Wednesday, November 11, 2009

November 11 work in progress: horse drawing

A side note about the leaf photos, I think I will go ahead and just post them all at once later on, after the leaf falls off the tree. This once a day thing doesn't really float my boat very well. Unfortunately, the chosen leaf is not turning a glorious red color as I had hoped, it's going the yellow and brown route. Lovely, but not as exciting. About half the leaves on that tree seem to go red, the other half go yellow. So I'll photograph a red one too. Stay tuned.

How bout a horse in the mean time.


Sorry, this is an AWFUL photograph, because I took it tonight, and it's dark. Ewwww it's not really that color.

It's pretty much done, pending a few things:
1) I need to sign it
2) It needs to "bloom." I heard you say "huh?" Wax-based colored pencils, when used at high levels of saturation, will produce a cloudy "bloom" over some areas of the drawing as the wax surfaces (that's why the black areas on the horse look kinda cloudy and dull right now). This tends to send people into crisis mode apparently. Relaaaaaxxxx. It's no big deal. People get crazy about redrawing and then applying fixative right away. Uh uh, bad idea. When you finish a colored pencil drawing, put it away for a couple days, or a week. Stick it somewhere safe, and let that baby bloom! Embrace the bloom! And then, ever so gently, wipe if off (kleenex, blending stumps, whatever). Then spray with fixative. But let the darn thing bloom and get it out of its system (so to speak), drives me nuts when people get all worked up about trying to "prevent" it.
3) This is perhaps the most important thing here in step three, my client needs to approve it before I can call it officially done. And here's where I wish all people had internet access. Alas, this means I schedule a meeting...

2 comments:

Unknown said...

Ah! Thank you for the info on bloom. I've just recently decided to fully embrace my creative side as I've been itching to do for years. I bought some Prismacolor Premier pencils and Art Stix to work with, alongside of some Derwent watercolor pencils I've had and dabbled with for several years. Question - will bloom still happen if you've used a colorless blender (the felt pen kind)? And how do you wipe the bloom off without damaging your drawing (I'm guessing it's not a super quick job)?

Katherine Plumer said...

I'm not familiar with the felt pen type of colorless blender, so I don't know. I use the colorless pencil, and that will bloom. Pretty much any area where you have built up enough layers of color so that the surface becomes "solid" it'll bloom. Most obvious on dark colors.

It's not hard to get rid of it, it doesn't take much pressure, it really just wipes off. For a tiny drawing like this I'll use blending stumps, and I'm not really applying pressure, just wiping off the wax. With a big drawing you can wipe it with kleenex. Just be careful not to drag pigment from one area to the next. I have a blending stump dedicated to black and dark blue. Another to browns and reds.

It's easy, it's just hard to explain. :-)