Zoe Wanamaker

Drawn from a BBC programme called Who Do You Think You Are, tracing celebrities family histories. It's a very interesting progamme but equally interesting this week were the lovely glasses and some of the clothes Zoe was wearing! (I'm wondering where she got a chocolate brown suede jacket - I've been looking for something just like it for years!) I knew I had to draw those black and white spotted glasses and that red cardi though!

Of course, to do colour I need to press pause but it's still not that easy - I have to have a whole tin of pencils in front of me so I have everything to hand. Once I got the pencil sketch done though, it was surprisingly quick - by my standards of course! There is something about the name of the pencils called Light and Medium Flesh (by Lyra) that puts me off using them as if it's 'painting by numbers' but Light Flesh worked perfectly here for the skin and I just added some red and purple on the left side for warm and shadow. The skin colour on the hands were very lightly indicated with quick touches of the same colours and a light touch of black in the shadows. Her hair was amazingly quick with White, Ivory, Yellow Ochre (Polychromos) for the light areas first and simply adding shading around those lines with a warm brown. I find it much easier to do the light areas in the hair first rather than having to leave them and work around them as I do with graphite. The lines look much more natural and flowing this way too.

The paper is by Paperchase and although it's the colour of brown wrapping paper, this particular shade is very hard to find in sketchbooks. This was done in the 6"x8" version but I'd like to see a larger version and for them to get rid of the oversized spirals that eats up space and makes it hard to scan.