September 17, 2011

     This magnolia pod ended up going through stages... At first, I drew this with 2B and 4B mechanical pencils. As I was drawing I kept thinking what a shame it was not to color in those wonderful red beans, but unfortunately the graphite would smear and dull the colors of just about any other medium I used. 
     I ended up coloring in the beans with colored pencils, but when I tried barely touching in some of the rest of the colors the graphite interfered and muddied the color while the colors smudged the graphite. Disagreeable. 
     The rest of the pod is all very softly colored, so I ended up touching in the rest of the body with very thin water colors so the graphite drawing showed through, but then having to go back in with graphite to touch up where even that thin application frosted over and obscured the details. 

June 21, 2011

    The first day of summer in COLOR...

March 21, 2011

     Okay - so this isn't a new sketch... but I'm so far behind right now that I'm allowing myself to post the colored version of this previous drawing as a sketch for a day. I decided to try coloring this one, and in keeping with the child-like drawing, I wanted to try using crayons. I had a box of 64 I'd picked up as a whim somewhere because the colors grabbed me  (no wonder kids eat these things). I knew the paper wouldn't take water color, but I decided to color it with crayon and wash over it with water color since it would resist - which it did; and beaded up nicely, which you can see if you click on the image to enlarge it. Ignore the buckles - they're from the paper being for sketching and not water media. I'll plan ahead better next time, but an experiment is an experiment and play is just that!

March 15, 2011

    This is the crab shell left sitting on the bench in the sun. I did it with colored pencil and a hit of white paint... an entirely different treatment of colored pencil. The odd white "eye" spot is a barnacle... I could have left it out, but I liked the peculiar alien look on an entirely alien but earthly co-habitant.

March 10, 2011

     This is a blue glass cruet with glass stopper. The line down the left side and the shadows on the paper behind it are because I'm having to get used to a new software. Perhaps when I learn to do this better I'll replace the image with one scanned more tidily.
     I used Prismacolor pencils, and would have liked to have had a smoother paper, but you can zoom and see that I laid down so much pigment it should bloom like a candle (am I mixing my metaphors if I mean "bloom" as in wax?) to crush down the pores. I enjoy using either a light touch or a heavy one with colored pencils... it was fun simply to do one with Color!