Drawing a Portrait with ONLY PRIMARY COLORS

is it possible to draw a whole portrait using only the three primary colors i always say you don't need loads of colors to make a great drawing but is that really true in a previous video i tried to draw this ring using only three colors and that was so fun but i want to take it to that next level make it even harder okay so we've got our different colors let's just experiment with them i'm just gonna try and make orange i'm just gonna layer red and yellow okay that looks really good now for green i'm gonna layer some yellow first and then a little bit of blue i'm trying to be really light with this i'm switching directions so that it kind of blends it as well blend blend blend i can even go in with the white like blend it together and to get a lighter version of the purple add a bit more blue very lightly moving on so we've got orange green purple and you know what for the brown i'm just going to try and layer everything to start with okay that's kind of looking a bit brown this is the photo that i'm actually going to be drawing it's from house of the dragon of princess ryneera i'm not a fan of the colors at the moment so i'm just going to edit it a little bit to make it a little bit better so before and after and personally i think that looks a lot better and i just think it pops a lot more there's a couple parts of the reference that's going to be really challenging to draw with just three primary colors there's so many different tones in her skin like the nose bit here is more of a pink tone and then we've got areas here that are a bit more yellowy green i'm going to try and create a gradient so that we can try and create all of these different tones i think i'm most concerned about the streakiness but you know what i know we can do this challenge i know it can look good i think this is the problem i've said it in many videos countless times that the faber-castell polychromos white is useless it doesn't do anything it just causes more problems we are going to be using the luminance white i haven't used this pencil in so long why is that so much more vibrant i think that is looking better i'm just gonna have to be super careful when i do this drawing anything that i do wrong one wrong pencil stroke and it's gonna look so streaky it's craziest thing that all colors are made from just like these three colors that looks like a gray green then pink then yellow what's happened here oh gosh i forgot with this pencil that the more blending you do it actually starts to get all chunky and like bitty okay that's just another thing that i've got to watch out for i'm literally holding it as far back as i can and just sort of letting it sweep over the paper and i'm going to add a layer of this all over the skin so i'm going to switch to the red and i'm going to do the same technique i might actually be adding way too much red so scary adding black to skin it goes against my entire nature i've said for years don't use black for skin try and avoid using black and here i am shading with black are you horrified she looks alive and dead do you have faith to make it look realistic yeah no do you know what i'll prove them wrong i'm just kind of adding another layer of yellow i need to kind of make it look more like a deep orangey brownie color rather than black i think i'm going to just blend with this white caron dash pencil to start with i might blend the shadowed areas with the colorless blender for the really dark areas see like even though this area it is like really gray at the moment i think just going in with a bit of red and yellow over the top is just gonna make that look fine the white pencil those the colors down a little bit more but the colorless blender actually makes them more vibrant one of the biggest problems is the neck area down here it's very streaky it's very red and purpley up here and a very greeny and streaky down here there's also this really bright highlight that is sort of harsh it needs to be softened out and quite a few areas need to go lighter and paler we need to try and saturate this yellow a little bit but first i'm just going to go in with the white and try to smooth out these highlights maybe brighten up some of those lighter areas of the skin a little bit more and for this stage i will be applying quite a bit of pressure to this white pencil honestly a few years ago i'd have really struggled to create this skin color with just those three primary colors i really didn't know that much about color theory so picking different colors and layering them together and knowing how much of each color to mix and layer together i found it really tricky and kind of overwhelming and so over the last few years i've learned a lot more about color theory and really delve into that topic a lot more so i decided to put everything that i learned into a free guide that will help you pick better colors for your drawing and know how to mix and layer different colors together to get the color you need for your drawing really easily so i'll leave a link to that free guide at the top of the description so you can check that out okay i'm gonna do the eyebrows now and i'm gonna add some yellow i'm gonna try and blend it into the skin at the moment she's looking less targaryen and more white walker the eyes will definitely make or break a drawing look at that pouch she's got on at the moment oh my god now i'm gonna go in with the blue this is gonna give it that more purpley tone seems so crazy layering so much blue i'm really hoping the white really desaturates these colors and lightens them up a lot you know what that actually doesn't look that bad at all now before we do the hair let's test it out because our first test went so well that i think it's crucial to do one for the hair you'll be surprised when you're drawing white hair how much gray you actually have to add and you can see here in these areas it's really dark pretty much black in some of those areas now it's kind of green so i'm going to layer in a bit of yellow and i'm gonna add a bit of blue now i'm going in with the white and instead of blending like scribbling or circling i'm actually following the direction that the hairs are going in see look it's mixing to make a nice green looks good the hair is definitely another part of a drawing that can take so long i actually really love drawing fun hairstyles like this it can be tricky when you're drawing like a plait and there's all these different sections that's why i just try and tackle it one little bit at a time okay so i am actually going to add a little bit of yellow i just feel like she needs a bit of that greenish tinge to the hair like there is in the photo it's just so hard to predict how much more vibrant the color is going to look when i blend it with the colorless blender and the white pencil because sometimes they just look so much more vibrant when you blend one thing i learned from my last video is that it is super hard to erase color pencil with a sticker razor so i bought an electric eraser i've used one of these in forever i used to use one years ago and i don't know why i stopped because i'm pretty sure it was really handy for colored pencil drawings so i've got the big tip in at the moment oh my god that was so easy yes oh my god this is amazing do you know how long that would have taken me to try and do it with this and it's not coming up it's just sort of smearing it around this changes everything is this gonna be my new favorite eraser oh look how thin that line is oh my god look how tiny these details are you may be wondering why i've done these sort of patterns and why i needed this and why this is going to make the next thing that i'll be doing so much easier going back to our reference you can see that her clothing her earrings it has a lot of tiny embellishments on it i was super nervous about these before this thing arrived i was like how am i gonna do that with my stick eraser it's not gonna work i'm just gonna have to avoid these parts and get rid of them in my drawing but now now we can do them and we can do them really easily this was i think about six pound and it's just going to make this drawing look not only look so much better but it's going to be so fast to add in all of these little details as well jewellery is really hard to do especially any sort like metal because it is reflective there's so much shining on it we've got highlights we've got shadows we've got reflections we've got a lot going on you know what i'm fine with detail that's like lots of fur or lots of hair but when it comes to jewelry or clothes things with like lots of folds or lots of little tiny details like this i don't know why i just find it so much harder to do what do you guys think what do you find really hard to draw i think it's patterns that i struggle with like all of these really intricate patterns that's gotta be so specific like if you were drawing fur it's okay if something's a little bit off it can still look super realistic but with a pattern like this where it's kind of symmetrical if you do something a little bit wrong it's so obvious now that i've blended it out i'm just going in with my white pencil and trying to add some of the folds in i don't know if you can see but i've kind of messed up here a little bit when i was blending the red a bit went onto the skin and then i tried to blend it out with the white pencil and it just kind of made it worse so i'm gonna erase it with my electric eraser to try and fix this and just blend over that to sort of tie it in with the skin around it again and to balance it out i'm just going to add a little bit of yellow i'm just finishing up her clothing now i'm going in with my eraser and pulling up some of those embellishments and then i'm kind of going in with the yellow to give it that more gold tone and i'm just adding these final details but this drawing is almost finished even though this was a really fun challenge it wasn't just that i found it so useful to actually see how color theory how it works in action getting to see all of those colors layered together how they mix how they make these different colors i think it's really really useful and i'd really recommend doing this sort of experiment yourself it just gives you a deeper understanding of how colors work together i think here is the final drawing and i cannot tell you how happy i am with how this turned out i am so proud of this final drawing i think it just goes to show how much you can do with three colors and you don't need loads of pencils to create a great drawing and if you do want to give it a try yourself i definitely recommend checking out my free guide which will just teach you all of the color theory knowledge you'll need to know to really go in and create a great drawing and like i said i have done this challenge in the past i drew a ring and that was my first time doing this sort of challenge just using three colors it was really fun to do so if you like this video check out that one next so you can see me do this challenge for the very first time

Channel: Kirsty Partridge Art

Views: 215,656

Keywords: colored pencil, coloured pencil, drawing with colored pencils, drawing with colored pencils tutorial, colored pencil drawing, colored pencil techniques, colored pencils, realistic colored pencil drawings, realistic colored pencil tutorial, drawing with primary colours, drawing with primary colors, colored pencil challenge, drawing challenge, how to colored pencil, how to colored pencil portrait, colored pencil portrait, coloured pencil portrait, portrait drawing

Id: dTpTUAqOXqQ

Length: 11min 38sec (698 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 09 2022