I’m going to do a two day course on using coloured pencil in a month or so – looking forward to it. Apart from anything else, I’ve taken two weeks’ leave from work and I can do things like ‘repaint the house’.
In preparation for this I bought Prismacolours and gave them a go. I already had my childhood derwents.
It doesn’t take much to convince me to buy art supplies. I’m an art supply addict.
I’ve been noodling around trying to work out how to get the best of them. I can draw, of course, so my pictures have turned out quite ok, but I am at a loss with how to get the best out of this medium. They don’t suck,they look fine. They are not great. There has to be a better way and I guess I’ll learn it.
I have thrown out the picture I did on the watercolour ground, it was horrible. The ones below I ‘ve done on the mi-teins pastel paper – it has a ‘tooth’ but i think it’s too much toothy for the pencil. I guess I will find out how to use it better in the course.
The first picture I did was based on Rigel: I love how this looks just like her from a distance, but it’s much paler than this in real life (auto-fix in my photo fix program has given it a bit more depth in the photo).
This was meticulous (ie tedious) to get drawn out, the head is the same size as the photo. Drawing accurately from is one of the things I learned to do while working on the Regina paintings. It’s my least favorite thing ever but it can pay off.
The close up shows the marks of the pencil. I’m not sure how to get deep colour in other than just going over and over, but that loses the freshness.
I noodled around on the bit of paper I was using to try and see what else I could come up with. I did a bee based on the cover of a book of backyard insects, I tried a tree, and did some fanciful figures. It went ok. The darker ground meant the white and lights show up well.
At this point I worked out that pencil has to be for doing very fine detailed work. Like, a cat.
I had a old picture of Angus I liked, it was very small and needed to be a bit bigger. I did that thing where you put a grid drawn on tracing paper over it and a slightly larger grid over a bit of paper, draw it, then transfer that picture to the pastel paper . You draw what you see in the grid, it gets the proportions right. He’s got a lot of stripes and blobs, which I would have probably got quite wrong drawing from sight.
I need a light box if I’m going to keep going this way. Or else to print out larger versions of the pictures i want to do. That bit was truly tedious, but i wanted accuracy.
Angus! His eyes are actually about that squished. He’s a lovely, sooky, wonderful cat. Other than that ‘wake Avril up by prodding with a paw at 3 am to indicate it’s time for breakfast’ thing he does EVERY DAY.
Also, is this a drawing or a painting? I bet if I google it it will come up with an equal amount of answers claiming both.
So this worked but I don’t feel I’m getting a lot of love from the pencils. It’s a struggle to master a new medium.
I have a feeling this will be too meticulous a medium for me, as I do tend to like random and fast, and this is anything but. Lets see how I go to adapt it.
