I’m working on these three pastel drawings from Dr. Sketchy’s Berlin veeeerrry slowly.

This first one is of the beautiful Viva Lamore, who wore a marvelous outfit with a cage hoop. Because the theme for this Dr. Sketchy’s was Broken Baroque, everyone was wearing ropes of pearls and masses of ruffles. Plus fluffy white cotton batting wigs.

I’m struggling to control the “dust sticks” as I call them and render some kind of believable volume with such pale colors.

I find it so hard to get any detail with pastels. Especially drawing things like pearls and lace. As you can see, for important areas like the models’ faces, I just cheat and use ink. I’m using both my beloved PITT brush pens and 50% grey scale markers here to add in darker values. For the pearls, I started using a white color pencil.

As much as I’ve hated and ignored color pencils all my life, I can see how on paper this good, they can be a nice tool.

Each of these drawings is on a different shade of Mi Teintes paper, as I randomly chose from my pad of sepia, umber, and buff paper in order to provide “new experiences”. Mighta gone a little overboard on adding complicating factors there, as the effect of each color of pastel stick is startlingly different on light vs dark papers.

So I am working on them just a little bit at a time, trying not to set myself the overwhelming goal of “finishing” or “getting them right”.

You can see the drawings I’ve finished so far from this Dr. Sketchy’s here.

Thanks so very much to my Patrons on Patreon whose financial support makes it possible for me to explore new materials like this. You are the best.