White Rose

Today is bright and sunny after weeks of dull, gray snowy skies.

I am working on color correcting my white rose drawing. How do you color correct white?  In nature or the real world, colors are seldom absolute. Even something that is actually made a single color seldom appears that way. It will have various tints and shade due to the lighting, the complexity of the object and natural contours. As artists we need to be sensitive to this. It is how we get our 2-dimensional drawings to represent a 3-dimensional world.

So today I color corrected my white rose.

Actually the white rose is not completely white. They seldom are. They are usually tinted a bit cream, blue or in this case, blush.

Looking at the heart of the rose I see the blush shading to a deeper pink to peach and coral. I even see a little green and violet in this rose. All of this must be brought out in the finished work.

But the light is fading--so I need to stop until I can see all the find shading/tints and details.

Starting New Colored Pencil Drawings

I am starting several new colored pencil drawings.

Working on very toothy papers, I do not tend to draw free hand directly on my support. I will select materials, either an idea or a photograph (I only work from my own photos, so this is my work completely). Once I know what subject I want, I will play with it on sketching paper, doing thumbnails with simple designs. ea. I will block in basic shapes, shading etc.

Note on working with thumbnails. work within the general shape and size aspect of the work you are thinking of doing. Otherwise, the piece might not be as pleasing as you anticipate.

Once a general idea is done, I will do the more realistic sketch on tracing paper. it is easier to draw and erase on. This is especially true if you decide to draw a complicated image, such as the close up of a flower.

I will grid this work. Sometimes, as in the white rose I have started, I will print out on standard copy paper the photograph I want to use as the subject. This is reference. I will actually grid this, and use it to draw the design onto the tracing paper.

I usually work on tinted, high grit paper, such as sanded pastel paper, mat board or colourfix papers. These do not erase well. So I will transfer the design from the tracing paper to the board with light artists transfer paper. I find that these lines erase much easier and more completely than putting grids on my good paper with either white pencil or graphite. Sometimes I have trouble removing graphite from sanded and colourfix. Graphite also has a tendency to put dents into the mat board, and that you just cannot get rid of.

Another advantage of drawing on the tracing paper, and then transferring it to the good support is that you always have your starting drawing for reference if you get lost. And with a very complicated, detailed drawing this happens more than you might think. I

I do number my grid, ea. lower left corner is 0,0 and I mark each row and column along the way.

If I have a color copy, I also mark this with the exact same grid!

So now I have several drawing layed out and ready to go.

Horse, Rider & Dog 2

blocked in.
 

The basic shapes are blocked in and the baseline colors are established. Drawing on this colourfix paper is like drawing on sandpaper. It eats the colored pencils. You can work effectively with lesser pencils at the base level. I even got out some old crayola colored pencils. I do not recommend these to students because they are so hard as to be frustrating, but the rough surface of this paper did take them with greater saturation than normal. So this was a good use of the harder, cheaper pencils. While this does has plenty of tooth, one of my major complaints for most papers, I am wondering if this paper has a little too much tooth!

 

The grayish background tones down the colors nicely and I think it will give an overall nice feeling to this drawing.

 



starting the second layer
 

Now that I established the basic level on this drawing I can start working on building up the layers and working in more and more details. It has been a challenge, as I am not as familiar with western tack as I am with English. There are many more do-dads! I will start adding more and more levels of value to all of the shapes, defining them more and more.