Carnations

 

After seeing my drawing of Marutaro (see preceding post), a long-time friend asked if I could draw some carnations for her - specifically, red ones. She didn't say so, but I knew they are her favourite flower; she had held a bunch of them in her bridal bouquet. (She's now a mum three times over, and the children are in their 20s.)

I turned to good ol' Dr Google for photos of carnations and picked a reference picture to work from. They are a solid red - not the red-and-white striped variety, thank goodness - but demanded no-less close observation on the various shades of red and how to render it like the petals were all folded against themselves within the blooms.

This was first sketched lightly in 2B pencil. The detail work itself was done using my Prismacolor pencils, using at least two shades of red, a true red and Scarlet Lake, a deeper maroon. Coloring them in took two hours or so, rather less time than I expected.

After the petals, the stems and leaves were a breeze. They were done in Sage Green mainly, with touches of a darker green, yellow, a 50% warm grey and some white.

I had to keep reminding mys0elf to keep the pencils at a sharp point, especially to render the serated petal edges.

I presented them to her this afternoon and she was truly appreciative, said that it was great that I had fun doing it and that it was something that felt to her like a blessing as well.

Post-script: My friend has framed the picture, and it now sits atop her dresser. Wow, my work, good enough for framing! (Jan 8, 2017)

Marutaro, Instagram's famous dog

 

The family are fans of Marutaro, the loveable shiba inu who has two and a half million followers of his feed on Instagram. This perpetually-smiling pooch lives in Tokyo with his owner Shinjiro Ono and is also the star of a Tokyo suburb "museum" of all things Maru; it's where you can buy all manner of souvenirs, from tee-shirts to posters and fridge magnets.

A challenge was tossed to me: Draw Maru from one of his photographs. This work took, I guess, five to six hours, spread over a few sessions ... time stolen from here and there through the week.

I sketched the dog lightly in pencil, and thereafter, it was a huge exercise in really seeing what was before me - thinking in terms of abstract colors - rather than drawing from any preconceived notions of what a dog should look like.

The big challenge was that I was drawing on white Canson paper, and Maru, a tan-colored dog, does have a lot of white in his fur. Pinterest was a big help. I learned from posts on color pencil art that even white-furred dogs/cats do have a lot of "color" in their fur, sometimes reflected off their surroundings. With Maru's white parts, I used Prismacolor's range of warm greys and French greys, and also some sage green, a greyish-green, believe it or not.

Even the brown parts took more than a few shades of brown to achieve depth and a fluffy look. The finished work is an improvement on my drawing of Tasha (see post here), but is still not quite there, not as realistic as some of the photo-realistic drawings of animals one sees on Pinterest. But it'll do for now; I still consider myself a beginner!

Another tool I used for this drawing was a white gel pen, a Mitsubishi Signo Uniball, which was indispensable in rendering the bright white parts - the bits of his black lip and tongue, which are wet with saliva and reflect as bright white, and his fine white whiskers. Being able to dot his pupils with the white also made the eyes come more alive!

More color pencils!

The husband bought me another two boxes of pencils while on a recent visit to Sydney.

Both are by Derwent. One is from this brand's "Artists' Pencils" range, a tin of 24 colors. Check its details out here. The Derwent site says their waxy texture makes them ideal for layering and blending. I have started using them for a drawing in my Enchanted Forest book and the pencils are as promised - highly blendable, so the gradations of color are beautifully smooth.  

Doesn't even look like color pencils, huh?
Work still unfinished. 

I'd even say that this set is more blendable than the Derwent tin of 72 Coloursoft pencils that I got from my sister last Christmas. Check out the details of that box of 72 here.   

The other new tin I have will take me to uncharted territory - water-soluble pencils! This second tin comes under the Derwent Academy series, a tin of 24 colours. Details of it here.  I have yet to use it as I have been busy, but I've had fun preparing to use them, haha.

I visited Straits Commercial Art shop a few weeks ago to buy paint brushes and a water pen, the kind with a reservoir and a brush tip. I plan to do a pencil drawing and then go over the colors with water and these brushes for water-color wash effects.

If only I had more spare time.

Li'l ol' me... four boxes of color pencils, all artist-grade!! One could be so lucky.

A pyramid of critters

This piece was quickly completed over a weekend.

 

For the stag at the top, and the pairs of deer, foxes, rabbits and badgers, I stayed with shades of browns and greys, all neutral, and varied the tones within them. I took liberties with the hedgehogs (iridescent blue/purple!) and mice (decidedly jaundiced). 

I broke away from the usual green for the few leaf vines and rendered them in burgundy and blue, inspired by team Aston Villa's colors. A rather pleasing combo, I say. 

All in, a fun piece to do, rather fewer leaves than the five kajillion that Basford is wont to draw!  

Three recent works

It's been a while since I updated this blog. Life called. I have done three more works, all from Joanna Basford's Enchanted Forest book in the past few months. 

 

This bird might be a crow, but who cares? Another exercise in color and light. I don't think I achieved the iridescence that I was getting at, like in this video.  

My next piece was of these two unicorns. I wanted them to pop, so kept the color of the leaves around them in pale sage and associated colors. The result wasn't quite what I wanted. Because I had rendered the horses in grey - one in a warm grey with teal mane and tail and the other, a cool grey with blue mane and tail - the animals weren't exactly jumping out either. 

Maybe I should have done them in stronger shades - chestnut brown and dark silver/grey.  

Their horns: I tried for a metallic look in high shine, hence the contrasting shades of dark grey and white, but it's not quite there, I think.  

For this picture, the eye gravitates more to the loud flower, for which I played with shades of orange and pink. (Fashion's hot color combo a few seasons ago!)

 

This one, I'm quite happy with. I would have just done a straight coloring in of the door, but a picture done by someone else (which appeared online) gave me the idea to try for an old, weathered look. 

I used two shades of brown, a beige and a yellow on the top and bottom edges of the door, creating a gradient of shades. Then I reckoned that the area below the door handles would also have had the green paint worn away from frequent use. 

For the metalwork on the door, I used bronze. The highlights were in white. I don't think the glass inlay in the centre of the door worked. More practice needed to achieve glass effects.  

For the door to pop out, I kept the green strong, and the rest of the walls in muted greys and creams.

Nostalgia: Remember those old-style cane chairs?

This was the first picture I colored in for the Dancing Streets book (see previous post here). I jumped at it only because I wanted to see whether I could render the brown of the cane, and the way the light played on the outer edges vs the parts of the chair in shadow.

This was also an exercise in coloring in the pre-war Peranakan row houses in the background. Typically in pastel colors, these buildings on Keong Saik Street in Chinatown have undergone gentrification lately; what were once headquarters for Chinese clan associations are now quite likely to be Western pubs and restaurants, PR consultancies or other businesses.

But many F&B businesses along this street, famous for its past as a red-light district, trade on the history of old Singapore, hence nostalgic touches such as the use of these cane chairs in their decor.

Coloring is far from being a "mindless" activity. One really looks at the picture -  and in this case, spots some drawing missteps, such as the missing building details through the ribs of the cane chair. It's white space there, where one should be able to see parts of the building in the background. And the chairs in the background also lack detail, which is why I colored them in progressively lighter shades of brown so they would "fade" into the distance.

Maybe the artist deliberately left out what he thought were unessential details.

Oh, and I came across someone else's rendering of the same picture. See below. I think the light on the cane was done better than mine. The white highlights are clearer, indicating a higher shine than in my picture.

And there are long shadows of the legs of the chair and tables too. Darn. We live and learn, don't we?

Minor quibble: if the light was falling on the back of this cane chair,
shouldn't the shadows on the floor have gone in the opposite direction - from
bottom left to top right, instead of from bottom right to top left?

Coloring in pictures of Singapore

 

After coloring in pictures drawn by Westerners - foxes and cute woodland creatures in "enchanted" forests - it is a good change to work on pictures of home.

I came upon Dancing Streets (below), a coloring book by Gine Yeo, a Singapore architect, and bought it instantly. To do the drawings for this book, he had gone on several walking tours through the older and newer parts of Singapore - Chinatown, Capitol Piazza -  and in a twist, rendered them as though they were being looked at through fish-eye lens. The buildings stray from the ram-rod straight and curve crazily, hence the book title.

Yeah, it was a "Buy 1, Get 1 Free" deal. The other book I
got for free was also another with local (Asian) content.
But I'll cover that in another post.

The Chinese temple picture was the second picture I attempted in the book. I had felt challenged to render the door in a blazing red, after seeing pictures of Chinese temples with such bold doors. The decorative "cup" features on the door, in shiny metal, were also an invitation to try for a textural finish.

The door was the first thing I attempted in this picture, and the rest of the picture was mostly finished in an afterthought! The door took six shades of red, done mostly in trial and error. By the time the finishing touches were put to it, the surface of the paper was already very slick with wax. I had used three layers of Prismacolor's carmine at the base, just to build up the color. I then put a coat of permanent red for a richer hue, and used a combo of Tuscan red and crimson lake (both dark reds) for the shadows at the top and far edge of the door. Poppy red gave a brighter hue to the lighter areas.

The metal cups on the doors... I used bronze, gold and white, and a 90% warm grey for the shadows.

A piece done with Derwent color pencils

 

I completed this today using only my Derwent Coloursoft 72s instead of my Prismacolor set, just to take note of the differences, if any.

Prismacolor is the superior brand, I say. When you layer one colour atop another, the wax pigments just meld together so much better than with Derwent. If I look closely at this lion from the Johanna Basford book, I see two colors remaining stubbornly separate, even after using a blender pencil.

I have no complaints about the richness of the pigments for either brand.

Basford, a bit too fiddly?

I can't say I enjoyed doing either of these from Johanna Basford's Enchanted Garden book. There are so many elements in them, and each is tiny, limiting the scope for shading. But at least I completed them.

Are there Basford fans out there who would defend her style of drawing?

'Right colors', 'wrong colors'?

What I am about to say may be subjective, but I really do feel that there are 'right' colors that go together.

This one on the seahorses from my Harmony of Colour book, for instance. Each one presented opportunities to use colors together, and my choices were not random. I picked green as the predominant color for the main seahorse, and introduced a complementary color - red (opposite to green on the color wheel) and then moved a little down the color wheel to orange, and moved up a bit to allow in a blue.

The other seahorse had a palette of purples and pinks, mainly, and the incomplete seahorse to the top right-hand corner was to have been in a palette of cool blues, blue-greens and greens. The seahorse to the bottom left-hand corner was mostly earth-toned.

I also made this an exercise in light, imagining the light source coming from the right, so the shades were light and dark accordingly.

The elephant above  (from the same book) must count as one of my most disappointing pieces so far. It just looks wrong. Blue, yellow and reds with pinks and browns? It just doesn't 'go'. Another abandoned work. (Abandoned also because the drawing was too fiddly and demanding. The fine lines also presented a challenge.)

Does anyone out there agree with me on 'right' and 'wrong' colours?

Coloring in backgrounds

If you want your main subject to pop out, consider a palette of paler colors for the background. Or even a contrasting palette of colors.

This was my takeaway from doing this eagle and the following bird, both from my Harmony of Colour book:

I used browns (again!) for the eagle, which was fine,
but I should have muted the colors of the background. I
realised this too late, and didn't even bother finishing
the work on the background. Consider this
an abandoned piece...

This one worked better, with the (mythical?) bird in
strong teal and the background in pastels. This too, was an
abandoned work. I ran out of patience to color in
 the fiddly background!

My 'spirit animal', the owl

There was once an owl

Who lived in a wood,

The more he saw,

The less he spoke.

The less he spoke,

The more he heard.

Why can't we be

Like that wise old bird?

For some reason, this rhyme has stayed with me since childhood. Then a friend gave me a 10cm tall porcelain owl as a gift, which started off my collection of owls. I now have them in glass, metal, leather, paper, plastic, cane, wax, volcanic stone ... some bought during my travels, and others were gifts.

A part of the collection sits in a display case below the coffee table at home. Put together, you see all at once how different artists have rendered this one bird in their own way. No matter what they are made of, it's their eyes, always the eyes, that grab your attention first.

It was Rachael who first referred to the bird as my 'spirit animal', so the headline is from her. I was, naturally, drawn to the owls in my Harmony of Colour book, so here are two of them.

I kept to shades of brown for this owl, and let
 the colours rip with its dream-catcher.  

Once again, a study in browns. I really should
open my mind to other colors instead of keeping it so real. 

Fur revisited ...still more work needed

I picked out this fox from my Johanna Basford book to color, and set out to go beyond just adding color to going for texture. Fur redux.

Again, it has all the signs of insufficient work on it, especially near the tip of the tail. More layers of color needed.

The nerd in me actually looked up photographs of red foxes online, and found out that the lower halves of their legs are actually black. I wonder why now I was striving for such accuracy when this particular fox has leaves unaccountably sticking to its body! Haha. See how the global community of pencil colorists have rendered this fox psychedelic here.

Fur aside, I was playing with colors here. I wanted to stick to an autumnal palette for the leaves, leaves past their prime.

Drawing Tasha

I sketched Tasha from a photograph in pencil first, and chiding myself for trying to run before I had learned how to walk, next looked up the Internet for how to draw fur! There are YouTube videos aplenty, and other websites -  this one, for example - which show the amount of work needed for it to look real.

One tip is that your color pencils have to be very sharp. I didn't always adhere to that for this drawing.

I was actually quite pleased when I finished, but now, looking at it months later, I think it's an obviously unfinished piece of work. Some bits, like Tasha's back, could do with several more dashes of color, either darker or lighter strands, so the fur has more depth in color and texture and doesn't look like someone (namely, me!) just had one go at it and then lost interest. (In the link above, the artist went over each section of fur four times, adding an array of shades.)

The websites that I consulted also raised my awareness of how fur lies one way or other, and how this can be achieved by varying the direction of the strokes.

Tasha is actually whiter than this. But I had to do her in more beige-y shades since the paper in my sketch book is rather white.

The litmus test came when I showed this drawing to my sister Anne, Tasha's owner. She said it was a very good likeness of her spoiled moggie.

The husband posted the picture on his Facebook page and garnered nearly 50 likes from his friends, some of whom said they didn't know I had this in me.

But I know I have to work at this more. I hope to be drawing more animals in the coming months.

Translucency (Part 2) - in a marble

I took a free, online lesson from professional artist Thaneeya McArdle on how to draw a photorealistic marble. This was the result:

 

It doesn't look as good as Thaneeya's, of course. And it looks a lot better when viewed from afar!

But drawing this taught me something: Glass is "colorless" to the observer, but in order to render it looking that way, there has to be some color, because the glass reflects surrounding objects (such as the table it sits on, or other nearby objects). So if you really look, glass is not colorless at all when you get down to depicting it in color pencil (or any other medium).

The colors used here for the glass ranged from white to pale sage and powder blue and various shades of grey, aside from the bold red and blue stripes within the marble itself.

Color pencil art (and indeed, all art) requires you to leave behind what you perceive when you "see". You could, for example, "see" a clear-glass bottle of white wine. But you can also see the vertical swathes of bright white on the bottle, lying right next to swathes of very deep greys or whatever reflected color the glass has picked up; and these contrasting colors are right next to each other, with pin-sharp borders, no intermediate shades in between. It's this high contrast that contributes to the shine in glass and metal. Even each "clear" droplet of condensation on glass isn't truly colorless.

Another takeaway from this is that you need a very steady hand - see my somewhat shaky dark grey outline at the top of the marble! - and very sharp pencils, in order that the white bits of reflection are sharply defined.

A look at my collection of Pinterest pictures, showing Mason jars filled with marbles, or "sweating" glasses of cold drinks (complete with ice cubes) really tells me that, in this business, I have miles to go before I sleep.

Doing this marble was my first step in coming away from coloring books and venturing into drawing and coloring in my own pictures. Ambitious? Yes. Do I have enough time to indulge in this right now? Not really!

Having to go to work gets in the way of everything. Every damned day.

Translucent bug wings

I was quite pleased with the way I did this bug's wings. I had decided that coloring in this one would be an exercise in achieving the translucent effect, so I used a pencil and lightly drew in the centre of the flower on the wings, and used the same colour palette as with the rest of the centre of the flower.

I took care not to press the yellow and oranges too hard, or it would flatten what is called the "tooth" of the paper, rendering it incapable of taking in any more color. This way, I was able to overlay the yellow and orange with pale sage and powder blue (Prismacolor's pale green and pale blue respectively) that I used on the bug's wings so they look "see-through".

I check out online tutorials on color pencil art (see list of favourite links to the right of this blog page) and maintain Pinterest boards of my and other people's work so I can learn. And learning has been fun.

My coloring books reviewed

"Just Add Color" series: Folk Art (S$16.05)  

This book has about 30 drawings rendered by Lisa Congdon in naive art style.  The subjects are simple, mostly drawn from nature or are abstract. They range from a basket of fruit to birds in trees to human figures dressed in a style that reminds me of the Amish.

The paper is smooth, super white, and the areas to be filled in with color are large enough for the artist to attempt blending colors, or playing with shades.

The strong point here is that the pages are perforated on the edges, which means if you are pleased with the result of your work, tearing it out safely for framing is easy.

"Harmony of Colour" series: Wildlife & Nature (A$12.95) 

This book, which the husband bought for me from a bookshop between Hunter Valley and Sydney last September, while we were on holiday,  has 33 drawings, beautifully detailed. The fourth book in the series, it has a chittering community in a Facebook page. It contains a lot more black areas in each drawing than the other two books. The paper is much thinner than the other two as well.

The annoying thing is that the drawings go right to the inside edge of the book, so getting to the extreme left hand edge is a challenge. If you want to frame any of these up, you'll just have to go at it with a sharp pen knife and hope for the best.

The Harmony of Colour people say in the preface: "Be aware of the overall harmony of your coloring, rather than focusing on each element individually. Try to balance the colors so that they are a reflection of your emotions of the moment. If the colors on your page are in harmony, then your mind will follow!"

Er. I'm in two minds about that. Yes, I do believe in trying to achieve a color palette that is "harmonious", but at the same time, I notice that several of these drawings enter the realm of fantasy. After all, what crazy whale has floral patterns all over its skin? What owl wears a dream catcher?  What eagle looks just trippy, set as it is against a manic swirl of busy background patterns? To me, these fantasy drawings are throwing an invitation to me to play with a riot of colors, yes, even clashing ones. The owl doesn't have to be brown, though I colored mine in restrained shades of earth tones in an exercise to get to know the browns among my pencils.

That said, these drawings gave me quite a bit of practice in choosing and blending colors.

Johanna Basford,  Enchanted Forest (9.95 British pounds) 

OK. I haven't got her best selling Secret Garden, but a look through this book gives an idea of her drawing style - very detailed, very painstaking.  

Don't embark on this unless you are prepared to take a number of sessions to finish each. Basford offers you five kajillion leaves on her trees and plants to fill in with color, a real test of anyone's patience. And each leaf is tiny, which limits the amount of shading and blending you can do. Basford is perhaps best for those who are less ambitious about achieving gradations of colour, or playing on light and textures. Just looking to do straight coloring and are patient by nature? This will do fine.

This Enchanted Forest one features "symbols" - such as a treasure chest, small animals or birds - tucked away among the trees and plant life and woodland animals, with which one can "unlock" the secret object that the castle at the back of the book is "hiding". Frankly, I can't be bothered with the "mystery". I just want to color!

All in, I would say the Harmony of Colour book is my favourite.

150 Prismacolor pencils! 72 Derwent pencils!

My dear husband, seeing my new interest, quietly went to Amazon and ordered me a set of Prismacolor pencils - their biggest set, at 150 pencils. That's the set pictured with the title of this blog.  Not that he had known what brand to get me. He just told Dr Google he wanted "the best" color pencils. 

I was floored when they arrived. They are excellent. Rich, vibrant color and beautifully blendable too.

The softness of the Prismacolor layers beautifully, and 
when I used my (Derwent) blender pencil, this was the 
ombre effect I got on this elephant from one of my 
three coloring books. So much depth.
Ditto the fish below. 

Both the fish and elephant pictures are from my Harmony 
of Colour book. See blog entry above this one for 
reviews of the three coloring books I have.  

This Prismacolor set was why I was able to give away my Faber Castells (see previous post) to my friend. I had bought those in the late 80s, when I was casting around for something to do outside my work in the government service, and did actually get down to drawing and coloring in my own art then - flowers, parrots...

Six months after I got the Prismacolor set, Christmas came around.  I got another box of pencils among my gifts, this time, Derwent, the box of 72, from my sister, who had done her research and shopped at Art Friend, one of our premier art supplies stores here. It is Derwent's largest box available in Singapore. She also got me a souped up pencil sharpener, also Derwent.

Among my Christmas presents was Johanna Basford's Enchanted Forest, her sophomore book after the world-record-breaking Secret Garden.  

 I am so spoiled.

A color pencil evangelist

I have so far have won over one convert. OK, "evangelist" might be overstating it a tad. I don't bring up the topic unless I know the person might be receptive.

I was talking to a friend who has semi-retired, but keeps herself busy tutoring teenagers in their school subjects; she also has her church work and household chores to juggle. Her children are grown-up, pursuing their own careers. At one point last year, she was hit by the blues when she realised her life was changing from how she had known it to be.

Over coffee, I told her about my new hobby and suggested that she take it up. Her first reaction was: "Oh, unlike you, I was never good in art in school. The art teacher kept yelling at me: 'Tones! Tones! I want to see tones! Light and shadow!'"

I told her that the horrible Mrs Beetsma wasn't around anymore to stand in judgment, and that she was free to color pictures in as she pleased. I bought this dear friend a coloring book, and gifted her my slightly used 24 Faber Castells and a set of 12 water color pencils, Faber Castell's Aquarelles - the kind that give water color effects if you add a wet paintbrush to the areas colored. 

Over the next week, she was sending me pictures of her finished work, pleased that coloring them in was giving her a new focus. She also said she was finding the activity strangely relaxing.  I hope she continues enjoying this.

How it began for me

When I let on that I had picked up an adult coloring book, there were sniggers aplenty. "Don't forget to color inside the lines," said someone.

Was that a dare? Well, I'll do more than that. I'll show them. They have no idea that professional artists have been using color pencils for ages, with some of them turning out works that look almost photographic. Have you seen drawings of glass bottles? Of clothing where the folds look so real you can reach out to feel the texture, be it nubby like wool or soft and drapey like silk?

No, we aren't talking about big, flat splashes of color, some outside the lines - the way kids do it.

The trend is now huge globally and with names such as Johanna Basford and Millie Marotta now famous, and one can't walk into a bookshop without seeing displays with 40 titles for adult coloring books alone, with the accoutrements thoughtfully stocked nearby - erasers, pencil sharpeners and... good grief, even CDs with music for you to play while you do your thing.

It's a new pastime undertaken mostly by women, and I have read of clubs springing up, gathering women to color in pages of the fine drawings by the likes of Basford and Marotta; new titles are coming up all the time, including pop-culture-themed ones like those on Benedict Cumberbatch (ew) and Harry Potter.  

Back in time,  a little before the craze took off, I was in a good bookshop, about to pay for some purchases when a book in the "Just Add Color" series and titled Folk Art caught my eye.  On a whim, I bought it, went home and dusted off my old set of 24 Faber Castells and just got started...

My first piece from the Folk Art book, and my first
 time handling my Faber Castell color pencils 
in about 25 years.  

My next one, still using my Faber Castells. 

A few months later, newspapers were writing about the craze, and pop psychologists were falling over themselves to explain why people were "regressing" to something they did when they were five.

All I know is I enjoy doing it, and the satisfaction of having a pretty picture at the end of it. I don't think this is a passing fancy for me personally, and I have set my sights on graduating to drawing and then coloring in my own work.