Every Day in May: Day 5 – White on Black

I managed to finish my last card for an illustratedatcs.com swap.  I was starting to get frantic because, again, I had signed up for too many swaps and taken a ton of requests.  Well, I can now cross one off the list.   *Ah*  That feels better.

This little portrait card is simply white colored pencil on black paper.   I’ve always been more likely to lift out whites on a paper covered with a ground of charcoal or graphite, so it was a challenge for me to create this drawing.   I made a similar one over the weekend.  So I had a better idea of what to do.

I created a rough map on the paper (lightly sketched in graphite)  so I could see where I would reserve the black paper for shadows.   Even though I knew where I thought the shadows would be I didn’t really know what the face would look like.  I then just moved around the paper starting with light layers of white pencil and shaping the face as I went.

At what seemed to be the midpoint, I made it a point to check the drawing in a mirror before going too far.  I wanted to make sure the features were balanced.    After that I continued to shape the face until I was ready to put in the highlights on the nose, forehead, and chin.   Then I pressed hard with the pencil marking more forcefully.

Well, that was day five.  Only 26 more days to go…