Contours

Today I finalized the proof of “Daydreams” at Lizza’s Studios.  I’ve been selling prints of some of my work for a while, and Lizza’s always does the scanning and giclee prints for me.  Additionally, I use their scans for my CPSA show submissions, since their professional scans look 1000% better than what I can accomplish with either a photo or pieced together scan on my home computer. Read more »

Opaline Dreams was interesting in that it was my first attempt at mixing Prismacolors with Neocolor IIs, which are water soluable.  Neocolors look much like a Crayola crayon when you hold them (although they are still considered a colored pencil – imagine the ‘lead’ of a colored pencil wrapped in paper, instead of wood).  It takes a bit of experimenting on a test scrap of paper to determine the right combination of crayons to achieve your color, especially since, once you wet them, the color will be very intense.  For this piece, I intended to use the Neocolors only for the darks; this was because I really felt the gray green color of the Colourfix paper was a key part of the skin tones and fabric, and wanted it to show through in the lights.  Since Colourfix can be difficult to get a full range of values on, having solid darks on a lighter paper also helped address this.

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I’ve just started working on a new piece, and snapped a photo of one of my favorites parts of the process – working out the color palette.  If possible, I’ll lay down the swatches on scrap pieces of the actual paper I’m using (in this case, black Colourfix).  If I like the color, I’ll put the pencil aside into my “palette box” for the picture.  Hopefully I’ll also remember to label the color – something I don’t always do when I’m rapidly trying many colors – so I can reference it later on.  It’s also a nice sanity check to look at all of the colors in the piece at once as swatches – if they have good harmony, then I’ll feel more confident about how the final picture will look.  Here’s the pic of the working palette for my new piece:

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Haven was done on violet blue Colorfix paper. I envisioned the skin tones being filled with blue, and the woman’s face being nearly silhouetted against the light of the window. I wasn’t quite sure how to handle such a dark blue picture, but I thought I’d figure it out as I went along.

I’ve put together a progression of the drawing from start to finish so you can see how I tackled it:

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