A White Sketch

This morning, I was thumbing through a National Geographic and saw an ad that had a picture of a polar bear.

The Bogus unbleached drawing pad seemed to lend itself to attempting a sketch (it always does, but it also almost always disappoints me -- not enough "tooth" or roughness) so off I went with a very limited palette: white, cobalt blue, light gray, dark turquoise, cool dark brown, and a touch of black.

I started out with pastel pencils, which are fairly hard, and then shifted to soft pastels for the blue. For the first time, I used a foam make-up wedge to smooth the colors of the background... and hated the result.

Switching back to the pencils, I intensified the color of the foreground and background with crosshatching and no smoothing, and I liked the result much better. Hours later, i can see where I could have added a touch more blue on the bear's fur. 

And this is the other day's work, with a little bit of mistiness added.

The above mentioned foam makeup triangles did well for adding a touch of mist.

So many of these sketches are less than stellar, but I'm having a good time playing with them.