 Hi there, it's Sandy Allnock and I'm going to do a review-ish of the Luminance Portrait set. It's an extra collection, 20 new colors, and I shouldn't say new, it's been out for at least a year or more, and they've been in my studio for a long time and I haven't had time to get to them. So I'm going to be swatching them, updating the hex chart, and doing some art. So all of that in one video. This is the set of colors. You can see it's kind of a rainbow. There's a few neutrals added in there for skin tones since it's a portrait set. I'm eventually going to add these into my case that has all the other colors in it, but first things first, I decided to swatch them. So I have two different swatching methods for my colors, and one is to just put them on one and a half by one and a half inch squares of paper. Use whatever drawing paper you use on a regular basis when you do your swatching, because otherwise if you do it on some other paper, you just want to do it on something cheap, it won't look the same necessarily, either in texture or in color. And if you swatch them multiple times, you may want to have some swatches or some portion of the swatch that uses blending solution. If you plan to use blending solutions, I don't tend to use them any more than necessary because I like the look of pencil on paper. I like that texture. So my swatches lately have not had any blending solution applied, because that's just another step, and I would rather get to the drawing. And for me, real life testing is what matters. So the drawing is the part where I really did my assessment. So there is the selection of colors. You'll notice there's no grays in there. That's something that's missing. There's no black. There is a really, really dark blue. You can see the blue section down in the corner, and the really dark blue is nearly black. And that will work fairly well. And you could also combine one of the browns with one of the blues and build up some neutrals. There's also not a lot in here that's really pale. So if you like some pale colors, you may want to add on onesies of other colors or find another set of luminance pencils that contains those kinds of colors. But this is just a quick overview of the kind of colors that are in this set already. So I proceeded then to fill in the rest of my hex chart, if I can even speak. And this hex chart is available as an update. I'll talk about that a little more while I do the artwork in a few minutes. But you can either write the numbers on the color chart itself in a white pen, because you can't really see much of the text once you color them in. As you can see, it's kind of invisible. But what I prefer, which looks a little tidier, is to have the chart printed at my local print shop on a piece of acetate. So I have them printed on a transparency and you can just lay it over top. So there's two real life projects. One is a card that is on another channel, but I'll show you a little preview of it. And the other is going to be a fine art piece, a portrait done here. Both are done on this drawing paper from Arches. It's not my favorite paper in the universe. At least it hasn't been until this drawing that I did, so I kind of like it after that. But this is the project that's going to be done over at MFT. It's a card with two little girls on it, and you can go see that on their channel. I'll put a link to their channel in the description of this one so you can go check it out. But what I chose to do was do a portrait. Now I am not a portrait artist. That is not my thing. It's not my go-to subject matter, but since it's called the Portrait Set, I figured I ought to do a portrait. And I was struggling a little bit to even figure out what I could do with the colors that are in this set, because there's one really pale, kind of pinkish sort of color, a pinkish white. And it's so pale, but then the other colors go to medium and dark really quickly. So I opted to do a woman of color because I thought that would be a little bit easier with the kinds of colors that are in the set itself. I've also found something kind of interesting. I've been, you know, I've been talking about for a while I guess that Instagram is my thing. I've been spending a lot more time there than here on YouTube. And there are a lot of portrait artists who use much richer colors even for Caucasian skin than I would normally ever choose in a million years. So this was kind of an exercise for me as well in thinking through that because like there's an oil painter that I saw and he painted the darkest brown for a cheek. And he started just painting on the cheek and then moving around the drawing or around the painting. And I was shocked that it turned out to be a Caucasian person when it was a color that was this dark greenish brown and it looked right. It looked correct. Which reminded me that all skin, everybody's skin is different. It's all made up of a lot of different colors. And I was just experimenting in this with how to layer these colors, these 20 colors to create this portrait. Just some random woman I found on the internet and God bless her whoever she is. She's beautiful. And just started trying to figure out how to lay these colors in. There were some colors I couldn't match. There was not enough red. So I couldn't do really red lips. She didn't have really super red lips. But the red color that was in there was not the right kind of red. It was more of a purplish red that I needed. And I wanted to get out the pencils from the rest of the set. But I told myself no. I must stick with the portrait set and see if this will portrait. This drawing took about I think 10 or 11 hours to complete. I did not film the whole thing partially because my computer at the time was choking on so much footage from so many projects that I was doing that I knew I couldn't store all that footage anyway for the length of time that I needed to have it hanging around. Because one of the things that I was going to be doing was developing different parts for this video. The first thing I did was filming the squares, those swatches that I showed at the start. Then I drew her. But I knew I needed some time to work on the hex chart because that takes a lot of time to color out and then revise and then move colors around and reprint it and try it again and see if I could get those colors to where I wanted. They're never perfect but it's close enough for horseshoes and hand grenades. But I knew that all of that process was going to take time. So I did just film portions of her and I filmed some little snippets to add on to Instagram as a real as well. So there'll be a little bit of that on my Fine Art Channel. But it was a fun experiment. Despite being limited to these 20 colors, I think it actually worked by the time all was said and done. But speaking of that hex chart, if you ordered the hex chart from me while it was on art-classes.com, if you purchased it from there, then you could just go into your account and crossing my fingers you should be able to just redownload and it should download automatically to the new file. If it does not, let me know. Just send an email and I will make sure that you get that updated file. If you're somebody who purchased the Luminance Chart while I was at sandyallknock.com, at one point I moved everything from my blog over to my teaching site so all of that was in one place, then those purchases didn't get moved over. Long story about that, a big tech thing that happened but manually I've been moving things over as people who purchased from the old site want to download something and they want it on the new site so I've been creating a new order. And so I will be happy to do that for you. If you send me an email, let me know what the name was you purchased it under and what email address. So I can look that up and then just create a free order for you on the new site. Or if you really just want to get her done, you could just buy it again if you want to but I would recommend saving your six dollars and go buy yourself an extra pencil instead because that would be much more valuable. The drawing, let's get back to that for a moment. The hair was something that I was starting to dread. As I was getting through the face and I got the face and the glasses and I was really pleased with all of that but how the heck do you do hair when you have no black pencil? She's got this really rich dark natural hair and it's got beautiful texture to it. How do you manage that? So I started with just layering a bunch of colors on top of each other and starting with blues and purples. I like to do that under blacks anyway because it just gives the blacks more life. They don't end up being quite as I don't know, flat I guess. But there's one really dark blue in this set that is quite amazing. The color number I think is 631. I think it's dark indigo and as you can see it is practically black. Might as well be black but I like it better than black because it's got some of that blue in it and it gives you a little bit of that flavor to it. I used it on the right hand side of her underneath side of her hair. I used it in some of her glasses and it can have that neutral black flavor if you mix it with some of the browns which is what I did on some of those portions to try to neutralize it more. But in her hair I decided I didn't really need to neutralize all that much because I wanted that really brightness of the blues and the purples to show through and opted even as I moved to the top of the drawing to just let her hair fade to a really pale color anyway. So this worked out really well. I am using a handheld sharpener and I've kind of come to when I use my Luminance pencils using the handheld because it will eat up less of the pencil than the Bow Stitch Quiet Sharp which I normally use for colored pencil. I like the point that I get from that but I don't want to use my pencils up any faster than necessary when we're talking about pencils like this that cost like pretty penny for each one of them. So there she is. She is all done and gorgeous. And I had a lot of fun doing this. I'm not a portrait artist but I'm kind of tickled that this came out and was worthy to share here on YouTube because I always get scared about that. If you want to go see the card that's over on the MFT channel I'll have a link to their channel down in the doobly-doo so you can check it out. And I will change it to the specific video once I have that URL. And there's of course always more on my blog if you want to see a still picture of this portrait and study it etc. And that's about it for me today. I will see you later. Link to the Hex Chart is down below as well. And I will talk to you guys next time. Bye bye.