Remy from Ratatouille in coloured pencils - my first online art coaching session

Last Friday, I held my very first online art coaching session! Ok, that sounded grander than it actually was. What happened was a friend of mine was interested in coloured pencil drawings after seeing some of my stuff, so I offered to show her and her daughter (also an art enthusiast) how over a Zoom session.

This is the final drawing but read on for the process!

I gave my friend the choice of drawing from Frozen or Ratatouille and she chose the intrepid Remy from Rataouille. What I should have realised was that Remy was a vrey difficult subject to start with if you're not used to coloured pencils because of the fur.

This was my first time attempting to do an online art session, so we had to wing our way through the setup. I mounted my phone on my son's camera tripod and used WhatsApp video call so she could see what I was doing, and we also had to simultaneously use Zoom so I could see what SHE was doing 😅

It was supposed to be a one-hour session but we ended up going on for two-and-a-half hours. It was loads of fun and the time just flew by. I'm not sure if my friend and her daughter learned anything from me, but I know we all enjoyed ourselves tremendously (at least I did!) Anyway, by the time she had to go, we had only completed this much:

Off-line, I continued working on it over the weekend, completing the face and ladle, and filling in some of Remy's body.

If you look at a closeup of Remy's fur, it has a lot of depth, with not just blue but purple, green and various shades of grey. 

Remy's body is the trickiest part of this picture because with coloured pencils, you need to work light to dark (since it's hard to layer light colours on top of dark colours). However, if you draw in the white fur first, it will look like it's sitting under the dark fur which is not the case. In order to look like the white fur is on top, I had to draw in the negative spaces (which means using the darker colours to draw around the white) which is much more challenging.

I filmed a short video showing how I layered the colours for the fur. I know it's very bright due to the lighting, sorry, not my forte!

These are the coloured pencils I used just for the fur. Assorted brands: Caran d'Ache Luminance, Faber-Castell Polychromos, Derwent Drawing and Lightfast, and Koh-i-Noor Polycolor. I used a light grey Canson Mi-Teintes paper.

And here's the final drawing, presenting Remy from Ratatouille: