I watched the 2019 “Aladdin” movie only recently (yep, yep, yep, shame on me, I know…) and I immediately fell in love with everything! Which says a lot, because I have not been a huge fan of Disney remakes lately. Drawing Will Smith as the Genie came naturally! Not without drama however…

My town is in total lockdown due to the Coronavirus pandemic. Nothing gets in or out. We only leave the house to buy food or medicine. So I am running low on art supplies and I am already out of my go-to colored pencils. As a result, I used some crazy colors I never used before and I am … awed by my own art! Seriously. It is scary that we are so used to doing the same thing over and over again without realizing it. In this case using the same colors for drawing portraits (namely faber-castell cinnamon, burnt sienna and van duke brown). Anyway, here I got out of my comfort zone and created my favorite piece so far. Hooray!

Which brings us to:

Materials used

• Prismacolor colored pencils (cream, Spanish orange, pumpkin orange, magenta, dark brown, Scarlett lake)
• faber-castell polychromos colored pencils (cadmium orange, cadmium yellow, magenta, Prussian blue, black)
• lyra Rembrandt polycolor white colored pencil
• white posca markers
• Tombow Bristol paper
• putty eraser occasionally (to lift up extra pigment)

And a few words about:

Skin

A little while ago I made a tutorial about coloring realistic skin, the easiest way possible. In short, just three different colors (highlights, mid-tones, shadows) can do the job. I try to be true to my word, it IS possible to create photorealistic skin with three colors, but here … I used way more. What can I say, sometimes I ignore my own advice, don’t we all? So, colors used for the skin include:

• Cadmium orange (faber-castell)
• cadmium yellow (faber-castell)
• caput mortuum violet (faber-castell)
• magenta (Prismacolor)
• scarlett lake (Prismacolor)
• dark brown (Prismacolor)

If you have been following me for a while, you should know that I (used to) swear by my Faber-castell polychromos pencils. However, I recently rediscovered Prismacolor. I can’t believe how I lived without them for so long! Untill I remembered why I stopped using them. In 2015 while I was pregnant, the smell of them was driving me nuts! It’s … nuts, isn’t it?? I think I should make an updated polychromos vs Prismacolor post!

Hair

Nothing out of the ordinary here. Three colors used:

• Magenta (Prismacolor) as an under layer to give dimension
• black (Faber-castell)
• cadmium orange (Faber-castell)
• mechanical pencil used to make (unsuccessfully) indentations on paper
• White posca market for the stray hairs

I basically filled the whole area with magenta before adding black. This way the black looks more “natural” and less flat, if you know what I mean. Initially I indented the paper, thinking I would create stray white hairs this way. But this method doesn’t work (at least not for me) with super smooth paper, such as the one I used here. So, I ended up using a white marker to create these stray hairs.

Background, clothes and the rest

I used the following colors, all Prismacolor.

• Spanish orange
• canary yellow
• magenta
• prussian blue

All Prismacolor, because as I they are unbeatable at covering easily large areas easily, and I really don’t want to draw each single pixel (which is the Faber-castell case) when drawing backgrounds. I mean, the main focus is the face, right?

I may have forgotten a couple of colors but believe me, it doesn’t matter too much what colors you use, as long as you use the same ones throughout the whole drawing. 🙂