by Henk ter Heide on Monday April 5, 2010
It does seem to be possible to control the colors while I’m color hatching and still get some interesting colors.
Of course this drawing is only a proof of concept. Doesn’t look like much, does it.
Turns out that there is a way to get the colors to interact. I can use either the lightest yellow or the white pencil to blend colors.
If I use yellow to blend blues I get a lot of green colors.
If I use white something happens. Not quite sure what.
I have to do some more experimenting to find out.
Color hatching 1
by Henk ter Heide on Wednesday October 24, 2007
by Henk ter Heide on Monday October 15, 2007
Trying out a new method to sharpen my pencils.
I’ve been reading that some people use a piece of sanding paper to sharpen their pencils. I never saw the point in that (if you pardon the pun). But now I’ve started drawing with the side of the pencil it make all the more sense. With sandpaper I can get a much sharper point then using a table top sharpener. Which means that I can use a larger part of the pencil.
That gives me much more control over the drawing and mixing of colors.
Tree 8
For this drawing I started out with light and dark blue and mixed yellow in. That is, I try to cover the paper with blue before applying the yellow. It seems that I get the best green when I use the yellow as a blending pencil.
by Henk ter Heide on Saturday October 13, 2007
Mixing sea colors
Sometimes I think I should just stick with abstract drawings seeing that most of my drawings look abstract.
But as much as I like abstract drawings, I like nature drawings even more. Abstraction is only a state were my drawings go through.
Blending several layers of blue and yellow I mixed a lively color green only to find that it’s the wrong color.
At first I thought that it should be darker, which it should. After thinking about it for some more I realized that I’m missing a shade.
This is supposed to be a wave. The top halve of the wave is curling forward and should cast a shade.
Sea 4
by Henk ter Heide on Tuesday October 9, 2007
My first attempt at drawing a seascape.
The problems are obvious:
- Since I can’t draw with white I must find a way to lift the foam out of the background color. This attempt doesn’t look right.
- The color of the beach is off.
- The color of the sea isn’t right.
- The shape of the waves aren’t right.
Oh lucky me. I would hate it if the drawing was a success on my first attempt. 
Sea 1
At the edge of a wave you find a lot of foam that becomes thicker when your eyes move towards the shore. I tried to create that effect by pulling the blue pigment onto the white paper with a white blending pencil. It didn’t work very well and you can hardly see it in the scan.
Even so it’s something I think should work. Something to work on in my next study.
by Henk ter Heide on Sunday October 7, 2007
Returning to my study to mix the colors needed to draw clouds.
It’s been a little over a month but I finaly have the feeling that I should be able to mix some colors to do the drawing I wanted to do.
Clouds 7
The colors in this sketch aren’t very good. To make matters worse I don’t like the way you can see the pencil scratches.
I did find out that there is a little difference depending on whether you blend with a tortillon or with a white pencil. White pencil seems to pull the blue’s out while tortillon pulls the reds out.
I don’t know why that is or if it has anything to do with the drawing method.
by Henk ter Heide on Saturday October 6, 2007
Using my new blending technique.
You can use a tortillon to mix colors over a large surface. But what do you do when you only want to mix a line of colors. Then you use a white blending pencil.
White lines
The only problem I have at the moment is that I can’t predict what color the blended line will have. Using yellow and blue the line should have been green. But for some reason it isn’t.
by Henk ter Heide on Saturday October 6, 2007
Stumbling into a new technique.
I wanted to experiment with a few blue colors just as I did for green in a study a few days ago. Finding a few colors I could use in clouds or in a sea drawing.
When mixing colors I always like to mix in some white. Even though I wasn’t clear on the effect it would have.
In the study a few days ago I used thick layers of pigment and although the white gave the color a softer feel it didn’t make that much difference.
This time I mix thin layers of pigment. Blending them with a white pencil had an astounding effect. The blending pencil pulled the color out of the paper.
Blue patches
Especialy with the four lower patches you can see the result of blending with a white pencil.You can, of course, get the same effect if you use a tortillon but a blending pencil has a sharp point that can create interesting effects. In my next drawing I will show you what I mean.
by Henk ter Heide on Tuesday October 2, 2007
Mixing a few colors to find the colors I need to draw a tree.
After discovering that drawing in detail probably will work better when you use pencil I wanted to try to draw an other abstract tree. But I soon realized that I didn’t know how to create the colors I would need.
So instead I experimented a little with colors.
The strange thing is that mixing colors with pencils isn’t as much as chemistry as I had expected. When you mix colors using paint you can to a certain extend predict what colors you will get. But with pencil the it doesn’t seem to work.
With paint if you mix a little bit of yellow with a lot of blue you get a dark green. With pencil it all depends. If you start with blue and put yellow on top you get dark green. But when you start with yellow and put blue on top you get blue. Not entirely the same hue blue as you had, but still blue.
When you mix three colors it really becomes complicated. Much more alchemy then chemistry.
But by far the strangest thing is that I found that I need blue both to create an interesting green and to create an interesting brown color. That means that the next drawing will be a something of a blue tree.
Well not really blue. But I’ll have to use a lot of bleu.
Squared
The other interesting thing about this study is that I don’t have any of the colors you see in my pencil box. Every color (except one) is a mix of at least two other colors. Although for some I mixed five colors including using a white blending pencil.
by Henk ter Heide on Monday September 3, 2007
Mixing colors
After making my first drawing with my new pencil box I’m a bit at a loss.
Until now I would look into my (old) 72 set pencil box and chose colors that best fit the drawing I wanted to make. But now I can make a few hondred colors and I don’t even know what they look like. Every time I mix two (or more) colors I get a surprise. A nice surprise in that I get very nice colors. But you can’t draw if you don’t know what colors you have.
Test
Over the next week I will test which colors I can make by mixing two pencils with each other. Today I mixed the first four color pencils in my box with every other color.
Mixing colors 5A
Mixing colors 5B
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