fireworks

Light color on top of dark color

Ever since I started drawing with color pencils I found one annoying problem. It isn’t possible to draw with a lighter color on top of a darker color. That’s a problem because there’re a lot of situations where you would want to do so. White clouds reflecting on dark water or pink flowers in a green tree to name a few examples.

An alternative to drawing lighter colors on top of darker colors could be to first draw the light color and then draw the darker color around them. But that wouldn’t be a very easy way of drawing and prone to accidents.

Experimenting

Thinking about easy ways to draw fireworks I realized that this would be the perfect opportunity to do a little experimenting to find an easy technique to color around a light color using a darker color.
This post is the first post of a mini series. The series will consist of four parts.

An easy artsy way of drawing fireworks
An easy and dirty way of drawing fireworks
A quick and dirty way of drawing fireworks
The easy and greasy way of drawing stars.
(You might also be interested in my easy technique to draw fireworks with crayons)

Cheating

The first technique is something of a cheat.
The easiest way to draw light colors on top of a dark blue color is simply to buy a piece of dark blue paper and draw something on it.

Fireworks easy artsy

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Although this is very easy method it not very practical. In most situation you won’t be able to use blue paper. In the next part I try something that, hopefully, works a little better.

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After reading about the 4th of July a few weeks ago I thought that it would be nice if there was some easy method to draw fireworks.

After thinking about it for a while I came up with a few methods. One very easy method use crayons.

When you’re finished with this drawing you’ll end up with something looking like this:

Fireworks

Paper

Using the kind of paper you use to make business card, you start out with drawing a template to help you find important features of your drawing:

Fireworks template

Template

It doesn’t matter if you make any mistakes while drawing this template because all the lines will be covered.

The crossing lines at 1, 2 and 3 will become the center of spreading fireworks.
Between line 4 and 5 I’ll color some brown crayon to draw the rooftops.
Line 6 shows were I’ll color some green that will become plants when the drawing is finished.

After drawing your template you use the crayon to color the template:
(My crayon box came with only five colors but you can use as many colors as you like.)

Firework 1th color layer

The pencil lines will help you decide where the different colors must come.

The cover up

Now you cover the whole drawing with black crayon. Take care that the outer edge stays visible.

Fireworks 2th color layer

Getting artsy

As you can see all the lines and colors are completely covered.
With the help of the lines in the edge you still know where the center of the fireworks are and where the rooftops and plants will have to go.
My crayon box came with a scraper. But if you’ve lost it you can also use an old teespoon to scrape the black crayon off.

Fireworks almost there

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There you are

This would be a nice picture if it wasn’t for the lines at the edge.

To finish the drawing I covered the edges with strips of red paper and ended up with this:

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