Drawing a White Animal on White Paper

6/16/20264 min read

I thought I’d write a blog!

And what better way to write my first blog than by going back to my first ever solo drawing. This was a portrait I drew for my niece for her 21st birthday. When my sister said that my niece was thinking I could draw her pony (Herbie) for her birthday I though “oh no, I don’t think I can do that” but I decided to rise to the challenge!

He’s a Welsh Mountain Pony (now aged 29) and he’s a real character!

If you’ve read my story you’ll know that I didn’t start using coloured pencils until January 2024 so I’d only been using them for 3 months when I drew Herbie – and he’s a white (technically grey) pony on white paper, the prospect of which was slightly scary!

I wanted to use pastelmat because I thought that (being textured) it would help with the texture of his fur. I considered using light grey pastelmat because I thought he would stand out more but to get him to stand out, I would need to use a lot of layers to cover the light grey so I decided to bite the bullet and use white.

Something you need to understand about pastelmat - as well as being textured (or "toothy"), it takes lots of layers but the first couple of layers look awful, quite frankly! You have to have the belief that it will all come good in the end! Trust the process, trust the process . . . . . . .

Something else to understand is that white animals aren't white (in the same way that black animals aren't black - but that's for a future post!). Herbie was essentially the same colour as the paper and I used lots of greys to create his fur, and of course every cream and ivory in my collection! Polychromos pencils are brilliant on pastelmat. They’re a hard pencil and it’s easy to move the pigment around. With watercolours you mix colours on a palette but with coloured pencils, you mix the colours on the paper by layering.

Polychromos have 6 warm and 6 cold greys and I used a mixture of warm and cold greys for Herbie. Another really useful pencil was Pablo Ash Grey.

The thing with drawing "white" fur is that you're looking for the hidden values in the fur and not at the fur itself and focusing on the values and not the details helps to create realism too. To put it simply, values in art are lights and darks and strengthening the darks to create shadows can really help in this respect. I have a high attention to detail and have had to train myself to not get bogged down in the detail!

The starting point for me is always the eyes and my sister chose the reference photo because she loved his eyelashes! Now, with pastelmat you have to be super patient and not go in with the detail until you've got enough layers in because you don't have a smooth texture on which to add the detail until you've filled the "tooth" of the paper.

I've tried to show here the graininess of pastelmat

Here are some more work in progress photos. I really enjoy the leatherwork on bridles (even though I sometimes have to seek advice from my sister as to "what's what" !)

In one of the photos, where there's just one layer of pencil down, you can see even more clearly how grainy the pastelmat is!

And here's the completed drawing with the reference photo

You can also watch the reel I put together showing the start to finish process for Herbie on my Instagram account.

Last year, I had another white animal to draw - a sweet dog called Smudge and for this one, I was very organised and wrote down all the colours I used to draw "white" fur. I used pastelmat for that one too. Here are some colours which may surprise you!

You'll notice that not all the pencils are sharp. I love a sharp pencil (like I said I love detail) but you don't always a want a sharp pencil, especially if you're covering a large area because a sharp pencil gives a less even coverage. I was wondering why the Light Cobalt Blue is particularly un-sharp and have just remembered what I was doing (another future post!).

Anyway, here's a photo of Smudge alongside his reference photos (I used two):