Color!

Color is hard. We only barely got into color in the very last drawing class I took last spring. Working on line felt like thinking about a single dimension of the picture, and working on shading felt like adding another dimension. Color feels like it's adding several at once: you have warm and cool colors, the effect of adjacent colors on parts of the picture, and the color palette of the picture as a whole. I don't have it figured out at all.

This was my first color picture. I kind of went overboard with contrast, and am not terribly happy with the overall feel of the picture- it ended up kind of flat, and the perspective is a bit off. But hey, learning is good. I used colored graphite pencils for this.

The picture is from a photograph from a National Geographic article in 1980 about a man who refused to move from his house near Mt. St. Helens right before it erupted.



Next, I did a bunch of experiments with colored pastels, both chalk and oil, but I found these frustrating. Chalk is so dusty I'm always afraid my drawing will blow away or disintegrate, oil is more substantial, but harder to precisely mix. I did find some water soluble oil pastels that mixed more easily, but haven't done anything with them yet that I really like.


Then I decided to get back to basics: markers! Well, 'brush pens'- that's what they call them when they are marketed to adults. But still, they are basically markers. Markers are fun. Markers are bold, fast to work with, hard to mess up after the fact, and you can still do some simple mixing with layers.

This picture is based on a postcard Jane sent me. Jane has excellent taste in postcards.



This was a live action sketch of a drum circle in golden gate park in SF.