A girl and her pencils......The Chimp

A very, very happy Saturday to everyone. The weekend is here! I am working today, but work could not be more fun! Draw what you love and you will always love drawing. And as ever l am sooo excited about my new piece. Excited because l love the photo, excited because l love the chimp and excited because l have lots of new challenges here. I have never drawn a hand, not ever! I have never drawn skin.....and the chimp is not even beautiful smooth skin, he is full of wrinkles, and l have never drawn chimp style fur. I think l need to do a page on drawing fur, people always ask how to draw it. The thing with fur is that there are so many different types of fur, long fur, medium fur, short fur, wiry fur, fluffy fur, velvety fur, curly fur, spiky fur, soft fur, rough fur, sleek fur, messy fur......... and they all require different things. Often one animal will have several different types of fur and recreating the textures is always a challenge and always fun.
Three pictures today, and each picture is a full day's work. I loved this little chimp's eyes so l knew they were going to take a while. In the first shot you can see that they are mostly complete. Or near enough that l am happy to work around them, although l almost always work on the eyes of a piece every single day that l am drawing.
l was thinking about this the other day. In nearly all of my pieces it is the eyes that make me want to draw them. There has to be some emotion or feeling in them that l want to capture. And unless l find myself being constantly pulled back to look at the eyes in a finished piece, l do not feel that it is complete. Yet what is it we see? When we look at a person or an animal we see feelings in the eyes.....love, fear, empathy, anger.....yet the eyes do not change physically, so what are we seeing? And how do you draw that so that you feel emotion coming from the page? I don't know the answer to that, l just know that l have to keep drawing until l feel a feeling looking back at me! That probably makes no sense to anyone in the world but me! Anyway, l drew till l began to get that feeling and that is what you see below.

Then l began to work on the hand. Two challenges here. My first time ever at making skin color and of course, my first time ever drawing a hand. Quite a wrinkly hand at that. I ended up with an interesting selection of colors. I did use the Polychromos light flesh color, but l used grey and violet and sepia and yellow and brown and a whole host of colors and as for the hand, l just took my time and copied what l saw.

I knew things would look a bit better when there was more contrast around them, so l really wanted to get some fur on the arm (and l wanted to try drawing the fur). If you look closely at the bottom of the arm you an see how l did this fur. Yes, every individual hair is drawn separately. I began with a light violet grey, then a darker violet grey, then soft brown, then dark grey, then black, then dark brown, then black again. It took a while! But l think it actually worked quite well. And to finish my day l began working the skin around the eyes. It is mapped out here, but not finished.

I have to tell you that l am having so much fun drawing this. I have always loved monkeys of all kinds and drawing one is so exciting. I love a challenge and this piece is definitely challenging me. I would just like to close by thanking everyone for following me and my journey with coloured pencils, l really hope l can encourage anyone out there who would like to draw to pick up the pencils and give it a go. Have a fantastic weekend and happy drawing!

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