Or, Know Your Tools

Once in a while, I do art just because I want to try something new.

Sometimes, the art I do is just for fun or to say I did something in the studio without actually working on a paid portrait or a gallery painting.

This little ditty is one of those projects that falls into both of the categories just mentioned.

First of all, a little information. This is on black Rives BFK printmaking paper. It began life as Thunderhead in Colored Pencil. That painting was an experiment on a new kind of paper and it didn’t survive. Read all about it here.

The piece of paper is 7 inches by 9 inches and when the original test failed, one of the options was to cut it down and try a different technique.

Another option was to flip the paper over and try the back.

The artwork shown here is on the back of that paper.

This past Saturday at the gallery involved a lot of printing, namely newsletters. That meant lots of waiting.

That piece of paper was still on the desk, so on a whim, I got out seven pencils ranging in color from a light yellow green to violet and began applying color in broad, diagonal strokes. The first photograph shows the first layer of color.

Each subsequent layer followed the same pattern. I wanted to see how color went onto the second side.

A confession. I also wanted to see if I could create the same kind of failure on this side as happened on the first side.

As you can see by these photos, color went on very well.

As you can also see, I couldn’t make the paper tear. And I did try. I used pressure ranging from a fairly light “2″ or “3″ at the beginning to a hefty “8″ or “9″ at the end.

I also was quite vigorous in color application. Lots of color and lots of energy. I didn’t pay much attention to the composition other than turning the paper 180 degrees with each pass to avoid creating an accidental “arc” in the color bands.

One of the things I despise in using colored pencil are the flecks of paper that show through color layers if a paper is very toothy or color applications are very light. Lots of artists use this aspect of colored pencil work very well, but I don’t like it in my own.

So I paid special attention to the saturation of each layer of color and to the amount of paper tooth I was able to fill in.

As you can see from this detail, there is still a few flecks of paper showing, but the overall saturation is very good.

I didn’t do the traditional layering with an under painting, then color. This was all direct color application.

And application was pretty much straight forward and with a much heavier hand than I usually use with colored pencil.

But the results were pleasing. Wonderful, bright colors. An interesting pattern and, believe it or not, a piece of artwork that’s worth framing.

In fact, with the next exhibit looming at the Carriage Factory Art Gallery, I may just surprise all those people who know me as a horse painter and put in an abstract!

By the way, for those who are interested, the colors I used were True Green, Light Aqua, True Blue, Violet, Scarlet Lake, Orange and Yellow, all Prismacolor.

©Copyright 2009 by Carrie Lewis. See original post here.
To learn more about this artist, visit her website.