Posted by
admin - Friday, August 8th, 2008
Okay, let’s talk about art. If anyone ever told you that colored pencil was easy, they were just trying to sell you $120 dollars worth of colored pencils. Colored pencil is one of the hardest mediums I’ve ever tried to tackle, well, I would say that watercolor is harder, but colored pencil comes in a not too distant second. I think it all has to deal with the way they blend. Because, they don’t. Watercolor is the same way. You don’t blend watercolor, you add layer upon layer and can only get a gradual blend if you do it quick and while it is still wet. With the pencils, it is very much like coloring with very thin crayons. You can’t blend them, you can only lay down one layer of color at a time and hope it looks nice with the color you are about to lay on top of it. If you do it wrong, you can’t erase, you can’t blob on more color, you can’t paint it all white again. You must start over from scratch. That’s what makes it challenging and rather fun. I started using pastels when I was fourteen because I loved the way I could blend the colors together on the paper with just my fingertips. Then I moved to pencil which also blends with paper stumps, then to oil pastel which blends roughly the same way as oil paints. Point is, I like to blend colors together in a predictable way. Watercolor is anything but predictable. Well, I take that back, if I were to do a painting in watercolor, predictably it would be awful. Colored pencil has been very much a roller coaster of a learning experience. My first picture in colored pencil took me about a year. Not a year total, but it was so complex and so detailed that it would take several days to do just one area of the picture. Then I would get disheartened or busy doing something else. Then I would grit my teeth and pick it up again, vowing to finish it. It definitely wasn’t the picture to get started on, but it did teach me what I could do with a colored pencil. It wasn’t perfect, but then again, it was art, and art is far from perfect. Which is the way it should be.
