Sole Mates - first in a series on shoes

Sole Mates. I've decided to do a series on shoes, and this is the first drawing. I think shoes are fascinating as they reveal a lot about what a person has done and where he or she has been.

This was a drawing of firsts for me - first time drawing hands, first time drawing shoes, first time drawing still life with pastel pencils. Initially, I'd intended to use coloured pencils, as I often do with still life subjects. But for some reason, I thought that using pastel pencils might create interesting texture, so I took a gamble and it paid off. Pastel pencils create a rougher finish compared to coloured pencils, which works for this subject. The paper is Clairefontaine tan Paint On mixed media paper.

The thing about drawing realistic art is that close-up, the colours and strokes often look wrong. I had to keep reminding myself to step back and look at the drawing from a distance to gauge if it looks right. Taking a photo and looking at it also helps me to quickly assess if any part is off. Not sure why this works, but it does!

And then it was on to the shoes. The shoelaces were particularly fiddly and getting sharp thin lines is challenging with pastel pencils. It's a slow process. Here, you can see the left shoe done and the right shoe with just a preliminary layer of colour. Besides my pastel pencils (Faber-Castell Pitt, Carbothello and Koh-I-Noor), I also used a couple of Derwent's tinted charcoal pencils. These are great for the muted or dark areas. Charcoal pencils play nicely with pastel pencils though they create a lot of dust, so you've got to be careful not to let the dust stain the other parts of the paper.

And the final drawing. This took many hours but I do like the outcome - it has a pseudo Norman Rockwell effect.