Experimenting with coloured pencils

Using coloured pencils is time consuming and building up the colour takes patience.  I tried blending two colours using a propen blender but I found that it darkened the colour and gave it a muddied effect.  I then tried using a pencil blender and this worked really well, the yellow and blue produced a green and it also smoothed out the lines giving a matt look.  Coloured pencils do not erase very well so some thought about what you are doing is essential.  A good knowledge about colour co-ordination is useful and trying colours out on a spare piece of paper is a good idea.  The use of coloured pencils have been taken more seriously in recent years and artists are using these as an alternative medium.  They lend themselves to detailed work and I have sought the permission of an award winning artist Jonathan Newey to use his pictures as an example.  His web site address is http://www.jonathannewey.com/.

                 Scarlet Macaws by Jonathan Newey Coloured Pencils on Paper

                 Primate Eyes by Jonathan Newey Pencil on Black Paper

                     Scruffy by Jonathan Newey Coloured Pencil on Paper

Exploring Coloured Media

My past experiences with painting has been mainly water colour so coloured pencils, pastels, inks and markers are relatively new to me, so I have decided to tackle these exercises differently.  I find that doing exercises in boxes too restrictive for me as I need to experiment and really try out the coloured media and also try them out on different papers.  So my first real change is using an A3 sketch book instead of A4 which allows me feel more space to fill and I think this has given me more scope for ideas.

I firstly experimented with soft pastel and I worked with pastel pencils, pastels sticks and a very soft pastel which was almost like powder.  I tried all three on pastel paper and tried different ways of blending i.e. with finger, torchon, cotton bud, kitchen roll and a rubberised blender.

  I also discovered that pastel is water soluble and you can add water and move it around with a brush. I found that the soft pastels you could apply with kitchen roll or a cotton wool pad which I think would work for soft skies.  I found that the light colours need to be laid down first as it was hard to get a light tone on top of dark colours  when blended although you could add a white highlight directly on top of dark colour and leave it unblended. The next paper I tried was colour fix which has a rough sandpaper texture and I found that you had to put on the layers quite thickly and work it into the tooth well.  I didn't like this paper but it holds the pastel in place and supposedly doesn't need fixing.  The third paper I tried is Pastelmat which I have used before it is a smoother paper with a very fine tooth and out of the three I found this one the best for all the types of pastel I have.  The other paper I haven't tried is velour and this is supposed to give the picture a very soft look.

http://pastelnews.com/2010/02/28/old-pastel-master-maurice-quentin-de-la-tour/

One of the great Pastel Masters a Frenchman Maurice Quentin de la Tour worked primarily in pastels in the rococo style (style related to the court of Louis XV ornamental and lavish).  Among his most famous painting was a picture of the Marquise de Pompadour who was mistress to the king.  In 1737 he exhibited 150 portraits mostly pastel paintings and became portraitist to the King.  The painting of Marquise de Pompadour is a stunning picture with luxurious fabric brilliantly highlighted to give it texture.  The whole picture is stunning and incredible to think it was done with pastels.      

                   Picture of the Marquise de Pompadour downloaded from   

                                 http://www.bridgemaneducation.com/Search.aspx

The next mdeium I tried was water colour pencils, I experimented with them on cartridge and water colour paper, aquarell not cold pressed and artistico fabriano.  All three papers worked but I think that the cartridge paper was better with dry pencil work and the water colour paper you could do both wet and dry.  What I discovered with water colour pencils is that if you made a heavy line and applied water the line still remains and doesn't blend in which is useful for veins on a leaf, lines on onion skins and perhaps foliage and blades of grass.  I tried blending with a propen marker which gave a deeper tone and also with a pencil blender which softened the colour.  Cross hatching works well and you can build it up on layers.  I then decided to try the medium with using wet and dry techniques and it works well together.

I also tried using the pencils with water soluble pens and this also was a good effect.

The next medium I used was coloured inks and pen.  This is a very new medium for me and I enjoyed seeing what I could do with them.  For stipling and making dots they are excellant and I tried cross hatching and again a good effect.  Using the colour as a wash was interesting as there was slight colour mixing but once it dried you can put on another wash in a different colour and the under wash doesn't move.  I tried some of the marks Van Gogh used in the Olive Trees and it was fun.

Oil pastels were surprising, initially I had a few very cheap oil pastels and I couldn't blend them so I bought some artist quality pastels and the difference was immediate.  They blended very well and it was like painting with lipstick!  The colours are so vibrant and it stands out on the paper beautifully.  The problem I had with them is trying to do detailed work, it was very difficult.  It was great for scratching into and you could put another colour on a  base coat and the colour showed through when scratched.

I also had a go at trying to use the pastels in a picture and what I liked about them that you can blend in different colours to achieve tone which adds more depth and the interest.

Coloured fine liners produced a flatter more uniform mark, you could vary the line by pressing lightly but it doesn't change as much as pen and ink.  I tried stipling and using different coloured dots together and this gave a good texture it also made me think how much work went to the paintings of George Seruat and Paul Signac who used this technique with paint to produce very textured paintings with a modernist feel about them.

Below is a picture by Paul Signac  called Antibes, The Pink Cloud, down loaded from the Bridgeman Education Library.

Assignment one

Man Made Still Life

I began by putting some objects together and firstly I drew three compositions to decide which one I would chose and also whether I would chose landscape or a portrait drawing.  I also drew some of the individual components so I was more familiar with them.

I then played about with colour to try and decide what medium I would use to apply colour to the finished drawing.

I  tried coloured pencils which were effective but because of the size of the A2 paper I thought that pastels would cover better.  I then tried to draw a charcoal landscape format on A2 just to make sure that portrait was the way to go.

I definitely then decided portrait was the format to choose.  From here I decided to draw on A3 paper a pastel preliminary drawing.

It was a disaster!  I concentrated so much on the objects I lost sight of the rest of the picture and I made up the background, even worse mistake.  The table is floating in the air and the background colour awful.  I was going to throw the lot away and start again and after thinking about this I had to rethink how I would tackle the problems so I just committed to A2 for the final piece.

The table I feel should have been placed further up in the picture as the two front legs of the table drop out of the drawing and then there would have been less background to fill as I think there is too much dressing gown shown. 

The second part of the Assignment a still life with natural objects I began in the same way playing about with the fruit visually and then drawing them in pencil and deciding on the composition.

I then drew the fruit and played about with colour and used coloured pencils to start with and this time I was also thinking about the background which was kitchen tiles.  I tried conte-crayon dragging the stick sideways over the paper and it worked. 

 I next tried pastel pencils, soft pastel and oil pastel and liked the effect.  I tried outlining the fruit with black oil pastel and this reminded me of Patrick Caulfield usage of black line so I thought I would give it a go.

I then did a quick drawing in charcoal so I could get a general idea of how it would look.

I decided to do my preliminary drawing in A3 in coloured pencils and use the conte-crayon for the tiles on the back wall.  I did not like the effect but perhaps it didn't combine  well with coloured pencils.

It was hard to get a shadow on top of the conte-crayon and in hindsight I should have tried hatching.  Anyway I decided to not use the conte-crayon in the final picture and chose pastel.

I am not too pleased with the background as it fights with the foreground.  I used the oil pastel to outline the fruit and I think that I shouldn't of outlined everything.  I feel that I have lost tone and form in the pineapple and I should have put in more shading.  Before I started the background the box was uncoloured and initially I wanted to leave it white as it looked effective seeing the coloured fruit through it.  I should have left it white and decided when the picture was finished whether it worked or not.  The completed picture was drawn on soft grey pastel mat and I used pastel pencil, soft and ultra soft pastel, black oil pastel, coloured pencil (on the orange peel) and black crayon.

 

Enlarging

Having drawn a simple picture with a 1cm square grid drawn over the top I then proceeded drawing a rectangle with a increasing the squares to 2cm. Copying the picture square by square was exacting and time consuming but I felt that it was worth it.  It was only a simple drawing I attempted but I felt it worked and while I was drawing the enlarged version it struck me that if I had wanted to double the size of the picture purely by eye it would have ended up considerably smaller!

Using Texture

I made a series of 5cm boxes and tried to use different objects of varying  textures and tried different ways of using tools to achieve an effect. I firstly tried an orange and used different methods of  techniques.  Some methods worked and some didn't and I found that the type of paper used had a bearing on the result i.e. I tried pencil on a cold pressed 140lbs water colour paper and this gave a good efect with little effort but drawing in detail was not so easy.  I tried graphite dust collected from a graphite stick and I tried to dab it on using a stipling brush this was not very successful so I tried stipling with the pencil over top again not very successful.  I had some success with a towelling fabric which is shown in the sample box and I used the same technique with coloured pencils to show texture on an avocado this seemed to work as well.

I them tried some frottage and there some interesting effects it is easy to see why Ernst incorporated them into his work.  I then tried some more textural boxes and I think that I need to play about and use more ways of developing this further I am already flipping back in my sketch books to see what I have done and using ideas from it.  It is proving to be a very useful tool.

The last drawing I tried was to develop the technique I tried to draw a towel with some other objects and it wasn't so succuessful but I tried too hard with getting the texture I lost sight of the tone and started to rub out highlights so it did not look so good.  I think the technique was sound but the execution lousy!

Botanical course with coloured pencils

On May 20th I attended a Botanical course with coloured pencils for 2 days at Missenden Abbey.  The tutor was Jill Winch and as we were only a group of six we all had a lot of one to one help.   Like all colour mediums it is the experience in which colour to use that is important.  I hadn't much experience in using polychromos pencils and I was amazed at the effect and opacity of the medium.

I chose a clematis and it took the entire two days to complete!  The drawing was on Fabiano Artistico paper which is a lovely paper to work on and it is the first time I have drawn on this type of paper. 
On the whole I came out with a picture and the rudiments of how to colour leaves, the importance of accuracy and observation, the use of embossing, and how to produce a bloom effect on fruit.
What I already know about myself is that I have to work more quickly, I found that I tackled the drawing with much more confidence and I did this quickly but I was more tentative about applying colour and this took the time.  Whether I will go back and study botanical work in more depth I do not know as I am trying to move away from exacting drawing and trying to be more expressive.  I felt this was encouraging me to be precis and exact which was very useful from an observational point of view but not so good for freeing up your work.

Max Ernst

Max Ernst was born in 1891 and died in 1976 ( http://www.abcgallery.com/E/ernst/ernst.html).  He was born in Bruhl near Cologne and he never received any formal training but studied philosophy and psychiatry at Bonn University between 1919-1914.
He became friends with Jean (Hans) Arp who was assoicated with several art movements. He was conscripted into the army and this had a devastating impact on his art and his life. (www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Ernst) He referred to this in his autobiography as 'on the 1st day in August  1914 as the day he died' and 'on the 11th November 1918 the day he was resurrected'.
After being demobbed he founded a group of Dadaists which is a form of anachist art.  Dadaism sprung from WW1 and for some it was a protest against bourgeois nationalism and colonist ideals, which many thought that this was the underlying cause of wars. 
( http://www.abcgallery.com/E/ernst/ernst.html).  His works of this period consisted of collage and junk assemblages.

             Down loaded from the Bridgeman Education Library, collage 1920-21 in the Dada style

In 1924 Andre Breton first published the First Surrealist Manifesto and Max Ernst was among those who took an active part in founding the new movement.  Ernst also developed Frottage (French for rubbing) a technic where paper is held over a textured surface and then with pencil rubbing over the paper to create a pattern in a similiar way to brass rubbing.  He also developed a technique called grattage where usually dry paint is scratched off the surface revealing a textured surface underneath.

                 Downloaded from the Bridgeman Education Library Fish bone Flowers 1928 Oil on Canvas
In 1918 he Married Luise Straus although this was short lived his son was born in 1920 and in 1921 he met Paul Eluard and moved in with him leaving his wife and son behind. He signed a contract with Jacues Viot which allowed hin to paint full time, and in 1925 he set up a studio at 22 Rue  In 1926 he collaborated with Joan Miro and experiemented with his frottage and grattage techniques
In 1927 he married Marie-Berthe Aureche which again did not last long  and again he remarried art patron Peggy Guggenheim in 1942.  After another shortlived marriage in 1946 he married Dorothea Tanning.  They lived in Sedona Arizona until 1953 when they both moved to a small town South of Paris where in 1966 he created a chessgame made of glass described by the poet Andre Verdet as a masterpiece of bewitching magic.
Ernst died on 1st April 1976 and left a huge imprint in the world of modern art.