This morning, I spent nearly an hour adding some more colour to this entangled drawing. I estimate that a bit more than a half has been coloured.
Today’s video on YouTube is a time lapse of this process.
I’m using a fairly limited colour palette of inktense pencils.
Link to Sketchbook Flip Through Vlog on YouTube
Sketchbook Saturday is upon us once again. I’ve created a vlog for YouTube where I flip through my current sketchbook.
The drawing at the top is now finished. I used a Tombow Fudenosuke ‘hard’ pen to draw the design on paper that has been coloured with Distress Inks. The sketch book is 21cm x 21cm (approx 8″ x 8″).
Drawing on coloured paper is something that is pleasurable to do. The colours add mood to the drawing and are an inspiration for any colour scheme I may use, should I choose to add colour.
The grungy, distressed nature of the page is also interesting; already depth and dimension are added to the artwork.
I’ve enjoyed drawing on coloured paper so much, that I actually have coloured quite a number of pages in my sketchbook and you can see them all in the vlog. What I can’t remember is exactly which colours were used for each page.
Some of the pages I like so much that I really do need to scan them in so I can use them as backgrounds for digital art, social media posts and so on going forward.
The colour choices I’m making are often veering away from the bright, saturated colours that were so characteristic of my earlier work. Such colours are still used for my colouring templates / pages and that’s not likely to change much going forward. However, for my more personal art, less saturated, vintage, even grungy, are what I am drawn to so much at the moment. Also, I seem to favour analogous colour schemes, sometimes with a pop of complementary colours.
Link to today’s Vlog on YouTube
As I enjoyed my first mug of tea of the day, I continued to add colour to this entangled drawing.
The success of blending colours yesterday inspired me to do more of this. Little by little, I’m starting to get some sparkles of confidence in adding colour.
Inktense pencils do make this easy in a way. It’s a lot easier to control the application of colour.
Control – it’s that word again in respect to the addition of colour. Watercolour vexes me as I want to control a medium that isn’t easy to control it seems. Perhaps the exploration of watercolour and Ecoline watercolour inks are cul de sacs for me. They’re interesting to explore but lead nowhere except back to where I started, almost. I return with extra knowledge and experiences that can then be applied to other media.
Indeed, the way that I apply colour digitally has partly inspired me in this artwork. But remembering my dabbling with abstract art back in my A level days gave me a few insights into my relationship with colour.
As a scientist, all my observations – drawn or written – had to be accurate, representative of what I could see. Colours had to be correct, as I could see, so others could check what I had seen and confirm those observations are correct.
As an artist, I can put that requirement to one side; but it’s not easy to do so, especially when I’m drawing from observations.
I have little problem adding colour to my cute, whimsical, entangled coloring templates. They’re not meant to represent anything ‘real’. They’re abstract in their own way. Though, when the motifs are based on observations, then I get into trouble with colour.
Remembering the abstract oil paintings I did back in the days of A level exams, I used colour to convey the mood, feeling that went with the time, place, experiences I had when taking photographs to use to work from. The final paintings were in colours that represented these personal, emotional, and sometimes intellectual responses.
Going forward, I need to remember this in my work and to transfer it to artwork. The actual colour of something is not as important as I think it is, and to remove that pressure from myself. If I want a record of the ‘real’ colours, I can take a photograph. But to record my experience, I need to give myself permission to express my feelings, emotions and my response to it in whatever colours suit me at the time. I need to allow my intuition and imagination a greater role in my work with colour
Hopefully I’ll get there, and I probably am little by little. The value of the vlogs is that I have to start to give words to the thoughts that come as I create, and this blog allows me to expand on them.
To give words to the ephemeral, abstract, metaphoric thoughts that wander around my head is to manifest them. The words result in conscious awareness of the thoughts. The awareness is then something that can be learned from, acted upon and put into practice.
I’m learning to externalise what has usually been an internal and fleeting process of thought and analysis, and it’s an intriguing and interesting experience for sure.
Link to today’s vlog on YouTube
It’s been a right weird morning. I started to work on yesterday’s drawing, but found myself at a bit of an impasse with it. So, rather than continue and risk messing it up entirely, I decided to start another.
For this one, I coloured the paper with Peeled Paint, Evergreen Bough and Chipped Sapphire Distress Inks before starting to draw.
I find working on coloured paper a real pleasure, much of the time. It sets a mood, a feel for the artwork to develop and grow upon. It can inspire me. I like that.
The one thing I didn’t do was scan the coloured paper in. My printer/scanner is having a serious amount of hissyfitting with the WiFi at the moment, disconnecting itself for no reason at all it seems. Weird, as I’d scanned in several drawings prior to this. Ho hum.
This is now finished! Between drawing, adding colour and embellishments, it’s taken somewhere between six and seven hours, I think.
Materials used:
* SeaWhite all media paper, 8″ x 8″ (195mm x 195mm)
* Uniball Eye Pen – micro
* Uniball Signo DX 0.38 Pen
* Derwent Graphitint pencils
* Brushes and water
* Derwent Drawing Pencils
* Cold Grey IV Pitt Artist Pen
* White and yellow Sakura Soufflé pens
* Clear Sakura Glaze pen
I actually managed to keep some white space in the design! I may have slightly overdone the dottiness. I did mess up by trying to use the Derwent Drawing pencils to add some darker tones to the green ‘leaves’.
Overall, I think this is good enough to move on to the next project, which is likely to be Thursday’s coloring template.
It’s been nice to lose myself in some art for the sake of art. Especially as my emotional weather is still damp, dull and grey and making me doubt myself. It’s been an emotional rainy spell that’s been brewing for a while, and that’s why I’ve returned to the familiarity and comfort of my entangled art.
I always circle back to entangled art, regardless of my experiments with other media and styles and getting frustrated with colour!
My tricksy emotional weather is only exacerbating my frustrations with colour. I know I need to get the coloured plates done for the Whimsical Cats colouring book, but as I am at the moment I will only get myself into a right royal kerfuffle. So, it’s time to just enjoy drawing, maybe using some colour – time for monochrome colour schemes I think.
Today has been a day of working with colour on various drawings in my sketchbook. This one is the one I’m most happy with; it’s been a bit of a frustrating day, colourwise.
This drawing was finished earlier today, and before adding any shading I wanted to add colour. This time, Derwent Graphitint pencils were my medium of choice, along with a brush and water.
I really like the softer, earthier, more vintage-y tones of these pencils. I was getting frustrated with the brighter colours of the Ecoline watercolour inks and Derwent Colorsoft Pencils.
So caught up in the process of adding colour (along with joys and frustrations), I didn’t realise how much of the day had gone! It’s now about tea-time here in the UK, and normally I do my social media postings mid-morning.
I am tired today. Tired because I was up way too late last night. My mood is weird – I’m content yet at the same time feeling rather sad and teary for no reason that I know. My EMDR therapist told me that in the West, we are convinced we can only feel one emotion at a time, but in the East it’s accepted that you can feel more than one at a time. I certainly experience that quite often.
The sad and teary may be a manifestation of the tiredness, but it’s nice to know the touchstone of contentment is present in the core of my being. Contentment is always present, no matter what other emotional weather is being experienced. It’s a storm anchor that helps me keep balanced during the less settled periods of emotional weather. For like all weather, emotions do pass in time. For me, I’ll feel much better when I’ve had a good night’s sleep I’m sure.
Yesterday, I took quite a large wedge of time to intensify the colours and adding shadow and embellishments to the art in my last blog post.
To do this, I used Derwent Colorsoft pencils, along with a blender pencil. The embellishments were added with White Sakura Soufflé, gold Sakura Metalic Gelly Roll, and clear Sakura Glaze pens.
It’s difficult to show the effect of the glaze pen on the artwork, though you can pick some up in the top right of the artwork on the left.
Is this the magic formula for me working with colour? A limited colour palette, simple watercolour washes, shadows added with a grey pen, intense colours with pencils, and embellishments with various pens? Maybe.
The drawing to the right was testing this idea out, though I didn’t use a grey pen to add shadows but a grey pencil. I really enjoyed how the coloured pencils added colour and depth to the artwork.
Too many dots? I don’t know. Probably. I do tend to get carried away with them!
I have learned that I can’t use the Zest-it blending fluid anymore – my asthmatic chest doesn’t like it at all! The Derwent blending pencils are a bit abrasive and moved some of the black pigment from the drawing. So, I switched to a Faber-Castell Blending pencil, and that worked just fine.
I also noticed that the blending pencil made the colours more vibrant – both the coloured pencils and the background watercolour wash. I think it’s because it leaves a glossy sheen, which I bring out by ‘polishing’ with a paper towel.
So, lots of learning and experiences yesterday and this morning, and perhaps progress in my use of colour by mixing media to my advantage.
This is, I think, finished.
It certainly was a task and I needed to persevere at the beginning. I was really hesitant about adding colour and seriously disliking the colour as I started to add it. The more I did, the more comfortable I became with adding colour.
I think what helped with the colours was the use of a limited colour palette. Indigo, prussian blue, gold ochre, burnt sienna and bronze green made the basic palette up. Mixing the colours gave me plenty of variation in colours and tones while at the same time keeping a coherence.
I started adding shading with a biro. As this drawing was a testing ground for various ideas, I used a cool grey Pitt Artist pen to add the rest of the shadows. I found the result pleasing, particularly after adding colour. A darker grey may have worked more to my tastes of high contrast, but this is a starting point.
Indeed, I rather like the combination of biro and pitt pens. I did end up adding some cross hatching to some areas to intensify the dark areas betwixt the elements of the design. That darkness helped to lift the colours somewhat.
To add highlights, a white Sakura Soufflé pen was used. I also had a hankering to add some metallic highlights too, so a gold metallic Gelly Roll came in useful.
Using flat colour washes and letting the grey shadows add volume seems to have worked well enough. I may, later, try out some coloured pencils to add more shadowing. But not until after breakfast!
Friday seems the perfect day to have a look back on the week’s sketchbook art. A vlog seems the perfect way to do that.
I also start to add colour to the latest drawing using a limited colour palette of Ecoline brush pen colours – gold ochre, burnt sienna, indigo and prussian blue. Another colour (or two) may be added to the limited palette. I’ll see how I get along.
This particular drawing is being used as a place to test out ideas concerning adding shadow and highlight, simple colour washes, and anything else that springs to mind. It may never been completed, but that’s not the point! Experimentation and experience are the points of this particular exercise.
Thursday seems to come around so quickly, and each Thursday means it’s time for another coloring template for the Angela Porter’s Coloring Book fans facebook group.
Yesterday, I created a timelapse video of the pen drawing of this template. You can find the time-lapse drawing video by clicking on this link.
Today, it’s another time-lapse video of colour being added to part of the template. Click on this link to see the time-lapse colouring video.
I added colour digitally, using Clip Studio Paint. Also, I added a grey background. I much prefer using a coloured background, it’s easier on my eyes. Also, the colours seem more vibrant against the grey background.
The template is a typically ‘Angela’ entangled, stylised, abstract one, with some inspiration from Zentangle patterns too.
I always enjoy the way that colour brings the drawing to life, and helps to enhance the layers in the drawing as well. It’s a bit of magic in my daily life for sure.
I’m not entirely sure about my colour choices. I wasn’t trying to keep within a colour palette, just having fun with colour and figuring more about Clip Studio Paint brushes. I really enjoy adding colour to my artwork with both digital art and a limited range of traditional media. I enjoy digital and traditional for different reasons. Digital work takes away the stress of making sure the right colours are chosen. If I mess up, it’s easy to change things without having to start over. It’s relaxing to do, just as art with traditional media, apart from colour choice.
Art is the Adventure 