by Henk ter Heide on Monday August 27, 2007
Cloud colors
After doing a lot of sketches it’s clear that I’m doing something wrong. None of my clouds look like real clouds. After studying them some more I realized that there was something wrong with the colors I’m using. It’s seems that I don’t have cloud colors in my pencil box.
That means that I will have to make them.
Mixing colors
It is possible to make new colors by mixing the colors you already have.
To try the concept I started out with mixing some red’s and blue’s…
Mixing colors 1
and got this.
I didn’t like this very much. It seems so grainy.
Drawing book
A few days later I came accross a book about mixing colors with color pencil.
It seems that you have to blend the colors you’ve mixed.
I mixed some more colors this time using a piece of toilet paper to blend them…
Mixing colors 2
and got this. Looks a lot better although still a bit grainy.
Purple music
Reading a little more in my book I found that you can use hues of grey to make a color darker or lighter. Since I’m still looking for a method to do my drawing “Purple music” I tried some pinks.
Mixing colors 3
I don’t like this. It’s more of a grey/black then pink.
After thinking about it some more I realized that I probably put to much pressure on the pencil when I was coloring grey.
What would happen if I used a little less grey and a little more pink.
For this study I used a little darker hue of pink.
Mixing colors 4
This is better.
The first four are mixes of black and purple and very dark grey and purple. The bottom row are mixes of light grey and purple. Alternating one layer of grey and two layers of grey.
Playing with blue
I also tried some blue thinking that it would be a good idea to have an other go at drawing a starfield.
The left most blue oblong are actually two hues of blue and two hues of grey. The top half consists of dark blue with light grey and the bottom half of dark grey with light blue.
I wanted to know whether it is possible to get the same hue using different combinations.
It is possible!
That could be handy to know.
Featured on See me draw
Would you like a bit of fun?
Court Jones draws caricatures of famous people.
Be sure to also visit his sketchbook!
by Henk ter Heide on Wednesday August 22, 2007
Painting with toilet paper
A few months ago I made a beautiful drawing in which I used a blending technique that seemed almost like painting.
Usually you draw some color on your sheet and rub it either with a tortillon or a piece of toilet paper. This time however I drew the color on a seperate piece of paper and pulled onto my drawing.
Gray on gray
In an attempt to get the shapes I see in the clouds above my head I wanted to try this technique. But a few minutes after starting with the clouds I realized that it wouldn’t work.
With Nova I used a bright yellow color as foreground and the white of the paper as background. But here I wanted to use gray both as foreground and background. You just wouldn’t see it.
Argh! Those clouds are turning out to be a whole of a lot more difficult to draw then I thought.
Clouds 5th sketch
Featured on See me draw
Ian Francis does very expressive paintings of people.
by Henk ter Heide on Sunday July 8, 2007
For this drawing I wanted my colors to smoothly flow from yellow to almost red and from light blue to dark blue almost black.
I first tried blending the colors with a piece of toilet paper and got this sketch.
Pillar of community 1st sketch
You can’t see it very well in the scan but there is a light yellow orange haze on top of the pillar. Using a piece of toilet paper works fine when you want to mix a few colors but it didn’t work for this drawing.
The problem is that the paper very quickly gets dirty. I tried first blending the lighter parts and then moving on to the darker parts but I still got toilet paper with to much pigment on it which was transferred to the drawing.
I did a little research on the Internet and found that there are several blending techniques.
One technique I found myself a few weeks ago. I used it in Blending colors (Art: Sunset 1 sketch). It is possible to use a light colored pencil to blend a darker pigment. A light green or yellow on top of a darker green (or blue) works very nice. While researching I found that this technique is called burnishing. Apparently it works especially nice if you use a colorless blending pencil.
It took me a while before I realized that they meant the white pencil in my pencil box. If you have it, you can also use a blank crayon.
I came across a website where someone talked about using some kind of metal for blending colors. And one website advised using different grains of paper.
I didn’t have any crayons so I had to go to my local art show to buy some. The art shop didn’t have any crayons and advised to go to a toys shop. They did have crayons in lots of colors except blank.
What the art shop did have was something called a “blender”. That’s kind of a brush only where the hairy bit usually goes sits a rubber tip. Apparently it’s specifically made for blending.
For the next test I used medium grain 175 grams paper and soft grain 180 grams paper.
I tried all three techniques at ones.
Starting with the blender which work a little better then toilet paper. Although it did get pigment transferred, you can control it better then with the toilet paper.
Then I tried a metal (spoon). I can’t say that the spoon really did something. I had the feeling that the metal made the drawing a little glassy but I’m not sure.
Pressing hard on the white pencil, starting at the yellow end and working to the darker end did have a very definite result. Not only did it give the drawing a glassy feel but it also gave the colors to flowing feeling I was looking for.
After trying the technique with the yellow orange part I decided that I liked the one on soft grain the best. I don’t know if that had anything to do with the grain or with the way I used the different techniques.
Pillar of community
Hack
When you’re working on more complicate drawings, like this one, you often find that you need to try a color or a new technique. You could take a sheet of drawing paper but usually that would be a waste since you only need a corner.
I’ve solved this by cutting a sheet of (A4) drawing paper in 8 pieces. This way every time I want to try something I can use a little piece of paper.
Being able to experiment is especially useful when you’re doing a drawing with a lot of varying colors like my sketch Cliffside that I will be posting in a few days.
Link
Jason Chan is trying to marry his western art education with his love for eastern art. On his site he has extensive gallery of his work
by Henk ter Heide on Wednesday May 30, 2007
It seems that I was wrong when I said that it wasn’t possible with pencil to put a lighter color on top of a darker color. It is possible only you have to prepare to the color you draw first.
Color tree second blend 1th sketch
You start out with a thick line and blend it with a piece of paper (I suppose a tortillon would also work). After that you can put a lighter color on top.
Even yellow on top of blue doesn’t seem to be a big problem. I never tried it because I was convinced that it would turn green.
by Henk ter Heide on Friday May 18, 2007
This was supposed to be “Color tree 5th sketch” because it’s a follow up on something I tried yesterday.
Holding the pencil the way I described yesterday gives much more color but you lose control. Which is fine because it gives the drawing a feel like anything can happen. But it also means that the color doesn’t cover to whole sheet. There is a lot of white visible within the tree. So this time I thought I’d combine the regular way of drawing to cover the sheet with the new way to get the new feel.
Then I came to the background. Yesterday I used one color green for the grass and one color blue for the sky. Which isn’t very interesting to watch.
Today I thought I’d add molehill (which didn’t work very well) and I’d add some more colors and since it’s only the background I didn’t bother with keeping the colors separate.
In doing so I discovered something new. You don’t need a tortillon or a piece of paper to blend colors. It’s also possible to use a pencil in a different color. Although you can’t see it very well in this scan the light green pencil drags the darker green over the paper. It didn’t work as well with the sky. Maybe I didn’t use the right colors.
Sunset 1th sketch
Which means that my next drawing will be of a sunset with a green field to see how it works out.
(PS A few days ago someone send me a trackback. But being new to Wordpress I only recognized it when I saw the email Wordpress had send me. Sadly by that time I had deleted the trackback.)
by Henk ter Heide on Tuesday May 8, 2007
Pencil is a very unforgiving medium to draw with.
A painter would start this drawing with a sketch using a black pencil or charcoal. Then he’d probably fill the background. Wait for the paint to dry and paint the branches and he would finish with the leaves.
But drawing with pencil there are a few limitations.
Color tree 2th sketch
It is impossible to draw two colors on top of each other without seeing that in the finished picture. Two colors on top of each other either give a third color or sometimes you can’t see the second color.
Light green on top of light bleu gives light bleu. Which might be because green is a mixture of bleu and yellow. So drawing more bleu drowns the yellow out. Or it might be to do with the structure of the paper that some color stick better to the paper.
The fact that I scan my pictures also doesn’t help. After the scanning process sharp lines, even erased sharp lines are much more visible then in the original drawing.
There is only one way to draw a tree like this and that is to start with the leafs, then fill in the branches and trunk and finish with the sky and soil.