Back to “Tanglewood” – done already in gouache and watercolor and pastels. Now it is time to do it in acrylic! (If you want to see these, and the photo, click on the tag “Tanglewood”.)
Here I decided to work on setting up values – light and dark, warm and cool. I thought it might be fun to set up areas in complementary colors, but who knows. The whole thing could end up very odd looking, certainly for me and my boring outlook and driveness to reality. I am seeing this as an adventure. The photograph itself is rather dark and murky.
Colors used on Fredrix canvas pad are cobalt blue, Naples yellow, quinacridone magenta, and zinc white. These are applied atop 2 layers of gesso and then a substrate of yellow ochre mixed with Marigold (Holbein’s cadmium orange).
Nothing like learning a few things! I’ve drawn with colored pencils on a very causal basis, but what I learned today included: use of Saral, a waxy transfer paper; use of burnishing and blending pencils. Never heard of those before today, but used all three.
Where to begin? I got there 30 minutes late – I thought class began at 9:30 but, no, 9:00. Oh, well.
Subject was a rose. Place the Saral between the picture you are going to use as reference and the paper you are going to draw upon – like carbon paper. Press hard to be sure it is on the drawing surface. Then, remove the Saral, and use a rubber eraser to blot the lines. This lightens them so you can still see them, but not so dark they are obvious. The paper we used had a bit of tooth, to catch the colors, and we worked from light to dark, white to reds and pinks and into the greens of the leaves. The suggestion was to moosh up a background to keep the rose from floating in space, so I did.
When I got home, I was interested in trying my hand on different papers. I have some bristol paper, which is a very smooth and very white paper.
This paper is so, so smooth that it is actually slick. As a result, colors are blended into one another very easily. I think the Prismacolor Premier pencils may be too soft for this paper and a harder, oil-based pencils, such as Polychromos, may be better suited for bristol.
The next experiment was done on some of my MiTeintes pastel paper; here, a mid-blue. I sketched directly onto the paper, using a very pale yellow pencil to create the general shapes as well as limn in the lights and darks. I decided to look at values the best I could, as well as whether they values tended toward warm or cold. The sunlight was dappled on the leaves, with some bright yellow green, and other a deep, blue-green tending toward black.
Out of all of these, I like the galangal the best. I like it because I had gotten a better sense of how to use the colored pencils, learning some of their characteristics and qualities. The blue background adds to the picture. The light and dark colors worked pretty well, and remembering to use complementary colors to dull down shadow areas I think kept the vibrancy. So, for a yellow-green leaf, the shadow colors were a purplish red, or a layer or two of each.
I don’t know if colored pencils will become a big love in my life, but I do enjoy drawing. My Pencil Portrait class was a real joy. I think I learned a lot in it, and moving to colored pencils is interesting. Shades of grey in graphite now are translated (or attempted to be translated) into values in color – something that is very, very challenging for me.
Even with a straight-on viewpoint, the cup is lopsided.
Parts of things are easier to paint because they lack the reference points of a complete coffee cup.
In all of these, I tried to use complementary colors, either as shadows and / or background color.
The first one is a green-blue, so the complement is red-orange. Adding reds and oranges to cobalt turquoise produced some interesting greys for the shadows of the first coffee cup.
The second coffee cup is red (with some orange) so I used greens, but thought shadows looked better with some violet and deep blue added, with a smidge of black.
The third cup is mostly a yellow color, with some medium blue for shadows. Additionally, I added purples, blues, and greens to the coffee beans in the coffee cup.
Journey by Paper 