After many months of studying and drawing hands, work has finally begun on the final artwork in this series of six. I am glad to be introducing you to the early stages of A Handful of Coffee. This is one that I have been looking forward to, it is much more monochrome in it’s hues than the first five, and I have a theory that the coffee beans will be quite fun to capture once I get into the groove. It remains to be seen if that actually will be the case though!
What you see here is the blocking in, which by now you will be very familiar with I am sure. There are a lot of wrinkles to come, of course, and the colours that I use now will help inform which to select for those lines. This is a part of the process where I can still experiment with colour blending and layering, and I have narrowed it down for now to three pencils which I am primarily using.
There is a lot of charm I think in these early stages, I like seeing the workings out, a visual record of my thought processes and snippets of the cross hatching still showing in places. The call for detail and the challenge of the precision that is required can be heard though, and onward I will go, always trying to achieve something better that perhaps I anticipate I can do.
As with it’s predecessors, A Handful of Coffee is in pastel on Pastelmat.
Once the full series of hands studies has been completed, I will make available limited edition prints and greetings cards of A Handful of Coffee and others.
Pre-orders are being taken now for prints of A Handful of Chillies, A Handful of Salt, A Handful of Lotus Seeds, A Handful of Faith and A Handful of Love. Please get in touch to order yours.
Many thanks go to Réhahn Photography for his inspiring reference images.
