Drafting film is fantastic for coloured pencil, you can achieve beautiful crisp lines, fine details and its great for fur. My favourite thing about it though is that it is translucent and because of this you can change up the background, draw on the back of the film and create depth, out of focus or blurred backgrounds which can really help the subject you are drawing pop off the page. Not only can you layer the film over coloured papers but you can layer it over other drawings and because of the translucency you get a gorgeous, soft look.
Free as a Bird - Polychromos, Derwent Drawing and PanPastel on Pastelmat and Durlar.
Here you can see the reverse side of the highland cow and the layers of PanPastel on the Pastelmat, a similar colour scheme to the Robin drawing. The film allows the colours to show through but tones them down slightly. You can see this in the background to the Robin as the Diarylide Yellow appears to be softer and not as bold.
An example of Dura-Lar drafting film laid over Panpastel on Pastelmat. The colours used from top to bottom are:
- Diarylide Yellow Shade
- Yellow Ochre Tint
- Permanent Red
-Permanent Red Tint
- Titanium white.
The background to the poppy was built up with Chrome Oxide Green Shade (top left) on Light Green Pastelmat and as you can see with the drafting film laid over the top the colour is not as dark as it is in the pan. With this drawing I used White and Permanent Red Tint under the poppy just to help intensify the colour of the petals, I did the same with the red breast of the robin however with the cow I left the Pastelmat untouched so the white could show through - this helped with doing fine stray hairs. All of the above drawings were done on Dura-Lar except for the swan which was drawn on Grafix drafting film because it has a little more tooth and can take a few more layers of pigment. Both surfaces are 0.005 and double matte.