About This Work

Enigmatic Star This colored pencil drawing ‘Sans Titre – 07-04-25’ depicts Swedish celebrity moviestar Greta Garbo. Enigmatic, illusive, lonesome yet strong, intriguing and even bestowed with comic talent in Ninotchka. She halted her movie carreer in 1941 only to live her life in obscurity until her death in 1990. Most fascinating! Consequently her name carries many mysteries. Then again, a great mystery why I didn’t came to draw her before. I don’t know really. Always on my bucket list for sure. Postponing yes until I came acrosss this very iconic photograph taken in the 1930s I think. That was the one I was looking for. Full of chiaroscuro and heavily art deco style driven one could say. Unfortunately these kind of photography doesn’t exist anymore today and I don’t now superstars personally. Time to dare taking on Greta’s Portrait. Color Combinations Last of Jean Muir was in yellow. This time I picked pink. You know, I had it in me to do this one in straight cubist planes right from the start. Dire green or freezing blue only would make her portrait more stern than it had to be. Pink would soothe her elegant yet strict appearance a bit. Next to this, I also knew I had to do this one in green, black and white colored pencil right away. Green would gray against the pink in a suiting manner. The idea was to search for a right combination of pink and green mostly whereas black would block them both in. Pigment Troubles As in Ms Muir’s case I didn’t want to hatch down these regions to a complete darkness. This would mean to the end of the paper. Certainly this would lead to a rather anecdotal appearance of the pink. Somehow the pink should keep on shimmering through, searching for connection to facial features. A bit of a trouble there really. Soon I found out the paper didn’t reacted to my Faber-Castell Polychromos pencil too well. The Pitt Matt graphite can be rubbed out just fine but true color pencils react differently. The pencil fills consist of wax and pigment basically. Little pockets or islands of colored pencil pigment can be formed when rubbed on paper. Therefor I had to put maximal force on my stumper to smoothe things out maximally. A bit grainy the result is yet a great homage to a great star. My compliments to the photographer as well. Colored pencil drawing on Aurora Coloured Drawing paper (21 x 29.7 x 0.1 cm - A4 format) Artist: Corné Akkers