[First portrait] The first test-drive with my watercolour pencils | A girl's portrait

This was the first drawing with my watercolour pencils

I bought the pencils, because I liked what I saw looking at some other artists work. And decided I want to have those watercolour pencils too. I bought a few colours only, to try them out, as they aren't cheap.
But as a noob in watercolour-art-land I started to draw on the wrong paper, well the drawing actually went fine. But when you add water to paper that isn't that thick, you get messed up paper. But I never want to start an artwork without finishing it, especially when I already spent a lot of time working on it, so I decided to take the flaws for granted, and finish it anyway.

Let me take you back to the progress pictures of this portrait

Promise me please that you won't laugh at me! Because I am well aware that I am not following any guidelines when you talk about how-to make a portrait. I just do it the way I feel like I should do it, but I know it may be not logical at all. But hey, it's a process too, and maybe it will always be like this, who knows. Let me show you the first progress pictures when I just started, again, don't laugh please!

You can see on these pictures above, that I was using way too much water in the beginning already. I bought pencils that you fill up with water, so you have to squeeze it to get the brush wet. And as I had no idea what I was doing, the water came out way too fast and messed up my paper. I learned from this that you better just take a little cup with water, and some kitchen towels or other absorbing paper, so you can make sure the brush is not too wet.
And this way you can instantly make sure that if you have a little "water-accident" you can remove it with the tissues. But like I said, I'm totally new at this, and I also made this portrait on the size of A3 paper, so it's a "bit" of work to finish too.

Let's add a bit more detail

Here you can see I was working on the eye and lips. The lips were probably the most difficult so far for me. Never done that, and I felt several times that I messed up both the eyes and lips. But I kept going anyway, as I hoped it would turn out ok in the end.

The reason this picture (and the next one too) is made standing up, was to see what my boyfriend would say coming home. And he said the eyes were staring at him constantly. And the more I looked at the drawings in those stages, the more I thought it was not that bad at all. Too bad that the paper was a bit messed up, but still the drawing was not as bad as I thought before. I learned to appreciate it after a while.

And this is the last progress picture. Looks a bit weird because I did not finish the lines of the face on the left, but I wanted to share this one anyway, as this is the last one I made before I finished it.

And of course once more the end result:

Conclusion

In the end I'm still proud of what I made, as it was my first portrait ever and also the first time creating something with these watercolour pencils. Yes, I am a bit perfectionistic and hate it when something doesn't completely turn out great, like in this case the paper that was affected by too much water. That's something I need to learn to accept, these things happen. But not finishing it was really not an option, so the best option I had was finishing it with imperfections.
Hope you liked this post! I am back to creating something new..

If you are interested in more of my recent work that I created with these watercolour pencils. You can find my Mermaid for the iTalent contest here and my Unicorn for the Myths & Legends contest here.