Creating Messi

I decided to follow on with my experimentation with coloured pencil again to do another piece of artwork, this time the person of my interest would be the phenomenal Lionel Messi.

Messi being one of the greatest footballers in my lifetime, meant I was taking on an interesting task at hand.

Loosely plotting out the layout for the image with and starting to add detail to the shirt mainly as, I felt that would be the area that popped the most, and would draw the eye into the piece.
I decided to add in the black of the shirt first.

Then I added in the blue, and shading effects of the shirt.

From there I decided to tackle the hair and arms, for the hair used a brown colour to add a first layer, as I knew I was going to add a background that had a lot of black areas in, I needed a colour to separate the and lighten the hair a little first. The skin tones contained several colours  with Ochre being the primary colour then a touch of blush pink and red with browns.

I was really liking how this piece was coming out at this point and contemplating leaving the background out totally. But in the end I decided to stick to the original idea. I have how ever decided to also draw Messi in this format on his own.

This piece is available to buy at http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/251563990162?ssPageName=STRK:MESELX:IT&_trksid=p3984.m1586.l2649

Raheem Sterling

So in this piece I decided to go with the moment Raheem Sterling turned against Pirlo in the Recent England vs Italy World Cup game. There has been a fantastic set of games recently and I've been inspired to draw a series of pieces in this simplistic style and try to recapture some of the great moments.


I started the process very similar as the previous one, building a general layout in blue polychromes pencil. Trying to figure out how each of the 3 figures would lay on the page.

Again I decided to follow a similar route and added more detail in with a 2H pencil and rebuild and try to get my proportions of the Raheem and Pirlo as accurate as I could, I struggled slightly with elements of Pirlo's face, particularly his eyes.

But once I spent a little more time with the details on my 2B phase of the image, I started to find out the details I wanted to create the finished piece.

This piece is available on an ebay auction at Raheem Sterling piece

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