Studies for an illustration I’m working on right now, done with prismacolor on vellum. I love drawing with prisma pencils, they glide on the paper in a way that is really appealing to me.

Rare that an illustration deadline will allow for the time for such luxuries as exploring different head options, but I have over a full week on this particular one, so I took the opportunity. I envy the time that artists like JC Leyendecker had, where he would do obsessive fully-painted studies of different poses of details like hands, just to make sure he had the perfect body language to convey the meaning of the picture. I don’t have Leyendecker’s legendary speed, so pencil sketches were about as much as I could allow myself before moving to the finish.