To celebrate the start of the New Jersey Devils hockey season, I'm in the process of making a bunch of portraits of the current players. Sometime soon I'll show a few of the finished pieces, but I thought this would be fun project to show some process on. All of the pieces were documented at the same time, so each step will be shown on a different piece.
For these portraits I wanted to try something new, and decided to employ a process that incorporates my favorite basic structure for drawing processes. 1- Make a drawing carefully 2- Make a huge mess on top of that drawing you just worked so hard on 3- Clean up where necessary.
Here is the first step which would be the sketch. This is Martin Brodeur of course. I spend a while trying to get the likeness down. Trying to get a recognizable portrait, but focusing on getting a certain mood from the player. When I get the line drawing down I trace it onto bristol. Then on the original sheet I go back in and quickly lay in a very scratchy value structure to make sure the way I want to compose the lights and darks will work. Drawing of a face.
The drawing on bristol (Andy Greene) gets a more descriptive treatment with colored pencil. Still fast and loose, but more refined. The way this part work is basically the same as inking the drawing, but with a colored pencil.
The last physical step are ink and gouache washes. All over Cory Schneider. I like the colored pencil drawings, but for nothing beats a brush when comes to making things a little more lively. From here I will take the drawing into the computer, where I do imaginary things to it until it is finished. Later. That got long; thanks for reading.
