Colored Pencil Tips

I've just been reading this month's issue of Colored Pencil, a wonderful magazine created by Ann Kullberg*. Each issue contains a gallery of CP work, and following a link to a painting of a monarch butterfly (very much like one I'm trying to work on) brought me to Denise Howard's website and some amazing CP art.

One post in particular caught my eye, on organizing colored pencils. I have collected several sets in the last two years, thanks to a generous friend and my two wonderful cats, but have to keep them in their original containers since I am torn between organizing by color (meaning that different brands are together) and displaying by brand (in which case I could as well keep them in the sets). This post expanded on a notion that I've seen elsewhere to use PVC pipe, but this time the pipe is really wide (2.5 inches). And now I have the happy notion of placing them on a circular piece of foamcore board for better access to the pencils. I'm already happy imagining a nice lazy susan where I can have pencils sorted by primary and secondary colors (maybe even warm and cool, hmmm), neutrals, greys, and in the center a logical place for rulers, erasers, and the other accoutrements that we tend to acquire.

Just thinking about this has my creative juices flowing, so it's just as well that I won't be able to go to Home Depot for a few days yet.

*I cannot recommend Ann Kullberg's website and magazine highly enough. I've been subscribing to Colored Pencil (formerly From My Perspective) since the beginning of 2010, and recently took advantage of a marvellous sale to purchase 11 CDs of back issues, so now I have the entire set. (Yes, I like to collect sets.)