It was still raining today, so no watercolours. Instead, I went for the experiment at…
JenH
I headed out to my local Hobbycraft yesterday to do some shopping. I bought replacements for seven or eight colours that seem to be shrinking down fast and bought some new colours, expanding my collection to a little over 50. But, most inportant of all, I bought some heavier paper to use those pencils on. I couldn’t find the three types of paper that I was looking for (and have since forgotten what they were) but I did remember that watercolour paper can be pretty good with coloured pencils. I made sure the paper was chose was acid free but wasn’t fussed by the cotton content. In the end I went for some cheapish paper by Seawhite of Brighton. It felt thick enough and was in a spiral bound book with hard covers, which I liked. It was cold pressed rather than the (smooth) hot pressed paper that I’d seen some people preferring but I liked the feel of the cold pressed. There’s more texture there and I like that. Maybe I’ll try cold pressed at some point.
The subject today was JenH, making her debut. I’ve gone again for a back pose and a drawing made of straight lines. Front views and curves work best with the inktense pencils, which are more forgiving if I get things wrong. With straight lines and a back view, it’s much harder to come up with a drawing that looks wrong. So this may be the way I go with the coloured pencils, although I’m also going to come back to portraits at some point.
As usual, most of the pencil marks went down using the edge of the pencil tip. I put on as much colour as I could before getting to the point where the paper wouldn’t accept any more, and by this time ai’d put down enough to make things interesting. Then I burnished it all over by going over everything with the point of a pencil: a grey for the hair and a light flesh colour (I think it was ivory, one of my new ones) for the body.
And it’s another good one, and is going up for sale. It’s hard to go wrong with paintings like this. My next figure drawing, though, will be with the inktense pencils – I need to practice curved lines.
Oh, and on a separate subject, I think it’s the kneadable eraser itself that’s been giving me problems with smudges. I’ve thrown it away now and am going back to the Faber Castell version.
Leave a Reply