Sunday, April 02, 2006

Playing with coloured pencils

I'm now starting the coloured pencils section of my drawing in colour course. To get a feel for them, I did these last night.

Caesar managed to stay still for a few minutes so I just about captured his contours. It was fun playing with the different shadings for his fur.

Then he went and sat on Paul so I did another quick sketch, below.



What I realised is that I need to layer or build up the colours a lot more when using coloured pencils, as they come out fairly faint otherwise. This is the first time I've tried to draw Paul from life since December or January...I just gotta keep trying!

3 comments:

sim said...

Coloured pencils & biros have become my staple medium it seems.
I find that you can get fantasticly subtle shades and mid tones out of them, but if you want dark tones start cheating with a bit of ink over the top.

Its also almost too easy to be precise
A silly thing I used to enjoy doing was sketching an object and shading each definate shadow tone in a different colour. Because you have this control & no real bleeding from one to the other this would produce a clear, crisp, obvious image, but similtaneously would look very odd inded.

If I can find one I'll scan it and blog it.

I like coloured pencils, have fun with the next bit of your course.

Teri said...

Tammy, one thing I would like to share with you about colored pencils is.....you need to press hard to get deep color. I found this out when I took a botanical drawing class. You can use up to five colors to achieve great results. Try it next time and see what you think.

Heartful said...

Thanks Sim & Teri! I'm going to have fun experimenting...