Colored Pencil Week Six

The Homework Challenge from Week Five was started in last week's class. A landscape, West Beach Sunset, was drawn using water soluble colored pencil on a bumpy, student grade water color paper and opened up with a brush and water to provide back lighting. The homework was to continue the landscape using the set of 24 Prismacolor Premier wax based colored pencils.

Chris Dougherty

Mary Vetere

 While each painting has beautiful backlighting, all three artists mentioned how the paper fought heavy applications of the wax pencils, but that light came through from the open spaces.

Katie Bull                                              

After the critique, we prepared for a portrait painting of Dr.Shui-ying Hu, a Chinese Botanist  of high esteem, who died last year at 102. She is being honored in April by the Arnold Arboretum of Harvard University, and we have been given permission to use the photo for painting. First, we watched a film of Alberto Giacometti the famous artist, painting a portrait drawing. We watched this film twice to learn his device of starting with the midline.  http://youtu.be/QS0PzOwfmHo

Next we made a chart of one and a half inch circles, experimenting with many possibilities for flesh tones.

 Starting with the peach pencil, a value scale graduated from the outer circle to the interior. Several colors were used. Subsequently, layers of two and even three colors  were graduated in preparation for the final painting. Last we focused on specific features; an eye, nose, mouth, etc. .

It will be two weeks before we meet again to see what progress has been made.