church

Second thought

Last week I finished my series of experiments to find an easy technique to draw a dark color around light colored details and although it was fun to do the experiment it wasn’t fun to write about it. Publishing was even less fun because hardly anyone came by to read it.
Half way through the series I even wondered why I would take the effort to write series about experiments. It’s much more fun to just draw the pictures that I see in my mind and write about them.

I need the techniques

It was only half way through the 8th sketch of Purple music that I remembered why I was doing experiments.

While listening to Leonard Cohen’s Suzanne two months ago I envisioned a pictured that was so beautiful it send an electrical current down my spine.
I had to draw it.

But after doing a few sketches it became clear that I just didn’t have the technique needed to do that drawing. I needed a blended color running from a dark hue to a lighter hue serounding a few details. At that time I did know how to blend colors if the whole surface would be done in one or two hues but I didn’t know what to do about detail.

The first experiment

At first I thought that it might be possible to first draw the background and then erase a part so I could fill in the details and I experimented with drawing some flowers. That looked quite good.

But then I tried it on Purple music.

(Could be) Purple music 7th sketch

I found two problems. First when I drew the flower I blended several colors on top of each other and that worked fine. But if I try to blend one color in several layers and then erase some patches I can’t see what I erased. If I can’t see what I erased before I put on the last layer I won’t get the right colors.
Secondly the erased patches where the wrong shape and in the wrong places.

That had me stumped. For a while I even thought that this picture would be impossible to draw.
But after reading about the 4th of July I again started to think about dark colors surrounding light colors. It’s not just this drawing that would benefit from a technique to color around details.

The second experiment

Drawing fireworks (or stars) would be a perfect opportunity to try some techniques. Although I didn’t think about it before hand I could have known that people wouldn’t understand why I would take so much time to draw fireworks in the middle of July.

The goal of the experiment was two fold. I wanted to find a technique to draw a dark color around a lighter color. I assumed that if I would find such a technique it would be easy to extend it to blending colors around details.
How wrong I was.

I did find a relatively easy (all be it) very dirty technique to color around a detail. But it doesn’t lend it self for blending.

Skills?

Although the second experiment did give me a technique to draw fireworks and stars it was a failure in that it didn’t help me with Purple music. Apparently there are no techniques that will help me do this drawing. So what about skills?

After blending colors in Crossing lines I thought I was ready for this drawing.

Purple music 8th sketch

But clearly I’m not. There’s no blending of colors here.

How to procede

If you want to mix colors using paint you’d usually start with one color (say blue) and mix in an other color (say orange) to get a third (purple). If you want to blend colors using paint you start with a lot of one color (blue) and mix in a little of the other (orange) and paint a piece of your paper. By adding ever more orange the color on your paper would change.

But color pencil boxes come equipped with several hues of purple. So you’re tempted to just mix the hues that you have. Only thing is that it doesn’t seem to work that well. Not to get the range of color I want for this drawing.
The only thing I can think of right now is that I should try to blend colors in the same way the painters do. I’m not sure whether that would work so I’ll have to do some more experiments.

Featured on See me draw

Among other Ryan Church did a part of the artwork at Star Wars.
On his site he show both his proffecional work as his personal work.

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