Week 5: from black and white to full blooded colour

This week we continued our projects - group portraits, a gallery of Ozzie Osbourne's guitarists, intimate drawings of children, parents and older people, and full blooded pastel colour landscapes.

Andy: great to see some stronger colours and the slightly more detailed face modelling. Go further on the face adding more tones. Also focus on getting the background colour in soon then check how it helps the other parts of the painting.

Claire: great to see brave bold colour which is also well blended. It is early days in this painting but showing lots of promise. Keep looking for all the colours you can see in EACH shape and blend accordingly.

Dorothy: Good shapes and proportions, well observed. The small scale of your drawing is making it quite challenging to capture the emotions in the girls faces but you have made a really good effort to do this. When applying several lines to work out the shapes, end by choosing the most accurate line and emphasise it with a confident, bold line of varied weight.

Ella: really well observed and carefully drawn. A thoughtful approach of varying weight of line and tone. Use a sharpened 4B pencil for the fine lines of each beard hair, don't soft blend the lines of the beard. For the head hair use a 7B pencil to draw fat generous lines and blocks of shade then use a sharp eraser to draw the high-lights, use of the erase will also give a soft blended look giving a strong contrast to the sharply linear beard.

Graeme: so good to see you using more solid colour and stronger colour contrasts. Do not leave any area of the paper unpainted or unconsidered - every part counts massively to the overall end result.

Jeff: good, strongly observed detail and good technique. The photograph doesn't do justice here but the lovely deep blue  background is helping the colours of the faces. Don't over draw the faces just yet unless you really want to. Leave the sfumato until all the faces are in. Once the sfumato is in place, then analyse all the faces and adjust the colours as necessary.

Rebecca: this is starting to develop into a strong painting. Good interpretation of colours with blending technique getting better very quickly. Good density of pastel where you have added subsequent layers. Keep looking hard for the "colours within the colours" in each shape. 

Yvonne: looking much better on the larger scale. You have edited the photograph intelligently leaving out unnecessary detail on the copying stage. On the actual drawing surface add lines where tones meet and vary the width and weight of all lines to articulate the depth and character of the features/shapes.