Little Blue Dress

We have the Little Black Dress for grownups but the Little One likes her pink stuff. Today, she’s off to a dressy Teddy Bear event and since her friends will be showing up in pink, she’d like to buck the trend and see what it’s like to wear blue instead! Boys wear blue but so can girls, she cries. Now that’s a future feminist talking! So I decided to do a little colour pencil sketch about this. For this piece, I used Staedler’s Ergosoft and Caran D’ache Pablo coloured pencils.

Begin Directly with Coloured Pencil

Without using graphite pencil, I made a rough outline directly with coloured pencils. I wanted to see the difference it would make. Would it enhance the colours more? Give a more realistic picture without a black outline and having it all coloured in? How about using a different colour for the outline then. That’s why I had the idea to use red for the outfit from which I can trace over in blue and fill in. For the hair, I began using a darker shade of brown and then later go over it in various other shades for some dimension. And now about the eyes….

Using a Blender Pencil

Now why didn’t I even use this before in my work! Derwent makes this tool called Blender Pencil which looks like a pencil in fact. I combined light green and some browns. Why green, you may ask. Well actually I was told my brown eyes have a hint of green. And I was interested in experimenting to see how I could achieve this effect. It’s such a wonderful blending tool which I was introduced to when I attended a Colour therapy workshop last summer. I’ll definitely be using it more often!

Now if you want a close up of the eyes, here it is

Colour with Dimension

I’m keen on practicing with shading and highlighting techniques. Although I don’t tend to use it in my illustrations, I was this time in the mood to try especially since I happened to be using pencils. Most anime-type illustrations and even traditional Japanese art don’t use this technique so I thought it would be an interesting challenge. I thus continued colouring away with the aim to make Little One appear more dimensional. I used some purple to shade the cute little blue dress. Having had initially outlined it in red certainly helped. And with the hair, I applied some strokes of blue along with various brown tones to reflect from the dress. The sorts of things I picked up from my weekly art classes. So here we are…

Getting More Practice

I must say I’m rather proud of this piece, although it’s far from professional artists standard. But then again am not professional anyway haha. Nonetheless always good to aspire! Although much of my work involves illustrations, I would like to continue practicing effective colour and realistic techniques when I can. One of the great things about anime is that they can be either three dimensional or just flat-out so long as it’s cute! And what’s more cute than sketching kawaii characters with kawaii stories to tell! Looks like the Little One is going to enjoy the Teddy Bear party with her sweet little blue dress…