Inktober comes but once a year, and it is a lot of fun, too. Ink is the focal point – drawing with it, shading with it. Not only is black ink used, but so is colored. It’s a great time to sit down and just draw with ink, or, what I always do, is to draw from a given prompt.
If you go to Instagram and type in #inktober2021, you can find all sorts of responses to the prompts. People are amazingly creative! Sometimes I feel a bit prosaic and dull, but that varies from drawing to drawing, of course.
1: Crystal
2. Suit – as in Law Suit
3. Vessel
4. Knot
5. Raven
6. Spirit
7. Fan
8. Watch
9. Pressure
If you want to see what I added below the images on my painting-drawing blog, head over to Journey By Paper to see more, or my Instagram account. At Journey By Paper you can enjoy boring commentary or doggerel by yours truly, others, as well as good poetry and song.
I keep finding new adventures in the art world. For the past 6 or 7 weeks I have been taking a beginning colored pencil class. What fun! Here you can see what I have done from earliest to most recent. I’ll say more at a later date because I am doing 2-fingered typing while my splinted finger heals.
Sometimes I have too much fun making up titles for my posts!
This is a colored pencil exercise I did, just because. I used the more highly textured side of a piece of Mi Teintes pastel paper, choosing a rather grey paper with threads of darker grey running through it. I drew the cherry blossoms on with a graphite pencil and then laid down a rather heavy layer of whites, greens and brown for the blossoms, leaves, and branch. From there, more colors, burnishing and blending. Finally, I scribbled in a turquoise background, followed by layers of blues and lighter colors as well.
Initially, I decided to use a tortillon to blend the background colors, attempting to emulate the bokeh one sees in photographs. Bokeh is a wonderful bit of photography at times, achieved either via the lens itself, or distance between the object in focus and the next object behind the primary one. To blur colored pencil requires a lot of pencil color and a bit of elbow grease. Not quite what you would get when blending pastels.
Never having done it, but interested in the effect, I took a small amount of odorless mineral spirits, a soft brush, and began to blend the colors in the background. Where there were heavier layers, the colors blurred and blended more readily. I waited for the mineral spirits to evaporate and then added more color. More blending, this time painting around the cherry blossoms and branch with the loosened pigment. More drying. Finally, a bit of blending – very little, with a very light touch – of the leaves and blossoms. To complete the drawing, sharp colored pencils were used to enhance the branches and yellow pollen in the center of the blossoms.
I decided to try bokeh in colored pencil as I think that is what my teacher said we will be doing in our class Thursday morning, as well as drawing on black paper. This was a fun exercise and like everything, doing equates learning and understanding. Let’s see what Thursday class will bring . . .
The last day of my Pencil Portrait class was last Wednesday morning, and it was a rather sad time for me. I have learned so much. The next session will be in the classroom, on a morning which is not good for me. Interestingly, by happenstance, by good luck, I came home and found out that a colored pencil drawing class begins this coming Thursday! Thursdays are always open in my schedule . . . . Email can be great – if you read it!
I am not sure what to expect from a colored pencil class, much less in a socially distanced and masked classroom. Hopefully it will work out well, and the teacher will be logical and good. It is not often that you see such an offering as more traditional media classes are apt to be offered.
In my library I have a few books on colored pencils, so I dug them out. One that is really a rather interesting one is called “Creative Colored Pencil Workshop” by Carlynne Hershberger and Kelli Money Huff. It combines pencils with other media. The magnolia blossom is a quick take on one of their very first studies. I like to warm up so I will be doing a bit of colored pencil drawing over the next few weeks, but plan to really continue to work on painting in gouache and / or watercolor as well.
Ink, Yarn & Beer 