Mulling over the advice that Malcolm gave us in the last
blog entry, I have been wondering what advice I would give to newcomers to
colour pencil. I think the advice I would give would be to invest in a sketch
book. Your sketchbook becomes your best friend as an artist. You hang out
together and play with new media and different ideas, try markmaking and colour
mixing, experiment with approaches to different textures . Like your best
friend, it also helps you solve problems you come across.
As Malcolm pointed
out, it needs to have good quality paper. My most recent one was a Daler Rowney
and the paper was 150g/m. It is a very smooth paper, lovely for graphite and ok
with Polychromos pencils, but easily clogged when layering with wax based
pencils. I got around the problem by using off- cuts of other papers and
sticking them in my sketch book. This time around I have upgraded to a
Strathmore journal, more expensive but better paper. As you will already know,
colour pencils take time and patience, as a result, you don't need a large
sketchbook as you will be probably trying things out on a small scale. An A5
book is probably plenty big enough and easy to carry around with you when you
want to go out drawing. Your sketchbook is the perfect place to put into
practice the advice and ideas you find along the way. It's private and nowhere
near as intimidating as that new sheet of expensive paper waiting for your next
drawing!
Remember too, that those colour pencil artist you admire did
not achieve those results over night. There was a lot of learning, playing and
mistake making going on, and a lot of that happened, and no doubt still
happens, in the privacy of their sketchbook.
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