I Eat My Peas With Honey

Lettering - Daniel Smith Luminescent Watercolors, Duochrome Arctic Fire and Pencil Crayon

I did this for the July Westcoast Calligraphy Society Love of Letters challenge.  The July  prompt is "food".

Douglas Fairbanks

Pencil Crayon

Men in Hats

I know I've gone through a "drawing men in hats" phase before, but indulge me please.

Lincoln

Fruit Crate Label, pencil crayon

Boss

Fruit Crate Label, pencil crayons

Golden Girl

Pencil Crayon

Pushing the Values on Toned Paper

I have been playing with pencil crayons on toned paper for a couple of days.  It took me awhile to get the hang of it.

I started with Magic Pencils in the garden:

Something wasn't quite right though, and I wasn't happy.  A drawing needs a good variety of values (light and dark), and the magic pencils didn't have the ranges I needed - not much white, no black.  Back in my office/studio this morning, I got out the Prismacolors and enhanced what I did yesterday.  I had to really think about it though, and do a little research.

Here are my notes for next time, using a 5 value scale from lightest to darkest:

1. Decide which value the paper is going to represent.  On black paper, for example, the paper would be the darkest value.  On this dark rust, it was about Value 4 out of 5.
2. Pick your pencil crayon colors based on value - white will be Value 1/5, black will be 5/5.  (If you're working on black paper, you won't need black.)
3. Do an initial drawing thinking mostly about placing the objects on the paper. 
4. Now concentrate on values.  Unless you're working on black paper, it might be easiest to darken the darkest shadow areas at this point.  Then I find it easiest to think about the lightest values, and so on, working back towards the middle.

Here is another one I did, after adding the Prismacolors:

And here's my initial drawing:

Working on Toned Paper

Pencil Crayon

I've been thinking more about the various ways of rendering values since my study of grisaille this past week. With colored paper, one way to do this is to let the paper tone stand in for the middle value.  The next pages in my journal were these creamy ones, so I chose these wooden items for my planner page next week.

There is just no end to the variations available with drawing!