Posts tagged as:

mixing

Study: Sea 1

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.

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Finaly a nice cloud (Sketch: Clouds 8)

by Henk ter Heide on Sunday October 7, 2007

After a lot of work I’ve drawn clouds that look almost the way I want them to do.

The last clouds sketch I also tried hatching and cross hatching with shorter strokes then I usually use. Usually I use strokes of three to five centimeters. This time I used strokes of only one centimeter.
Clouds 8
The resulting colors are much nicer then in my last sketch. The shapes could be real clouds. Not sure whether I’ve seen all these colors in real clouds though.

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Sketch: Clouds 7

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.

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Study: White lines

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.

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Pulling color (Study: Blue patches)

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.

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Study: Blue tree 4

by Henk ter Heide on Thursday October 4, 2007

An other blue tree. This time an old tree without leafs. That way I have more room to play with the color of the bark and I don’t have to worry about how I should draw leafs.

I know. That is cheating. At some point I must find a solution.

Blue tree 4

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Study: Blue tree

by Henk ter Heide on Wednesday October 3, 2007

Drawing a tree without the use of brown and green.

I’ve found that using only brown and green for a tree isn’t very interesting. It doesn’t feel very life like. When you mix a few colors in it becomes much nicer. Even if you use colors you wouldn’t see in a real tree.
For this drawing I wanted to try to mix brown for the bark and green for the leafs.

The funny thing is that you need blue to mix both brown and green.
The bark went allright. The first drawing has a little to much blue in the bark but after a few tries I get a nice color.
The only problem is that the tree doesn’t have very much bark. So there isn’t much room to play.

I’m not as happy about the leafs. It’s rather scratchy. I must find some other method to draw leafs.

When I was finishing the third tree I realized that I now know how to draw fire. In fact the third tree looks something of a burning match.

Blue tree 1

Blue tree 2

Blue tree 3

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Alchemy (Study: Squared)

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.

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Finding my colors (Study: Mixing colors)

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

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Mixing colors 5B

Featured on See me draw

Yu Chung Peter Chan draws very nice fantasy pictures.

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New box of color pencils (Study: Christening)

by Henk ter Heide on Friday August 31, 2007

Horrible colors

The last few days I’ve been mixing colors. Although the technique didn’t seem to be very difficult the resulting colors where horrible.
After consulting my drawing book I concluded that the problem might be that the colors I used weren’t pure enough.

Pure colors

That presented something of a problem.
I have a 72 piece color pencil box that comes with something like 10 reds and 10 blue’s and 10 greens etc. Which one of those reds is the pure one? And how do I find out?

I solved the problem by buying a new color pencil box. This box has the 12 basic colors in the most pure form.
According the shopkeeper of the art suppley shop the quality of these pencils is such that you can put five layers of color on top of each other and still see the diffirence.

Drawing panic

Five layers of color sounds as though you can make a lot of different colors with it. It’s been a while since I had math but I think that means that I can make several thousands of colors with this pencil set.

Where to start?

For a while the sheer number of possibilities had me frightened. Then I remembered an advise that I gave a few weeks ago: One way of drawing abstract is just to draw what is right in front of you and extend the lines.

You’ll probably won’t recognize this but this drawing started out as the pillows on the chair I drew a few weeks ago.

Christening

Beautiful colors

I must say. These colors are truly beautiful. And these are only a fraction of the number of the number of colors that are possible.

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Going to the movies for a change. Not the flavor of the day but an almost 8 minute showing of a lot of the paintings by Picasso.

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