Camp Creative 2

Wednesday & Thursday Morning

Wednesday is landscape day!  It can be fun to expand your work to express an open sky and full background. We discussed various ways to plan a composition for a landscape; how to maniuplate your reference to create a pleasing series of shapes, understanding the foreground, mid and background - and a few other hints and tips. We also looked at ways to create tone, using tortillon/paper stumps, hatching and scrumble effects and also using water soluble graphite pencils as a wash base. This landscape exercise had a mixed result with the students - about 1/3 loved it, another 1/3 hated it and struggled with it, and the last third were ambivilent. But love or hate it, all agreed it was worth the time to attempt the subject.

Haybales near Wattle Flat. Class demonstration, incomplete. Grapitint and 4B W/S graphite pencil plus HB, 2B & 4B graphite on Fabriano 300gsm hot press, A3.

Thursday Afternoon/Friday

Working on toned paper is also great fun - with a mid-tone grey or tan you can build your tones up and down leaving the colour paper to work as your mid tones. In this exercise students were given some Strathmore 180gsm Tan Toned paper and asked to use colour pencils to create an animal portrait or a human portrait of their own choosing. I demonstrated a quick portrait of David Helfgott, the patron of Camp Creative. We were lucky to see him perform for us on Monday night where I took a few mental notes and quick sketches. As well, the printed program had a good shot of David with which I based this work.

'David' Prismacolour pencils on Strathmore Toned Tan Paper - 1 hour demo.

I also started an animal portrait that demonstrated fur techniques. This is currently a wip and I hope to produce a progressive pdf of the work to completion.

'Snow Leopard' Prismacolour pencils on Strathmore Toned Tan paper - WIP