Sensual and ingenious colored pencils
They are gentle and submissive. Among its beautiful colors are vibrant blues, sunny yellows, deep greens, bright purples, and juicy oranges. They come in pretty cans, nylon sports cases, and polished wood boxes. They smell good. Their enameled bodies fit snugly against your fingers and respond to paper with a disposition that awakens inspiration. These are good quality colored pencils, not your normal pencil in any way, shape or form. Grabbing one, tapping the paper with the tip is, well, a sensual and witty experience.
Do you like to draw? Scrawl? Have you thought about taking art lessons but didn’t want to spend a lot on supplies? Colored pencils are the answer!
A WONDERFUL MEDIA OF ART
Maybe you’ve spent some time drawing, nothing much: cartoons, Disney characters, doodles, etc. Maybe you’ve even invested in a drawing pencil. If you did, you found that a drawing pencil is quite different from a regular pencil. Its lead is smooth and creates dark blacks, solid medium grays, and ethereal light grays.
Maybe then you started thinking about color, wishing your drawing pencil was colorful too. Can be! Good quality colored pencils are on the market today that respond well to shading, multi-color layering, solid color blocks, and creating expressive, sinuous lines.
The added attraction of colored pencils, beyond their soft, highly pigmented leads and voluntary response to paper, is their price. A can of twelve good quality colored pencils and a good quality 9 “x 12” sketch pad will cost less than twenty dollars. And it’s on its way to producing beautiful, bright, and color-rich drawings that will retain their permanence and color integrity for decades.
ONE TWO THREE
Now you have sharpened your colored pencils and you have your sketch pad. Whats Next? Start with a doodle. On a new sketchbook page, take one color, it doesn’t matter which one) and draw swirls, lines, dots, dashes, whatever comes to your mind. Cover the entire page of the sketchbook. Take a minute to do it.
Now take a close look at the squiggle you’ve made. See what you can find. Trees? Birds? Faces? Whatever you find, outline the image by going over the lines in the image making them darker. Well! Now choose another colored pencil color to complete the image (s). Now think of the surrounding area of the doodle as the background or environment of your images.
You must choose certain areas to fill with various colors. For example, if you found, in your doodle, a shape that looks like a fish, color the fish, then color the area around the fish with various colors. Note that you want to emphasize the image. How can you do this?
IMAGE’S POWER
To emphasize the image of the doodle, you can do several things. You can make the image very dark and then fill the surrounding area with light colors. Or you can make the image very light and fill the surrounding areas with dark colors. Or you can use contrasting colors, for example, red image, blue background; look closely to see that the image stands out from the background. I recommend that you choose the option that is the most fun for you!
SHADOW AND HIGHLIGHT
So you’ve done the scribbling and you’re starting to learn what your colored pencils can do. If you didn’t experiment with making certain areas with solid colors or played with shading multiple colors together, now is your chance!
With any colored pencil (color of your choice), draw a circle on a new page of the sketchbook. You can use a compass or small plate or other circular object as a template to make the circle. Now imagine that the light descends on the page from the upper right corner. You will want to start shading the circle with a dark color (blue, purple, brown, black) where the light is not, which is the left side of the circle. Start slowly, completing along the left line of the circle. Remember that as you shade and move towards the light source (upper right corner), your shading will be less. Why? Because its shading, in drawing terms, represents the shadow and the white on the sketchbook page represents the light.
Amazon! You can see it? The circle is turning into an illuminated sphere, just shading. Isn’t it amazing how we can reproduce the illusion of light and shadow in a simple way by shading and highlighting a simple geometric shape?
ADDITIONAL CREDIT
You’ve come this far and now you see how cool colored pencils are. He has tapped into his imagination through scribbles and now he has produced the illusions of space and, consequently, time. How cool is that? Now take it one step further. Where you have produced light by not coloring much, bring a light colored pencil color (yellow, orange or white). Now color in the area that you left in the shading. Miracles. You’ll see the lighter color take on the role of light, taking over where the white on your sketchbook page left off!
YOU ARE A BETTER PERSON
If you’ve made it this far, you are a better person. Why? Because you have tuned in to your innate creative powers that nurture your entire body and mind. You have learned a new drawing skill and, most importantly, you have beautiful colors to visualize any image or dream that comes to mind! The colored pencils are there, waiting in their little tin, nylon case, or wooden box. All you need to do is put some of the day’s hectic work aside, sit down, open your sketchbook to infinity to a clean white page, and dip your fingers into the rainbow of colored pencils. Magic!
Or maybe you want to put your sketchbook and colored pencils in your backpack with a bottle of water and a sandwich. Then go out into the world in search of the right scene or location to shoot with brilliant colors and sensual, artistic lines.
