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| Pear and Orange, Prismacolor pencils on mat board, 10" x 9." |
I really enjoyed the recent Colored Pencil class at Brookside Gardens. Colored pencils were my favorite medium for drawing as a child. My sisters and I had amassed a huge collection of Prismacolor pencils which we would expand during our shopping expeditions to downtown Havana with my mother and aunts. Each of us was allowed to select one pencil for purchase as a reward for good behavior. At the rate of four pencils every other week or so, our collection grew over the years until we had the equivalent of an expensive 120 or 150-color set (of course, favorite colors also had to be replaced often).
I've tried many other mediums since then: watercolor, acrylics, oils, pastels, you name it. To me, colored pencils are still the most portable, easy to use, and versatile. No mess either--nothing to clean up other than pencil shavings and keeping your paper smudge-free. My love affair with them has been re-kindled by this class.
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| Artichoke with asparagus spear, Prismacolor pencil study, 17" x 11." |
There is such an amazing variety of effects you can get with colored pencils, blending and overlaying of colors, along with varying pressure and linework. Prismacolor pencils have a wax base, and the one thing to watch for is that excessive application can cause the wax to rise to the surface over time creating a "wax bloom" that obscures the artwork.
In these botanical illustration classes I have been exposed to another type of colored pencils: Faber Castell's Polychromos pencils, which are oil-based. These are well-suited for shading and adding detail such as veins under watercolor washes. The range of colors is lovely too--I just invested in a 60-color set so I can experiment more with them. I wonder what else can be done with these as a stand-alone medium? Stay tuned.
