Smile of Autumn

I'd like to thank for allowing me to use her beautiful photo as reference.

So, first attempt at a color pencil portrait. I did play around with colors in a couple of works but none of them was serious (except for an incomplete drawing, which really doesn't count ), and none required this level of shading. The transition from graphite pencil to color pencil is like going from English to binary. With graphite, I could vary the shades of each pencil to a great extent but with color pencils (at least my kind of color pencils), there are only a couple of shades that each color will be able to produce. This kinda throw me off track since shading becomes less of varying the pressure applied, and more of choosing the color used. Sounds intuitive but it's a big change from graphite. The pencil strokes also had to be changed because blending isn't really an option with color pencil (I know you can, but it's not as effective as graphite).

The initial part of the drawing was just a lot of trials and errors, testing out different shading techniques. I'm not a fan of preparation so I basically colored the paper right away, without testing out on scrap paper first. I guess I'm very lucky the drawing turned out the way it did

This was done with Faber Castell 48 colors set, which I got for 12USD. I guess you get what you pay for since the coloring process was far from smooth sailing. After 2 layers of coloring, the colors stopped blending properly. The lead felt kinda plastic-ey. I'm not sure if that's true for all color pencils though (if you have experience with other kind of pencils, do enlighten me )

Stats
20cm x 24cm Daler Rowney 220g/m2
Faber Castell 48 classic colors
I'd say it's a bit more than 20 hours
Reference
WIPs:
I hope you guys like it and thanks for any fav. I may receive