sketchbook :: time for spring

A new season, a new sketchbook for me. And all of the best plans just waiting to happen. This is an 8 x 8 hand.book watercolor journal. I began my usual way with a calendar on the first page, and my travel watercolor palette on the next. The sketch above was done with watercolor only of daffodils from my yard. They are in one of those old glass milk bottles, the kind we used to get in school with the waxed cardboard cap, if you are old enough to remember that. From the scan you can see the previous page shows through where I painted the colors in my palette.

The only adjustment I have made from my previous travel palette is to remove sap green and put cerulean blue back instead. I know. Sap green. One of my long standing "go-to" colors in my watercolor palette. However, lately I find that I am using mixes for greens rather than relying on green pigments.

Just to prove to myself that I would be happier with an additional blue (cerulean) and that I wouldn't even miss sap green, I played around with mixing various greens. Although the scan is a poor representation of  the actual colors, there in the center, a mix of phthalo turquoise and gamboge results if a beautiful sap green that has more depth than sap green straight from the tube. I am keeping phthalo green (blue shade). It is a color that I find much too intense to use on its own, but it results in beautiful mixes such as grays when mixed with alizarin or burnt sienna and rich greens when mixed with various yellows. It is good to change things occasionally. Even small changes can create new and interesting challenges.

Familiarity enables us to tame, control, and ultimately forget the mystery.

~John O'Donohue~

Anam Cara

Foggy with a chance of snow

Not much art happening for me lately as I have been busy with homeschooling and free-lance work. Hopefully the next few days will offer me more art time. The photo above was taken about mid-morning from our back deck. This is also what it looked like here yesterday. All day. And now today. Snow may be coming too. yippee. So for a little bit of color I tried this quiz that I saw over on Paula Pertile's blog, Drawing a Fine Line.

Well, maybe I'm not so colorful after all.

Your rainbow is shaded violet.

What is says about you: You are a creative person. You appreciate beauty and craftsmanship. You are patient and will keep trying to understand something until you've mastered it.

Find the colors of your rainbow at spacefem.com.

Color!

While working with the study of color this month I thought it was time I created a color wheel with colored pencil. Now I have made color wheels with paint, but colored pencil is really an entirely different exercise. Because of the translucency of colored pencil it is perhaps a much more difficult exercise, yet very worthwhile for learning not only how colored pencil "mixes" color but also for understanding just what color palette is available with colored pencils. I am doing this project in tandem with Rose Welty of Rose's Art Lines and you can see her color wheel "mixing" results here.

So up top you see my colored pencil color wheel. For the purpose of this exercise I used Derwent's Coloursoft colored pencils primarily because this is the only brand where I own the complete set. My thinking being that with a complete set I should have all the colors necessary to do this type project. Well, not exactly, as I learned.

First off, I identified three pencils to use as my primaries of red, yellow and blue. For red, I used Red c120; yellow, Lemon Yellow co30; and blue, Ultramarine c290. I then proceeded to mix my secondary and tertiary colors using just those three primaries. The complete circle of colors in my color wheel shows the results of these mixes. Although mixing a good violet in any color media is difficult, in this case the red and blue worked quite well. Green turned out to be a more difficult color to achieve, probably because my blue primary leans a little toward the red, resulting in a green with somewhat less intensity. For the sake of comparison I included examples of 'pre-mixed' colored pencils that most closely match the secondary and tertiary colors in my color wheel. By clicking on the color wheel you should be able to see it large enough to read my notations identifying each color used. The oranges were easy enough as were the violet and red-violet to find matches to my 'mixed' colors. The green hues were where I found the Coloursofts very lacking. Nothing is really a good yellow-green, green or blue-green. In each case it seemed a mixture of my two closest contenders would result in better representations of those colors. And a true blue-violet was not to be found, as you can see, my Indigo pencil was the closest, and it is really a different hue entirely.

As a side note, I used at least three different color wheel sources to help me find the correct hues for my color wheel. And even within these three sources there were variations of hue from one color wheel to the next. Color is, after all, very subjective depending on the viewer, the media, and the printing or whatever process is used to reproduce it.

Next up in this exercise is my value scale. Now value, is the relative lightness or darkness of a hue. The lighter values being 'tints', and the darker values are 'shades'. Here I used my blue hue, identified the location of the blue on the value scale, with white at one end and black at the other. I then 'mixed, with either white or black to get my range or seven values. Notice that the blue hue does not fall in the center of the value range, but just right of center toward the darker shades. Where do you think red would be on a value scale? Yellow? Each hue also has its own relative value.

And lastly, my intensity scale. Intensity refers to the relative saturation of a color. To remove or lessen a hue's intensity you can introduce the complement of that hue. In this case I used the complements of blue and orange. And I used the orange colored pencil as opposed to my mixed orange, just to make things simpler and more consistent. The center square is the neutral achieved by mixing the two complements. Changing a color's value with white, black, or gray will also lessen it's intensity. Personally I never use my black colored pencils. I find pure black to be rather deadening in a colored pencil drawing, a holdover from my painting days. Instead I prefer to 'mix' darks, so that even though it may be very dark, there remains some hint of color in my darkest values in a colored pencil drawing.

When I mention 'mixing' color with colored pencils I don't mean mixing in the same way one would mix color in paint. As I stated above, colored pencils apply pigment in a translucent manner that produces a different set of challenges from mixing an opaque media like paint. When layering with colored pencils, it is possible to see the color from the previous layer peeking through as each new layer of color is applied. What is really happening is an optical mixing of color. Your eye blends all those little bits of color into a new color just like all the little dots of color in a newspaper photo blend into the colors you see. Optical mixing of color is challenging but also offers a lot of exciting possibilities for ways to use color, as the Post Impressionist painters discovered. And Chuck Close used so well.

For further reading about color, how we see colors, and a very thorough explanation of the color terms, hue, value and intensity, check out Katherine Tyrrell's recent post "Colour-a scientific perspective" on her blog, Making a Mark.

Color project for June

Elizabethan Gardens, Manteo NC
colored pencil in Moleskine sketchbook
©2008 Ann Thompson Nemcosky

For the month of June I have been given the gift of time. Something that is a rare commodity and always in great demand in my day-to-day activities. It comes in the form of a few hours three mornings a week while my dear hubby will be taking kiddo to her tennis lessons. Come July he's back in the classroom and I'll be on duty again from there on out. The rest of my days will chiefly be occupied with homeschool lessons (yes, we school year round - believe me, it's loads easier) and all the other stuff moms need to do. But for the next four weeks, those morning hours will be mine.

And that's what gave me an idea to do a special project, something I have wanted to do yet didn't have the time to accomplish - paint. I haven't really attempted to put paint to canvas in over nine years. Besides, I have many ideas in the works for new projects in colored pencil. I wavered over the sense of this project, to indulge myself with painting, when I could very easily fill that space of time with so many worthwhile activities. My kitchen cabinets are screaming to be scrubbed and our attic is a nightmare of clutter. Or I could continue with my colored pencil drawing projects, getting oh so much accomplished. Then I saw this post about color from Katherine Tyrell on her blog, Making a Mark.

Well, that did it. I have committed myself to a month of working in paint. I spent the day setting up a temporary "studio" in our garage, the only available space in our little mountain cottage suitable for making a mess. Since the weather is warm, working there will not be a problem, and I added a couple of clip-on lights to brighten it up. I already had a good supply of paints and brushes and a quick trip to the art supply store filled any holes I had in supplies.

Katherine Tyrell's extensive outline for her color project is very inspiring and something I will be following very closely as I dive into my paints. And my goals for this project? I would like to see if I can come away from my own personal painting workshop with a better sense of how to use color more interpretatively than representationally. When I do return to my colored pencil drawing I would like to be comfortable with a more expressive rather than a literal use of color.

I do still plan to continue with drawing in all my various sketchbooks. Whether I will share any of my paintings here remains to be seen. It all depends on how things go. Stay tuned. . .

Colors

Beach Walk
pastel on sanded paper
4.5 x 6.5 inches
copyright 2008 by Ann Thompson Nemcosky
click here to buy

As I have been working my way around my new home here on this new pc I have run up against some issues with color. I suppose I was lucky in my ignorance of color issues and computers on my old machine. Whatever I saw on the screen tended to be what I ended up with in print, whether printed on my home printer or a professionally printed design job. I knew that different monitors and computers would display color differently but I had no idea just how different color could appear until I set up shop on this computer. Files I had painstakingly adjusted for color to match my original art look completely different now when I open them up here.

So I have spent the last couple of days searching for solutions. I have adjusted the monitor settings, Photoshop profiles and operating system color profiles for devices. And I learned just enough about color on computers to make me feel like my head would explode. I'd really rather be making art you know. Anyway, for those of you brave enough to venture into this highly technical topic I found a great resource in this color tutorial. And I'm going back to concerning myself with color use and theory in the three dimensional world.

The image above is a pastel drawing I completed this past weekend. It is on Colourfix sanded pastel paper. I was feeling the need to work a little more loosely than what I have been doing with colored pencils. Thinking about getting out the paints again, but don't really have the space for that. Or the time. But I love drawing with pastels, one of my favorite mediums. Such direct color. And to mix things up even more, I put this one on Ebay this time.