Saturday, July 2, 2011

The Night in Battle Creek, Michigan

Wow, what a day! Driving around in the hot sun makes for two very tired people. But clearly not tired enough. We shared information about the various blogs that we follow, techniques that we like, traded recommendations back and forth.
Yummy fruit. I was going for the highlights and darks, but of course made everything uniformly dark, so my overall effect was lost. Part of my problem was that in using complementary colors at the beginning, I probably put too much green in the apple, so it ends up being the same color as the mango, even though it was really a reddish-yellow. Fruits clockwise from the top: apple (in rear); mango (unreadable as such); two strawberries; pear.

Experimented with using a blender pencil and a white pencil (wax) as a sort of frisket, coloring over with both w/c and wax colored pencils. Nice technique... and it works. In fact, I was even able to lift the Inktense blue from the white just a bit!

Top sketch is an apple using a white wax colored pencil to protect highlights. It works well. And when I squint at the sketch, I actually see some roundness. That's encouraging. Vicki and I talked about the Adirondack chairs that she's working on, so I tried sketching a pair from memory. I guess it's not much help if they're facing AWAY from each other, is it?!

And what is this? An intriguing question... can you tone paper enough to be able to use a white pencil on it? Mixed up a thick darkish wash (using my travelling w/c palette) of prussian blue, alizarin crimson, burnt umber, with some green, and laid it on pretty heavily. After it dried, we found that several pencils worked very nicely on it, thank you very much. I did a quick sketch of my troublemaker Numa, though it doesn't seem to look much like a cat. Well, it's the thought that counts.

We finally went to bed around 3 am!

1 comment:

  1. Very interesting sketches and the homemade toned paper. Looks like your experiment went okay.
    Nicely done.

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