Monday, January 30, 2012

Colored Pencil

This first week is about increasing familiarity with graphite, colored pencil and ink. A basic chart of my Prismacolors, the beginnings of a primary color wheel and a greens chart have kept me busy.

I'll admit it. I don't get very excited over colored pencils. Still, I had fun mixing colors. The greens chart is about columns over rows, four layers. The layering reminds of egg tempera and this chart may come in handy when I get back to that medium.

I can see how the choice of support makes a huge difference. This Stonehenge paper has a tooth that doesn't fill easily, leaving lots of white space. I'm reading that watercolor or vellum papers work well for colored pencil.


2 comments:

  1. Funny how different mediums just "call" to us- I absolutely adore working in coloerd pencil; but paper surface really does matter big time; I love the smooth surface of hot press papers. One can achieve incredible photo-realism with colord pencil (at the cost of alot of time spent burnishing and nursing an aching wrist afterwards) but I actually prefer the look of the sketchy, lighter handed approach. Despite the off-putting yellowish tint, the plate surfaced paper found in the molskine "sketchbook" (lavender label) is one of my all time favorite surfaces for colored pencil.
    ~ gretchen

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  2. Thank you for this! There is to be more work in colored pencil and I will try hot-pressed. While dealing with the mountains and ravines of Stonehenge I did think about trying other papers but HP didn't come to mind. I now remember that in my last botanical class that the instructor mentioned HP as a good support for graphite. Let's see if I grumble less with a nice sheet of Artistico! :-)

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