This week I published my finished pencil portrait of Hector, a wire-haired German Pointer. For this portrait, I had decided to use a 360g/m² Clairefontaine Pastelmat in grey.  I’m used to drawing on Strathmore: 500 Series: Bristol paper, which is very smooth and white, so the pastelmat was as interesting change.  Despite having bought the pastelmat quite some time ago, I have loved drawing on the Strathmore paper, so have been reluctant to try out other papers.  However, I had a wonderful image of Hector to draw and I thought that the pastelmat might well lend itself to helping show all that lovely hair off!

Starting the portrait on this new paper was interesting and I wasn’t confident that it was going to turn out well.  Drawing the outline of the dog and the first layer of colour felt quite rough and I thought that maybe the finished portrait would look too sketchy.  I even considered stopping and starting the portrait again on the paper I know and love. However, once I had figured out how the pencils worked on the paper, the portrait came to life quite quickly and I realised that I could layer up colours a lot better on the pastelmat than I can on the Strathmore 500 Bristol. With the Strathmore paper, there comes a point where the paper will not accept anymore layers of pencil but on the pastelmat, it seems that I can draw on endless layers and every stroke of the pencil would show up.

I also tested a couple of other new products on this pencil portrait.  I’m always trying to ensure any white hairs and areas are as white as possible, which is hard if you have previously worked colour onto the area.  I recently bought two new products to help me with this.  Coloured Pencil Titanium White and Coloured Pencil Tough-Up Texture (both from Brush and Pencil by Alyona Nickelsen).  The Titanium White is a powder which you mix with the Tough-Up Texture to form a paint-like mix. Using a fine brush, you can then draw this onto your drawing and it shows up amazingly well. You can also draw over it once it has dried.  I highly recommend these products to anyone in the Coloured Pencil world - they have completely changed my life!  I would often get cross if I had overworked an area and no more light marks would show up on it, so now I’m happy that I have found a product that solves this problem!

I hope you like the final portrait of Hector. He was a handsome boy to draw and it was great to be able to get so many colours in to show off how hairy he is!  I think the pastelmat was a success and I’ll definitely use it again!