Here is an installment after two weeks of work. I approached the beginning of this drawing in the same fashion as the still-life that I featured in my blog post of October 15, 2009. I worked in the background first, and then started in on the bowl from the outside in. This will leave the rocks and water for last. I’m having a lot of fun working on this, but there is a challenge in the colors, as I’m slightly tweaking the color to a more “blueish” shade than a more “purple-ish” shade. There are no blacks in the drawing, so the darks are made by layering blues, purples and browns. I am so excited to move on to the reflections that continue on the glass down into the water.
When I start a new drawing on paper, I jump right in and start laying out the drawing directly on the drawing surface. Not so with a sanded surface, such as the Rtistx board I’m using for my new drawing of stones in a bowl of water. The sanded surface is nearly impossible to erase lines from, so I follow a system that seems to work well for me, and I think many artists must do very much the same. (I would be most interested to hear what others do when laying out a drawing on Ampersand Pastel board, Rtistx, or a sanded paper – so feel free to share!)
My first step is to create a basic line drawing – not too detailed, but everything in it’s place, on drawing paper at actual size, as below.
Then I make a copy of this drawing onto a piece of tracing paper, as follows.
Next I take the tracing paper drawing and layer it on top of the Rtistx board, with a piece of transfer paper in between, to offset the drawing onto the board.
Below is the finished product, a transferred line drawing of my future drawing on the piece of Rtistx board.
I’ve been working on this piece for a week and making good progress, so my next post will include a recent photo of the drawing. To close I wanted to share something that I discovered for the first time, which I know many other colored pencil artists have experienced. . . . inconsistent product color. As you can see in the photo below, both pencils are Prismacolor Grayed Lavender, but the lead color is quite different. Fortunately I had several pencils of each, varying shade and was able to continue without difficulty. But it was a head’s up for me to always check the consistency of color when changing pencils.
