Thursday 17 September 2020

Week 19: Rosalie, Don & CursedGirl

 Welcome to the final week of Term 3!

I hope you have all enjoyed the prompts for the past 9 weeks and done a bit of drawing. Even if you haven't wanted to show your work it is important to keep up the practice. I will be doing prompts for Term 4, which will begin in the first week in October.

Rosalie

As Rosalie has been doing some on-line botanical classes, she thought you would all be interested in what she has been learning this week. She has been learning the art of blending colour pencils using solvents! This is a fun way of mixing waxed/oil based pencils to achieve a really smooth and polished finish. Solvents also can make the colour quite intense and brilliant.  I haven't used this technique for decades as I always found the solvents too irritating to use and they made my asthma kick in. But Rosalie has used a product called Zest-it which is reported to be low irritant.

Using Polychromos on Fabriano 300gsm TW HP she blended her pencils with Zest-it , she says:

"Ways of applying are brush, cotton bud, tortillion, I also tried silicone shaper. None worked well until I used it in a separate jar with a sponge in it and dipped the tortillion in the wet part of the sponge being careful to make sure it was clean when I was changing colours."

These two studies are nice experiments in the technique and well worth exploring further.  You can find out about the product from the Zest-It website HERE. The product is designed for use with waxed/oil based pencils - not sure how it would work with water colour pencils and would need to be experimented with - but I really don't know if you need to as you can already 'paint' with w/c pencils...

An interesting video I found from Kirsty Partridge -  her tests are interesting and show how you can blend in various layers: HERE

'Zest-it studies' by Rosalie

Don

Don has also taken this weeks prompt as an opportunity to experiment a bit:

'I've been wanting to try pen and wash, so I had a go at this pic I took somewhere in Italy...'

Using Canson 220gsm watercolour paper Don created light washes with Prismacolour watercolour pencils and added detail with a 0.1 Unipen Fineliner. A delightful little drawing that hints at the summer Tuscan sunlight. I like how you have used the pen to create texture in the wooden doorway. Your perspective is pretty good too. I like the stonework jigsaw-  perhaps a little more pen texture rather than outlining each stone individually is needed - but, what you have done works quite well and is an interesting technique. Very nice.

'Italian Doorway', by Don

Cursed Girl

CG is walking on the side of the angels this week with this fantasy manga style drawing. She has used graphite line alone to express the contemplative pose of the angel. The form is good, the blank face evocotive. Perhaps the arm could be longer and less 'stick' like, it lacks form. The soft strokes in the wings create a feathered effect well.

I would love to see CG try adding more colour or tone in a manga style to her works. Not much, just a touch. HERE is a great video from Mark Crilley showing 4 different ways to try. Give it a go CG!

'Angel' by CursedGirl

Fabulous works you three... Anyone else?



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