decision about YouTube. I’ve never posted a video on YouTube, though I hoped to do so at one time.

    I’m also undecided about MeWe. My gut instinct is to quit everything cold turkey, but there is the colored pencil group at MeWe and I have been trying to generate followers on MeWe. It’s a relatively new platform, however, and developing traction there has been a time-consuming effort.

    How much better would the blog be if those daily posts were written for all readers and posted here?

    Or published in the weekly newsletter?

    But I follow you on social media? What do I do now?

    First of all, thank you if you’ve been following me anywhere. I do appreciate you!

    The best option is to sign up for my free weekly newsletter. That way, you’ll get news about the latest posts, new products, and tips and tools to help you make the kind of colored pencil art you want to make.

    If you’re a follower on any of the outlets I’m about to close and you want to continue to hear from me, sign up for the free newsletter and you won’t miss a thing.

    How can I connect with you?

    The best way to connect with me has always been by email through the contact page on this blog. I answer every email I get as quickly as possible and email correspondence comes directly to your inbox.

    If you have questions or comments about specific posts, I encourage you to share them in the comment section for that post. I get notifications about new comments and respond to those too, usually within 24 hours or less.

    And of course there’s the newsletter.

    On the Search for Alternatives

    My leaving social media doesn’t mean I’m no longer interested in connecting with you. There are alternatives to social media. At present, the most intriguing from my point of view is a member forum. There are ways to host a forum on this blog and for many of us, that may be the best current option.

    But there is much to consider and investigate before any such decision is made.

    Thank you again for your participation on social media if you have followed me on any of the venues mentioned above. I do appreciate you and your very kind support.

    Please share your thoughts and comments below or contact me by email.

    Have an idea for an alternative way we can connect and chat? I’d be happy to hear about that, too!

    In the meantime, thank you for your very kind support and loyal readership.

    Best wishes,

    Carrie

    Posted on

    Draw on Suede Board with Prismacolor

    If you’ve wanted to draw on suede board, but have been waiting for just the right tutorial, your wait is over.

    Peggy Osborne walks you step-by-step through her drawing process using only 21 Prismacolor colors on suede board.

    Draw on suede board with Peggy Osborne's new tutorial.

    Draw on Suede Board with Peggy Osborne

    Peggy knows working on suede mat board can be a challenge. She also knows the end result can be well worth the effort. She shares tips for working on suede board and talks about the characteristics that turned her into a huge suede board fan.

    Peggy’s model is a stunningly beautiful long-haired German shepherd; the perfect subject for suede board. Peggy shows you how to draw long and short hair, a wet looking nose, and shining eyes, all on suede board.

    You’ll learn valuable skills like layering and blending, using different types of pencil strokes to create textures, and how to lift color to add details. Peggy also shares a few tips for working on suede board, as well as a few things that work on traditional paper but are big no-nos when you draw on suede board.

    The tutorial includes a full supply list, a color chart so you can match colors if you don’t have Prismacolor pencils, and a line drawing. Download it and start this delightful project today.

    Are You Ready to Draw on Suede Board?

    This tutorial is perfect if you’ve never before tried suede board but are ready to try it. You can’t do better than Peggy’s easy-to-read and follow instructions and beautiful illustrations.

    And if you’re just looking for a new project to draw, then why not give this tutorial a try?

    Click here to buy your copy of Peggy’s Long Haired German Shepherd tutorial.

    About Peggy Osborne

    See more of Peggy’s work at Pet Portraits by Peggy. You can also meet Peggy in the January issue of CP Magic.

    Peggy is an accomplished self-taught artist living in Canada specializing in creating beautiful realistic portraits of pets and family members. She’s had an on going love affair with colored pencils, loving their simplicity, for as long as she can remember.

    She started out using graphite pencil so it was an easy transition to carry on with colored pencils. Love of animals and art go hand in hand. Peggy is in awe of what can be accomplished with colored pencils.

    Want to see a free sample of Peggy’s dog portrait tutorials and writing style first? Read How to Draw a Golden Retriever on this blog.