Parrot Tulip
Parrot tulip. Coloured pencils, May 2013
This is another example of the fact that looking at your online drawing shows you all the things which still have to be done. I thought I could call it finished, but I still need to work on the contrast – some parts of the drawing/painting still need to be darkened. Well,,,
Back to the good old colour chart
Colour chart with various green shades.
Some coloured pencil experts stress the importance of putting up colour charts. I must admit that I haven’t done many, but sometimes I do. Here is the one I did yesterday. I am working on a coloured pencil piece with a background in various shades of green. I have been using baby oil as a kind of solvent in my last paintings, and doing this I noticed that the colours get more vibrant this way and even change a bit.
Knowing this I wanted to test the effect in order to select the proper pencil. I used emerald green, juniper green and chromoxide green as the basic greens and added my other greens. I was surprised what a nice green I got using the emerald green and other greens – in the past I hadn’t used emerald green because of its unnatural look.
So now I now, and I am glad that this colour chart will help me doing the background.
Tree Wizard
Wizard Tree. Coloured Pencils on drawing cardboard. March 2013
This is the second coloured pencils drawing which is based on a digital painting. The first one, the eagle, you can see here.
I feel that I’ve discovered quite an interesting way to get ideas for a coloured pencil drawing – play around in Artrage, have the result printed out and then think about how to do a coloured pencil drawing based on that digital piece. “Based” does not mean copying it–when you compare the drawing with the digital painting here you’ll notice that there is quite a difference between the two images.
The other thing is that I used baby oil and markers as solvents on this piece. I used a warm grey #3 marker on the dark green background and I used baby oil for parts of the tree, parts of the water and for the green grass.
Eagle
Eagle. Coloured pencils. Ulla Hennig March 2013
With all the drawing and painting with Artrage going on I don’t want to neglect my coloured pencils. I must admit it is not easy to stick to that goal: Artrage has something addictive to it, especially since the moment I found out how to adjust the settings in order to make my graphic tablet work properly. So I had to kind of drag myself back to the cardboard, but when I had my pencils moving over the paper I felt fascinated again. So I hope to be able to keep that balance between traditional art and digital art!
The Dragon in the Forest
The Dragon in the forest. Coloured pencils on drawing cardboard. Ulla Hennig March 2013
Some time ago I did a digital painting with the same theme – a dragon in the forest. You can see it here: Now I decided to have a go with coloured pencils. As you can see I changed the drawing a bit.
I used baby oil as a solvent almost all over the drawing with the exception of the left hand side of the darker tree. Here I wanted the bark to look lighter – almost white-ish.
The drawing has the size of 17×24 cm (6,7 x 9,4 inches), and I worked about 6 hours on it (from the pencil sketch to the last finish). Coloured pencils are definitely not a fast medium! But it is easy to store the drawing and the pencils away and to get them on the table again the next day.
Colored pencils Video tutorial
I consider the following tutorial a very helpful one: it is relatively short (about 8 minutes), it lists the single steps and it lists the colours of the pencils.
Whale Shark
Whale Shark. Coloured pencils on drawing cardboard. Ulla Hennig February 2013
There was a time when I hated doing backgrounds. In fact I didn’t do them. But now I really enjoy doing them after getting the pencil sketch down on the drawing cardboard. In this case here I particularly enjoyed using all my shades of blue and even some greens. This drawing is not meant as a realistic drawing of a whale shark swimming in the sea. I had the movement of water in my mind and the multitude of shades it can have, and in contrast to that I painted the big, rather static form of the whale shark.
Lily
Lily. Coloured Pencils on drawing cardboard. Ulla Hennig February 2013
I did this for the February challenge over at the Botanicals Forum at Wetcanvas. I had already started a digital version of a lily, but then it became clear to me that it would take me a very long time in order to get a satisfying result – and with “very long time” I don’t mean a few days – it would take me months.
So I decided to change horses and to return to my coloured pencils – here’s the result.
Orange yellow Creature
Orange yellow creature. Coloured pencils. Ulla Hennig February 2013
I mentioned in one of my last posts that I thought about using my digital images as reference for my coloured pencil paintings. This painting here is the first result of putting that thought into practice.
The painting is not a copy of the digital image. I kept the pose of the creature and most of its colours, but I dealt with the background rather freely. But that’s what a reference is made for, isn’t it?
Back to coloured pencils again
Red Squirrel. Coloured pencils. Ulla Hennig February 2013
Here it is – my first coloured pencils piece after returning from the world of digital art. I really enjoyed drawing the cute critter!
