Snow Leopard

Colour Pencil on Toned Paper

The following is from one of the demonstrations and exercised I did with my recient class at Camp Creative, a Snow Leopard in the soft Prismacolour Premier pencils. I don’t use Prismacolour pencils often as I generally find them too soft, but I do like their ability to blend and layer over coloured papers. As I didn’t want the class to have to spend too much on different types of paper for this class, I brought along a pad of the Strathmore Tan paper A3 180gsm. This is a lighter weight paper than I usually work with, but is robust enough to take several layers of pencils. As it is a thinner paper it is possible (just) to use the trace method of transferring a line drawing via a light box or window.

Why draw on toned paper? Well, working on toned paper can lead to a very realistic result . Remember, just as there is no true black in life, neither is there white. There is the sun, and everything else is darker than that.  So if your paper is darker than white it gives you an edge in your tonal range. It is easier to push a dark on tone paper, and you can always add a white highlight if you wish. Mistakes made on the original drawing are easier to hide. Because you start with a tone, your drawing time is faster as you don’t need to draw that in, it is there for you. You draw the tonal range either side of the paper colour.

One drawback to toned paper is that it can affect the colour hue of your pencil when laid down. So you MUST do a test sheet of your pencils on your chosen paper. So this is how I began. The Snow Leopard image is a photo I took several years back at the Melbourne Zoo.

As you can see, the Prismacolour pencils worked well and were quite intense in hue compared to my preferred Staedtler Mars Karat pencils - although you can certainly mix the two together if you are lacking a particular colour in the Prismacolour range.

Here is the the final result:

Very shortly there will be a step-by-step post on Mike Sibley's website showing the development of this work - joining is simple and inexpensive. But if you wish, I have a pdf available of this progress, simply contact me and I will send it to you.