I spent yesterday colouring yesterday’s drawing in. That was an interesting experience!
I started out with graphite and coloured drawing pencils. But, as I coloured more and more I got frustrated with them
So, I switched to Inktense pencils and paints and a water brush. That was better, but the results were rather chalky and obscured the black lines a little. So I tried some watercolour paints. Better, but still weren’t feeling right.
Finally, I dug out my set of the Kuretake Zig Clean Colour Real Brush pens, and they hit the spot!
With each type of media I did my best to remain true to the limited colour palette of earth tones, but the more organic parts really did need that muted olive green for some variety. That decision really has helped to tie everything together in this design.
Surprisingly, The whole variety of media seems to work well together. I expected a whole hot mess from my messing around with media. Whatever I did, it’s brought the drawing to life, and there’s a lot of interest in the variations of intensity and vibrancy of colour throughout it.
I’d expected the mixed media paper to be a bit difficult to work with Inktense, watercolours and the brush pens. It wasn’t, it worked really well! Perhaps because I didn’t do much in the way of working in colour layers.
I still have some work to do to this. I want to add some gold accents in places, as well as using a white Gelly Roll pen to add dots of bright white here and there. Oh, I need to remove the margin guidelines, as well as that pesky bit of dirt that is on my scanner!
I really am smiling when I look at this piece of artwork. There’s lots of open space, yet it works. I think it’s done, though I may add some ‘ruins’ peeking above the froth of vegetation. I’ll see what happens over time.
Angela Porter 