And now... a fire dragon

After doing the water dragon (see here), I attempted a more conventional kind of giant lizard - the fire-breathing kind, also from Kerby Rosanes' Mythomorphia book.

These two dragons are on facing pages in the book, likely meant by Rosanes to be tackled together. I did so because it was an exercise in rendering water, and then fire. Two very basic elements in nature.

Bottomline: I'm not good in doing backgrounds. 
This one, like some of my other works, is a disappointment. 

There would be a lot of yellows, oranges and reds for the flames in this picture, so I went with blue for the dragon for a nice complementary color scheme, although I had my doubts that fire-breathing dragons would be blue. (But since dragons are mythical, who's to say, right?) 

I turned to the scumbling technique for the dragon's skin, using a fairly light touch and various shades of blue, going with a lighter shade where the scales catch the light. (See here for useful pencil techniques.) 

To do the fire, I used a similar technique, going with pale yellows generally in the centre of each flame, where it would be white hot, and grading to increasingly darker oranges towards the edges. Tuscan red went into the recessed "folds" of each plume of fire. 

As with the water dragon, whose fore limbs are towers of water, there is no real clear line where the dragon's scales end and tongues of fire begin here - or at least, that's how I see it. I checked other color pencil enthusiasts' work on this dragon online, and saw that most of them had colored the two large plumes of fire by the side of the dragon in the color of the dragon's skin. The way I did it, however, depicts the flames as part of the dragon itself. This dragon is the fire!

No matter, I suppose. This work is continuing to draw "likes" in my Instagram feed. 

After I was done with the reptile, I moved on to the rocky outcrop, using three shades of French grey for lit and shadowed areas. The emerald comb and card were done quickly, without fuss.

... and then, I should have stopped right there and called this piece DONE, and left the background white, like with the water dragon. 

As has so often happened when I am faced with a large expanse of background after having worked on the subject, I get impatient to be done. 

I couldn't even decide for a number of days what kind of sky I wanted, and sort of decided on a sunset palette, glowing peach around the dragon, and grading to pink and then lavender. And that's what didn't turn out so well! I tried the scumbling method so that the gradations wouldn't show, but it didn't work so well, despite using my blender pencil and a piece of tissue paper to smooth out the pencil marks in the bits when i got impatient. 

I am measuring myself from the benchmark set by Matthew Vaughn (@manlycoloring on Instagram). This is definitely something I need to work on. 

  

A water dragon

I'm on year-end vacation now, so I'll have more time for this!

Today, I completed this picture of a water dragon from Kerby Rosanes' Mythomorphia coloring book.

I picked purple, my favourite color, for the critter, but the challenge for this piece lay in rendering the water - how to depict transparency. I'm not too satisfied with this one. 

I used my Prismacolor powder blue and pale sage as the base color and then used a deeper blue and deeper green for the darker areas, and white and pale yellow for the parts where light is shooting through the crest of the wave.

A disappointing result

Finished coloring in Kerby Rosanes' Mythomorphia ghoul yesterday, a month and then some after Halloween, and I don't like what I see.

The blood moon and the glow it would have thrown on the dark sky aren't well done, and the pencil lines are too obvious, even after blending with a piece of tissue paper and with my blender in some parts. 

I had done the ghoul, his pet wolf-dog and their little hill of skulls first, and, as always, the blank background stared back at me, melting away much of my patience. I think I was in too much of a hurry to finish it, after the subjects in the foreground had sat there half finished for a couple of weeks. It was a busy period at home and at work.

The ghoul: I settled easily on making him a shade of dull green, since he's "undead". Again, Rosanes' shadow shading helped me greatly in where to go with a deeper green or even French grey to denote shadows.

The wolf dog: I wanted it to be a dark, dark grey, nearly black, so that the red/vermillion eyes would pop.

The tree: This took a while, with all the gnarliness in deep brown to offset the paler brown of the trunk. I had wanted to make the lone apple on the branch red, but since I already gave Mr Ghoul a scarlet loin cloth, I didn't want to repeat the color. So this became a granny smith tree!

The roots, among which sat all those skulls, took a while, and I was running out of patience, because doing it pretty much restricted my palette to browns, greys and black. The skulls were done easily enough.

Then... the background, my nemesis. With ghouls being creatures of the night, it had to be a night sky, and the inspiration came to me to draw in a blood moon. With its deep red hue, such a moon would add to the spookiness of the scene. I looked up the Internet for pictures of blood moons for inspiration, and built my palette from there. I layered several reds, oranges and deep greys, and left the lower right quadrant a paler yellow for some variation. I had to tone down the moon with a deep grey overall, because it looked too red to be believable.

It still looked all right at this stage. Things went south only when I attempted the sky, especially the part around the moon.  For the sky to the right of the picture, I applied three shades of deep blue - the ultramarine, indanthrone, dioxazine purple - then deepened the top of the picture with 90% cool grey to darken it.

I put a layer of orange round the edges of the moon, and then introduced lilac, blending the edges to try to get the gradation smooth. The plan had been to make the lilac morph into blue through shading to join up with the rest of the sky, but, as you can see, the blending didn't go according to plan and just looks Plain Wrong. Because the colors at this point seemed too bright, I brought in my deep grey again to mute it down, but that too, didn't go well.

The rim lighting: The trusty white gel pen came in useful here for the silvery threads of bright white where the ghoul, wolf-dog and tree catch the moonlight.

Maybe I should have done a regular yellow moon. Might have been less demanding and not required so many colors. 

Unicorn from the Mythomorphia coloring book

I believe most unicorns depicted in popular culture are white and come with magical rainbow-colored horns. Meet this, a gold/brown unicorn with a flaming red mane and a horn that seems to be a part of a silver armor!  Since no one has ever seen a unicorn, these colors can't be wrong, can they?

I did an online search of color pencil artists' renditions of this drawing from Kerby Rosanes' Mythomorphia book, and yes, most did the unicorn in white.  I had meant to do the same  - it would have been an exercise in creating the illusion of white. Such a unicorn would probably have entailed using various shades and layers of yellow, pale blues, pale greens and greys to make the animal look white.

But I started with a pale cream around the eyes, and before I knew it, the face was too brown/cream-colored to make it a white horse already. Ooops. So gold/brown this thing came to be.

Oh yes, before I go further, I need to note here that this drawing was done using my tin box of 72  Derwent Coloursoft pencils for a change. After months of using my Prismacolor (set of 150), I found the Derwent pencils nowhere as soft and easy to blend or even lay down as a first color. I wonder why.

Back to this unicorn drawing: Online renditions of this drawing by Rosanes' mostly went with blood-red roses; some had lurid colors on the headgear, like brilliant blue... To be contrarian, I picked blush pink and dusty lavender for the roses for a softer look, and after doing the gold for Anubis (see post here), I made this one an exercise in rendering silver.

The roses: Rosanes' ink shading made the roses a cinch to do. Darker pinks and lavenders went into the lined shadows, with the paler shades of pinks and lavenders on the parts of the blooms facing the light.

The silver armor: From reading Alyona Nickelsen's Colored Pencil Painting Bible (a worthwhile investment if you want to learn the finer points of rendering ice, glass, water, wood, flora/fauna, metal, gems and jewellery!), the tip I picked up was that to convey the illusion of shiny metal, the darkest values and lightest ones have to sit right next to each other, with little or no grading between.

It is really much more complicated than that, for Nickelsen also delves into how to create the reflections of objects on silver. Here, I simplified it by not drawing in any reflections. The unicorn's headgear was assumed to be isolated from any surrounding objects, hence the broad bands of pure, bright white against 90% grey or sheer black on the metal and the horn. I hope it looks believably silver nonetheless.

A horse this majestic could have done with a more generous mane, I thought. And with red being my favourite hair color, I went with that, using pale yellow and my white gel pen for the highlights.

The scattered gems around the unicorn were quickly done. Most of them were done using a jewel tone - a strong green, blue or red - with a dark grey pencil for depth around the edges, and my trusty white gel pen for highlights.

Coloring in the background: Matthew Vaughn (Instagram handle manlycoloring) does awesome backgrounds with his pencils. And from his WIPs, it looks like he does them first. When the colors are done right, backgrounds do make the subject jump out and provide a context for them. Kudos to him!

BUT... they are a lot of work. Matt Vaughn says that because the backgrounds in most coloring books are blank, they are a great canvas for the imagination. True. But it is still a lot of work! And after I have colored in a picture, especially a double-spread one, I'm too pooped to think of filling in that expanse. Matt Vaughn does show the possibilities though.

I am dropping the idea of doing the background for the unicorn, and have moved on to my next picture.

My mum-in-law asked me an existential question the other day: So after you are done coloring this picture, what then? I was floored for a moment. "I don't do anything with them," I replied. "My pictures aren't good enough to sell!" Coloring is an end in itself to me. I take breaks between pictures to draw my own pictures, like I did with Marutaro here, the carnations and the carousel horse. No immediate plans for another!

Anubis from Egyptian mythology

This might be my best work so far, if the number of "likes" I get on my Instagram feed (look me up under yinpheng) is anything to go by!

I'm still learning by doing, and for this drawing, also from Kerby Rosanes' Mythomorphia coloring book, I made it an exercise in rendering gold. I have no idea whether those striped pieces of cloth one sees on Egyptian mummies and royalty are actually fabric, but this Anubis - the Egyptian god of mummification and the afterlife - seemed to wear those striped pieces of fabric as well as what could be armor, so I went with gold for what I thought was the hardware part of his head gear.

The gold was rendered with a few yellows, a coup le shades of brown and white to create the illusion of gold. I didn't use the gold color from my Prismacolor 150 pencil set at all. 

Anubis is pictured here with objects typically associated with him - the crook (lower right, in blue and gold), the flail (in deep red, to the upper right) and the ankh (traditionally in gold, but rendered in silver here, just behind Anubis' head). The other objects in the picture are also deeply connected to Egypt - the scarab beetle (on Anubis' sleeve, which was too small for me to color its iridescence effectively), the pyramids and ancient columns, together with a scattering of precious jewels and an earthen pot.

It was on a whim that I also rendered the shadows cast by these objects on Anubis, since they appear to be floating above him. Rendered in deep grey, they turned out quite nicely. I realise greys work nicely for shadows or to deepen the shade of any color, and that I seldom have to use black.

The nerd in me went to read up about Anubis, in search of extra information that might aid me in my decisions on color. He is the god who oversees the souls of the departed into the afterlife, and is typically depicted as a black wolf. 

A nine-headed hydra

The left half of the picture

The right half.

This is my first attempt at one of the double-spread drawings in my Mythomorphia coloring book by Kerby Rosanes. I did it over several days, but still felt the strain of the size of the work. That's a lot of sea, a lot of lizard and a lot of sky to cover, and I must say I lost my focus several times over the course of it.

Online renditions of this drawing often put the hydra in green, and so did I. It just seemed appropriate. Some online versions of this drawing have the hydra in a raw, blinding green not found in nature. One could argue that this is a mythical beast after all, and it could technically be in any color, really,  but, oh well... At least, I know that if the hydra really existed, this would be the color of its skin.

Using my  Prismacolor 150 set, I picked Kelly Green as the base color for the hydra, then used a dark green for the parts in shadow and lightened the green with yellow and pale sage for the parts hit by the light.

The underside of the hydra were rendered in putty beige and a deep brown for the parts in shadow.

The sea: The challenge here was to make the water look transparent. I don't think I succeeded, with my palette of sky blue light, ultramarine, artichoke and pale sage. The crest of the waves catch the light, so these parts were in yellow/artichoke/pale sage. The sea foam was in sky blue light and the lower parts of the wave, the darker ultramarine.

The sky: I wanted the palette to be in the pale blue, lavender, pink and peach commonly seen at dusk. The left side has a pinker/peachier hue because that's where I put the sun at, so the clouds picked up this warm shade as well. The skies and clouds to the right were bluer.

The other minor elements in the picture - the birds, the two ships and the world tarot card were quickly done. My reserves in focus were pretty low by this point.

[The tarot card: As an aside, Johanna Basford also does this - "hide" some symbols or small objects in the picture, so that one finds them as one colors in the picture, and they are supposed to be put together by the time the pages of the book are all done to "solve" some mystery. I don't really see the point in this. They distract from the picture, I say. This is why I've usually rendered these objects in non-obtrusive colors.]

My gel ink pen in white came in useful again for the bright whites of the sea foam of the waves, and the highlighted parts of the hydra's skin, where the scales catch the light.

The two halves viewed together. 

A siren

This is my second piece from my Kerby Rosanes Mythomorphia coloring book.

Sirens are undersea monsters who lure sailors towards rocks with their beautiful music and lovely singing voices, and who eat sailors for supper after their ships get wrecked on the rocks... hence the two skulls at the foot of this picture.

I went with purple, my favorite color, for the siren, and a complementary sage green for her fins. I lightened the purple shade to lilac and pinks on the parts facing the (imagined) light source. I colored in several layers of color with a light touch this time, after having pressed much harder with the harpy (see previous post here).

The treasure chest was layered in several shades of brown, and my Prismacolor set didn't disappoint with its sheer blendability. I picked several shades of warm grey for the anchor, from the 10% (lightest) to the 90%, to recreate the sharp contrasts one would expect in metal. The other objects in the picture were fairly quickly done - the fish, seaweed, skulls, sand and items in the treasure chest.

The siren's hair: I was undecided on the color. I had thought to make her blond, but ended up going with pastel rainbow hues. It makes her almost girly, which is hard to reconcile with her grisly dining habits.

I was going to leave the background white again, like I did with the harpy, but decided on the spur of the moment to color it in to see whether I could recreate rays of sunlight piercing the water, shining on the creature's face and upper body. I can't say I'm entirely satisfied, but I don't regret trying.

This page gives a good idea of what it should look like.  This one too. I thought of adding those wavy strips of paler color over the siren's face and upper arms, but was afraid it wouldn't turn out right, so I left it as you see it.

Looking at the completed picture, I wonder now if I should have rendered the siren in a stronger color so that she would pop from the background, which is in the same family of colors. I have seen several other artists' renditions of this same picture; I do believe, however, that colors can be too raw and too strong. Some artists like to go with raw greens, blues and reds. The result seems too garish for me.

My Sec 4 art teacher (RIP, Mrs Woon) used to berate us for using paints straight out of the tube. If you are painting something for nature, the green that comes in the standard set of 12 tubes of pastel paints will almost always never do. Add yellow, she would advise.

Mythical creatures by Kerby Rosanes!

My coloring book Mythomorphia by Kerby Rosanes has arrived, and the pictures are awesome. They feature mermaids, gnomes, kitsunes, dragons, phoenixes... any critter that has featured in stories from long ago.

Many of the drawings are double-spreads, but I chose to start with a single-page one, to warm up.

Harpy. Drawing by Kerby Rosanes, color by Amy

A harpy, from Greek and Roman mythology, is a rapacious monster described as having a woman's head and body and a bird's wings and claws. It is often depicted as a bird of prey with a woman's face. The word can be also used to describe a grasping, unpleasant woman.

I picked a palette of blues and greens for the feathers, and used my white gel ink pen to give some highlights to the tips of the feathers. Yes, colors can be too raw at times, like for the teal colors of the feathers, so I toned it down with some warm grey at 70% saturation. 

I decided against giving her human skin tones, since she does look evil. A dark greyish tone seemed to me to convey her other-worldliness better.

I quite like the way the feet turned out... yellow like most bird feet, but given more depth with orange on one side to convey shadow. 

Stuck for the color to use on the harpy's helmet (or is it supposed to be the beak?), I asked the family. R said "red" but I went with orangey-red instead, since orange is a complementary color to blue. Worked quite nicely. 

The tree and leaves were quickly done after that. I went with a yellow-green for the leaves, rather than a blue-ish green, which wouldn't have provided enough contrast with the main subject. 

The two hidden objects here were the axe and a goblet with lighted candle in it. They are too small to expend that much time and energy on, but I tried to convey metal surfaces with the use of contrasting tones.

Then there is the matter of the background, which I have left white. I posted this work on my Instagram feed with a question: Is this a WIP, or can it be considered finished with a blank white background?

Someone said it's a WIP. Another person said it's finished.

The expanse is a bit too much work for me to color in the background. But I have seen the payoffs from the effort. Some color pencil enthusiasts really do a lot of work on the backgrounds of pictures they color in, going so far even as to draw extra elements in.

Goodbye, Johanna Basford, hello, Kerby Rosanes.

Limiting the color palette, Part Deux

I have taken another look at the color palettes I saved to my board on Pinterest lately, and have decided to continue being more disciplined in my choice of color. (See my last post on this subject here.)

Sites such as Design Seeds, for example, put on display dozens of beautiful photographs of scenery, nature or every day objects which are beautiful because of the way the colors work in them. Alongside are color palettes drawn from the photos themselves, so a photo of cactus succulents, for example, would produce a palette of dusty rose, sage green and deeper purples and pinks, perhaps with cream or warm greys. Nature really does show us how some colors just work together.

The following work, another from my Johanna Basford book, The Enchanted Forest, shows the result of working with a limited palette:

 

The colors are dull greens - no "raw" greens here - used along with dusty pinks, purples and some browns or warm greys... much like the palette for the cactus succulents.

The yellows of the bug wings and the centre of the flower kind of stick out -- a lesson in what happens when you depart from the palette. Or maybe the yellows work, I am not sure.

Another recent  work I did, also with a view to restricting the color palette, was this one:

 

I uploaded this to my Pinterest board on my color pencil work too, and also to Instagram, where it is continuing to draw "likes" -- more than the other picture -- probably because of the element of whimsy in this one. Notice the quaint tree houses on stilts and the green house with Moorish architectural elements in it.

For this one, the greens were yellow-green (chartreuse) rather than sage green, and all other colors were from an earthy palette - browns, warm greys, yellows, ochres and some pumpkin orange. I doubt a bright blue or red would sit well here. It's just a feeling!

This whole color pencil adventure has taught me a lot about color. I find myself looking at things in a new way, seeing how the colors work, such as whether they are in ombre palettes, flowing smoothly one into the next, or whether they contrast each other.

As an aside here: I'm fast running out of pages in my Basford Enchanted Forest book. Will I get another of her works? I think not. She draws far too many tiny leaves that are a test of patience, and because they are that small, they don't offer much scope by way of shading possibilities. Her other books that don't feature "enchanted forests" may have fewer leaves and plants, perhaps?

I've ordered a new book from Book Depository, Mythomorphia by the illustrator Kerby Rosanes, which has taken the world of adult coloring by storm. This is his third book, his earlier works being  Animorphia and Imagimorphia.

And I still haven't given up on making and coloring in my own drawings. It's just that Life happens, and it did happen in a big way this past month, shaking my family to its core and yanking the rug from under our collective feet. So we are picking up the pieces and finding a new pattern to move on with.

I hope to carve out time to do this strangely calming hobby from hereon.

Carousel horses, the stuff of childhood memories

 

There you go, as promised from my last post, a drawing of a carousel horse. I'm quite pleased with this one, considering I went into it without expectations of how well it would turn out.

This is adapted from a photo I found online. I kept the colors pretty close to what is online, but made some variations here and there - some variations are the result of my not observing the photo closely enough when sketching it, haha.

Now I know what those online tutorials mean when they say you can pretty much draw anything. It's not so much in the drawing itself, but in how you see what's there in order to render it in color pencils. I had pretty much gone in and winged it, by focusing on what I was seeing - from where the light hits, calling for a bright white, to the shades of yellow on the body that a casual observer may not notice in the photo.

For the most part, I worked off a very basic pencil 2B sketch of the outline of the horse and the places where there is a clear change of color to signify the curvature of muscle. The rest of the details were done in color pencil (my Prismacolor set of 150).

I picked a 10% and 20% French grey for the base color of the body, and worked in the shades with 70% and 90% French grey, jasmine yellow, black, white, a little sienna brown and my trusty white gel pen. (The yellow was particularly useful for rendering a warmth to the warm grey of the body.)

The mane and tail: I sharpened my pencils and added some streaks through the base color, using a mix of the above colors to achieve depth and texture. (No faster way to learn the importance of keeping your pencils sharp for this.)

The saddle was done first. The reds and blues were layered with other colors for depth, to create shadow and highlights.

Looking back on this, I would say right off that the legs were the biggest challenge. It's a horse in gallop, so it was a bit of a struggle to get the legs positioned just right, and then to use color to show
where muscles rippled or where the bones and ligaments showed through the skin. The front right leg still doesn't look right, haha.

The drawing has attracted a dozen "likes" (and counting) on my Instagram account - not bad, considering I don't have that many followers!

Going through a rainbow

These two pages were facing each other in my Johanna Basford Enchanted Forest book, the top pic on the left-hand side page, and the bottom pic on the right side, so it was a garland of leaves tripping across a double-spread.

Fresh from my previous exercises in keeping to one color, I rendered these two pages in the colors of the rainbow, starting with blue to blue-green, then grading over to greens with progressively more yellow until the yellows took over.

Next, with the addition of increasing amounts of red, the yellows morphed into orange; then with the addition of more reds, the garland turned from orangey-red to blue-red, then over to purple, starting with a reddish purple (mahogany). With increasing amounts of blue added, the purple became a royal purple (my favourite color), and then back to blue to green to yellow.

The birds were colored grey so they wouldn't compete for attention with the garland.

I have to admit this idea isn't original. I saw a similar work like this online - also on a Basford drawing - so I just had to try it out myself, to do it my way, and this Basford picture, with a strung-out garland, seemed to lend itself to this attempt. This exercise made me think of color, and how to render the hues so that they "flow" smoothly, one into the next.

VIBGYOR was a mnemonic we learned in primary-school science, with the letters standing for the colors of a rainbow in the order they are stacked. Violet, indigo, blue, green, yellow, orange and red. This garland follows that order.

Speaking of those days of long ago, I have set myself my next assignment - to draw (and color) something from my childhood - a carousel horse.

I follow the contemporary American artist David Palmer of David Palmer Studio on Instagram and he has been posting awesome pictures of his works (in acrylic)  featuring carousel horses. Unlike me, his works sell for money!

I will make my own humble attempt at drawing such a horse next. I won't use his works as reference - somehow, the thought of copying a professional artist's works is loathsome to me - but will use an online photo of a carousel horse instead.

Watch this space for my horse. When I get (or make) the time. As always, work keeps getting in the way.

Speaking of carousels... Singapore's now-defunct Wonderland Amusement Park was in the news recently. A festival that trades on nostalgia for a long-gone Singapore lifestyle is coming, and an attempt will be made to recreate some of the features of that park, which sat on the site of today's Indoor Stadium.

I have fond memories of Wonderland. Dad used to bring me and Anne there on Sunday nights, after dinner. We had such a great time there that the usual Sunday-night pang of having to go to school the next morning would hit even harder than it would have if we had just sat at home to a blah evening by the TV.

The carousel horses in that park weren't anywhere as elaborate and beautiful as David Palmer's horses, but they brought us joy anyway. It didn't take much in those days, given that there was no Internet, TV wasn't in a golden age, and there weren't half as many other entertainment options.

I remember that when the time came for us to take leave of Wonderland's roller coaster, the spinning tea cups and the carousel, Dad would offer another one of his maxims when he saw our downcast faces: "All good things must come to an end."

At the time - I was 12 or even younger - I accepted that as a Truth of Life. I suppose now, with the benefit of age, I can see that it just might have been a tad cynical. Don't at least some good things last?

Anyway, Dad, you are seriously missed, and you have been gone 14 years. Fourteen!  Wherever you are now, a Happy Fathers' Day (slightly belatedly), and a Happy Birthday in advance. You would have turned 88.

A study in reds

I was thinking of this as a cushion cover. I chose red for this picture from my Johanna Basford book (Enchanted Forest) because it gives a wide spectrum to play around with - from the deep Tuscan Red at the bottom left-hand corner through to the bright Poppy Red and oranges and even yellows.

Done, another exercise in keeping to just one color and its related shades.

The two birds were rendered in blue and blue-green for the sake of contrast, because the flowers in that part of the picture were orangey; it's where I chose to make the spot where the light hits.

A brass compass

I picked this image out of Johanna Basford's Enchanted Forest book to have a go at coloring metal, highly-reflective metal.

I worked with a deep brown (Espresso), moss green and a lemon yellow to capture the highlights and dark reflections. I turned to the Internet's stock photos of brass compasses for reference photos to see the play of light and dark.

For the ring of plants and animals surrounding the compass, I continued my exercise in limiting the color palette, this time to greys - cool greys, warm greys, French greys, sage green, slate grey and some browns. The only pops of color come from the blackberries (at left) and red fox (at 1 o'clock).

Not a sterling result, I think. More practice needed for metal.

Limiting the palette on each work

I've seen the gamut in color pencil works online - those that throw every color of the rainbow in and those that seem more studied in limiting the colors used. Fine, I guess there's no "right" and "wrong", but I wanted to give the latter style a try, as an exercise in picking the colors that work together and yes, discipline as well.

The following works are the result. (The hedgehog got several "likes" on my Instagram feed.)

Hedgehog with autumnal palette of leaves. All earthy shades.

A palette of cool blues and blue-greens, with white flowers
 (my favorite!) and some chartreuse accents.

Browns for the squirrel, with red bits in the tail for accent.
The plants were kept to an autumnal palette that played off the
browns on the squirrel. 

There is really no need to go hog wild with color all the time. A little restraint is good as well. I've seen entire pages of leaves and flowers done in only white and blues, recalling the splendor of Ming vases.

A clan crest from the realm of fantasy

Another picture from my Johanna Basford Enchanted Forest book. I'm not moving through the book in order, but picking pictures that I want to do.

I went for this because of the sword, thinking it would be an exercise in coloring metal. From my readings here and there, metal, being highly reflective, is rendered by highly contrasting shades, say black (or dark grey) and white, sitting starkly next to each other. And any other color that appears on the surface would come from reflection of objects nearby.

But this sword is pretty small, and so gives little opportunity to introduce any other color.  I decided to stick with black and white.

It. Didn't. Quite. Work. Did it?

The rest of the picture... well, it was a matter of sticking to a palette of greens and not straying too far from that. Nearer the bottom, warm greens, orange, beige, brown. Nearer the top, a cool, silvery green sits below the two birds, done in blue/green/red.

Peacock

I'm on a roll.

Still on my Harmony of Colours book (Book 4), I went to the page with the peacock, treating this as another exercise in playing with color.

Plan: To use blues/greens/teal and deep purples/pinks on the bird, and, in order for it to pop out from the rather busy background, I wanted the background to be in muted earth tones.

Result:  I think the plan worked?

 

A color-corrected lion

My (mis)adventures in playing with color continue.

I went back to my Harmony of Colours book (Book 4) over the weekend and picked out the lion to work on with my Prismacolor set. In my head, I envisioned a pair of flashing eyes in a strong color, the face in shades of warm browns, and the mane, also in shades of warm brown, but lighter.

It didn't quite turn out like that. I mean, I got the flashing eyes all right. And even did a commendable job (Ithink!) on the "emerald" jewels on the lion's forehead. But the choice of color for the face and the mane didn't quite work so well.

In fact, it was a disaster in need of correction at a subsequent coloring session. The face was at first done in browns that were too reddish and to clayey for a lion. Then I compounded the mistake by doing the mane in ... yes, lighter, colors, but the wrong lighter colors.

When I was done, the lion didn't look anything like a majestic beast of the Serengeti. Its mane came out in streaks of Canary Yellow and Pumpkin Orange. Definitely a ginger lion, haha. And then the yellows and orange clashed with the warm reddish browns near the face.

On my next slot of two hours of free time available, I set about doing a color correct. Added Sepia (a deep brown) and 70% French grey to tone down and deepen the too-raw orange and yellow respectively, and then added Golden Rod to tone down/add yellow to the too-red browns and too-grey French greys.

The following was the result:

The yellows are still arguably too yellow.
but you should see the original.
This was supposed to have been a dignified, tawny
colored beast, ruler of the African plains.
Sigh. Sorry. 

Hipster hippo

I was halfway through coloring this hippo when I found those color palettes online (see previous post), and realised I should have probably used a more limited palette.

This picture uses gradation of Tuscan red/pink/light brown,  purple/pink and blue/green, along with vermillion and a couple other shades of brown.

Still too many colors? 

I wouldn't say it's a disaster. After I checked out the online color palettes, I decided to use the Tuscan red/pink/light brown combo on more areas in the body of the hippo (as opposed to going with still other colors). As a result, the combo still shines through, instead of being overwhelmed by the strong green bands.

I have to work at using fewer colors in my next few outings. The other day, I saw an online work of an owl that used only three or four shades of grey, black, white and a deep orange for the eyes. The effect was understated, sophisticated, and the eyes really popped in the monochromatic palette.

Discovering online color palettes

In my previous post, I moaned about not seeming to be able to find groups of colors that "go" together. Yes, over time, I have come to realise - rather organically - that I ought not mix warm and cool colors together within a picture.

For example, I may use oranges, warm pinks, peach and even deep warm reds on a fish (see picture in the previous post), but in a picture with more than one fish, I might render another fish in a cool palette - icy blue, deep blue and even teal and cool grey (never warm or French grey).

But, as I lamented in my last post, I have a beautiful set of 150 Prismacolor pencils, and yet sometimes struggle to find colors that "sing' together in proximity. Yes, I'm aware of the color wheel, one rule of which is that complementary colors - those facing each other on the wheel - go together. Hence, yellow-purple, red-green, blue-orange and so on.

Two nights ago, I searched "color palettes" on my Pinterest feed and lo and behold, was shown several feeds, including the websites Design Seeds and Color Collective.  Both are beautifully designed, navigable websites set up principally for designers and "those who love color". They offer bold new palettes of color drawn from the colors appearing in color-balanced photographs (ranging from landscapes to cupcakes).

As an aside, many palettes draw inspiration from nature. Crashing waves on a seashore offer a palette of teals, blues, greens, yellow (from the incandescent light) and dove greys. A photo of succulent cactuses creates a palette of dusty pink, lilac, dull greens and frosty light greys.

When I am taken by a color pencil work, it is almost always as much about the choice of color as it is about technique in rendering those colors to show texture. One can't just fill in a picture with colors chosen at random. All you will get is a picture that looks wrong, out of whack.

Exhibit A: I don't know what I was thinking with this

disappointing work. Red and cool blues,

together with browns and warm pinks?? The

wrong colors were the very reason this work was abandoned.

One picture that I saved to my Pinterest board titled "Learn Color Pencil Art" is this one below. It had not yet been completed when it was uploaded by the artist to Pinterest, but I can tell it is going to be a winner.

It's all in the choice of color, baby. 

 

Fish

I returned to my Harmony of Colours book this week and found a drawing of a few large fish, and decided that I would colour them like the light was coming from the top, the surface of the water, so the tops of their bodies would be lighter than their lower halves. 

I admit I devoted more attention to the blue fish, the first one I did on this page. The rest were done cursorily, which explains why the (attempt at) iridescence isn't as apparent in the others. 

I find it ironic that, with my box of 150 Prismacolor pencils, I find myself bemoaning that I don't have "enough" color options. That shouldn't be the case. I'm just not thinking hard enough about how colors can "go" together, even the colors that one doesn't normally reach for from the get-go. 

Looking at others' coloring book works, I see some getting really creative about using various shades of one color, producing largely monochromatic pieces, or putting contrasting colors that I didn't think to mash together. 

A tentative first brush with watercolor pencils

This was done with my Derwent watercolor pencil set of 24. I decided to be disciplined about my choice of colors and keep to a palette of earth tones - mostly three shades of browns, oranges, warm pink, yellows and some greens. I wanted the eyes to pop, so picked the strongest green there.

The process of wetting the paper didn't go so well. I used the second finest brush I have (of my four), and applied it only to those parts of the drawing that had clear gradations of color, such as the tiger-stripe part on the sides of the nose, the irises and eye lids. I left the rest of the color pencil parts pretty much intact because the areas of color were mostly too small for the water color effect to show anyway.

The gradation from brown through orange to yellow on the bridge of the nose are mostly gone in the above "after" version - and i don't think that's a good thing. Did I apply too much water?

More research into handling watercolor pencils needed, and definitely, more practice.

Drawing fabric folds: a practice run

Sophie's birthday is round the corner, so her Godma decided to make a card to go with the bag of goodies. Godma figured she needed the practice and challenge of rendering fur and fabric. One can do only so many pages of coloring books drawn by other people!

I copied the drawing of a dreamy-looking mouse from a Pinterest post I saw, but the post was in black and white, so the color choices of the animal and clothing are mine. I used the black and white picture - and all its shades of grey - as reference for the subtle shades of the folds in the blue-denim overalls, red undershirt and yellow scarf.

I used my Derwent periwinkle blue and my lighter Prismacolor powder blue, as well as a 70% cool grey for darker areas of the denim. White was used on the tops of the folds catching the light, accented by ink from my white gel pen. The red shirt was done with a combo of poppy red (base color), Tuscan red and two shades of orange.

I also tried to make the mouse look furry. This entailed putting down a base color of light brown and then overlaying it with light strokes of darker brown and warm grey.

Godma is not entirely satisfied; this could have been better. Surely the way denim catches the light and the way cotton (I presume the red shirt to be cotton!) does it are different? This was all done only by observation and instinct. My copy of Colored Pencil Painting Bible arrived last week, but haven't had a chance to browse through it or use it for reference.

The lettering was hand-drawn and colored in with my Towbow Dual-Brush Pens.   I don't feel confident enough yet to hand-write using the pens, showing the characteristic thick-thin strokes of brush lettering.

Sigh, so many things to learn, so little time. Work always gets in the way. I still haven't tried out my Derwent Water Color Pencils!!

From vase to my drawing pad

I bought a bunch of orange orchids with red spots two weeks ago, and decided to try drawing a bloom.

Half done. 

Actually, the single bloom - already past its prime and detached from the stem - deteriorated really quickly, so I had to throw it out. But by then, I had already done two petals or so. I put the bloom into my flower press and continued drawing the other three petals, basically without a reference object.

I put a layer of yellow first on the lightly-pencilled outlines, then put in the deep red spots, using Crimson Lake from my Derwent Artists set. They were a test of patience, and I had to keep my pencil point sharpened. 

I had to layer a medium grey over each spot - yes, each and every one, talk of tedium! - to give the red the greater depth required. 

Then I used orange and a light brown to give some shading to each petal, with the lighter parts in orange and the deeper bits, in brown.

This was an exercise in observation - how the red in the spots was picked up at the tips and bases of each petal. 

The centre part of the flower was very hurriedly done. For this, I Googled for a picture of this type of orchid and drew it from a reference picture. It's not very good - but I suppose it looks real enough and recognisable as one variety of orchid found in Singapore.

Another dragon!

From an Oriental, fire-breathing dragon (see last post here) to this cartoony cutie, complete with wings, which his Oriental cousin doesn't have.

I drew and colored this in 40 minutes for a birthday card. Having taken classes in cartooning some years ago, I'm familiar with the conventions of cartooning. I adapted this from a drawing I saw on the Internet, but the colors are all my own. I wanted them bright and cheery for Sammy, whose birthday will be celebrated this Sunday.

I should have put in more effort for the words above. It was nearing 3am and I admit I was looking to finish the job!

A dragon

This was off another page from Your Personal Wish Book by Asian geomancer Lillian Too, with illustrations by Jennifer Too.

Lillian's "commandment" on the page facing this drawing was to color the dragon, a Chinese symbol of strength and vitality, "in a color that resonates with you", and to render its "magical" scales with a glitter pen.

My tin of Derwent pencils, a set of 72, were out, so I used those instead of Prismacolors.

I went with purple, my favourite color, for the dragon, and layered it with green nearer the areas where the scales catch the light. Instead of glitter, I used my white gel pen to bring out the high whites in the bright areas.

For the head, I opted for strong reds, oranges and yellows. I picked a strong pea green for the spines through the creature's length.

As for the pearl: That caused some difficulty, and I'm not pleased with the result. I looked up some tutorials online, and they seemed to advise using contrasting shades of white and deep grey, and to layer the white in pink and mint green to bring out the luminescence. As you can see, it didn't quite work. I think the white I used wasn't white enough.

A rethink on the clouds: I should have done them in white, with some bluish shading, instead of using two pale shades of blue.

As for the rim of Chinoiserie patterns around the dragon, I did it quickly. The fine lines were quite a pain and a test of my patience. I only reminded myself to keep the colors muted so that the dragon, the main event, would pop.

The option for the rim pattern would have been to keep it monotone, probably in blue, in a nod to Ming blue-and-white pottery.

I put this on Instagram, and R says she thought it was a photograph of a porcelain plate. I guess this piece turned out ok overall.

But the pearl, the pearl, aaarrrggghhh!

Fish!

Nine fish from Your Personal Wish Book by Lilian and Jennifer Too.  

After some freehand-drawn works, I returned to my coloring books this last weekend, this time picking up a lesser-used book, Your Personal Wish Book by the Asian geomancer Lillian Too. The illustrations are by Jennifer Too, probably a relative.

The challenge tossed by the two Toos (haha) was to render the nine fish (carp?) on the page in vibrant reds. The Chinese say that the word for fish, yu, sounds like the word for excess, yu. The number nine is no accident either. It is a symbol of longevity. 

I used my box of 72 Derwents for this one. It had several shades of reds, from the deep cranberry to pale orange. I picked a combo of three to four colors for each fish - a red, a paler red and a neutral (grey or sand) - in hopes the combo would work. 

It was after I was done that I realised that I should have played with shades within each fish, as each body would be thrown in shadow in parts and gleaming bright white in others. So it was a belated effort, an afterthought,  to render some parts of the fish with an overlay of mid-grey. 

It was a conscious effort to keep the flowers and floating lotus leaves in pale pastels so the fish would pop. 

This piece was done under less-than-perfect lighting, so does not bear up well to a closer inspection. Some parts of the scales were imperfectly colored. (*Embarassment*) For this, I blame the lighting in our living room on Saturday night. My presbyopia didn't help any! 

Towards the end, after the nine fish were done and I was onto the flowers, I was losing patience, and did the rest of it quickly, so it's not one of my best efforts.