Color lessons

Detail from Bass Lake Trail
colored pencil on pastel board

First, let me begin by apologizing for not having a pastel post yesterday. I did do a pastel drawing but haven't finished it, so next Monday I will hopefully resume with my Pastel Monday posts.

What I do have to post today is a small colored pencil piece that I have been working on, and all its stages of process. I have been concentrating on color these days, or more specifically, my use of color, and have learned a few things about myself and my working habits along the way. Not to bore you with all the details of my color study I will just say that using color, and especially using color expressively, is a constant challenge. A challenge that keeps me interested and moving on to the next thing but is always a learning process. I have a tendency to over work color through a struggle of pushing and pulling layers of color throughout the making of a piece, often losing that fresh, expressive quality I was after in the first place. I do this no matter what media I am working in, colored pencil, pastel, acrylic, watercolor, any color media I pick up is fair game. So my challenge is to overcome this habit and try to be much more focused in my intent. And posted here is one recent attempt to hold on to that focus plus do a little experimenting with color.
This first image shows my 6 x 6 inch pastel board drawn with Derwent's Inktense watercolor pencils. I was looking for patterns of light and dark, warm and cool, in this little landscape scene.









Next, I washed the Inktense pencil with water. The colors become much more saturated.










When the board was dry I started in with Derwent's Coloursoft colored pencil. Again looking for patterns of light and dark, warm and cool.









Here I am much further along with the dry colored pencil. I tend to work from the top left outward, getting to about 80% completion, and often bouncing back and forth from the area I am expanding back into previous areas to make adjustments and outward across the board some more.

Bass Lake Trail
colored pencil on pastel board
6 x 6 inches
©2008 by Ann Thompson Nemcosky

Lastly, here is the completed piece. I did manage to keep my focus for the most part and was happy with the overall process on this one. I have previously done colored pencil works using this technique but with a lot more pushing and pulling of color back and forth. I still have a way to go before I can really say that I was able to stay focused on my intent throughout. And I know there are always those times when you have to let the work dictate what it needs. In this piece I like the effect those bright colors of the underpainting have on the colored pencil applied over top. In the future I would like to push this use of color even further and have the underpainting play a more important role in the finished work. It's really all about the process.