The blacks are ink, all shades of gray are charcoal including grays over blacks. I hoped for a different result, but it’s just a small sketch, so not a big deal. I will get where I want with the next version.
What it looked like half-way through:
As usual, the ATC exchange at CAG today was a lot of fun. Here are my contributions to the event:
I love how the fall edition of the ATC exchange happens around my Birthday. This year it’s on a day before, so I got four early Birthday gifts:
Here is my newest tiny digital canvas. I haven’t done any for a few months and completely forgot my past experience with colored pencil on this kind of surface. It is a bit slippery and does not allow to build up really dark darks unless you carefully plan for them from the beginning and use very sharp pencils all the time. Unlike with paper or traditional linen canvas it is not possible to start with lighter colors everywhere and then go darker in as many layers as necessary. Darker colors on a digital canvas start to chip off relatively quickly if you are not careful.
So with a refreshed memory, I am now going to use digital canvas with soft graphite pencils only and leave colors to linen ones. Or maybe it’s worth trying to gesso a digital canvas and see if it becomes more tolerant to dark colored pencils.
The original miniature ($35.00) is available in my Miniatures online gallery.
I had a different look and feel in mind when I started this sketch, and to add to that I grabbed some odd oil chalks (not even sure what that might be, it feels like something between a wax based colored pencil and an oil pastel stick) instead of normal pastels for coloring. The result is a complete accident.
This is my latest miniature partly inspired by a very cold and snowy winter of 2011-2012 and partly made because right now here in California it’s overly warm and sunny even by local standards. In the process of bringing winter closer to me I found out that a digital canvas can take a fair amount of scraping with x-acto knife which is pretty convenient for putting snow over heavily darkened areas.
The original is available in my Miniatures online gallery for $35.00
I have so many pieces in progress that each one seems to be a never ending drawing journey. It’s good to switch gears between subjects and media all the time, but at the same time I would really love to finish at least something already. So, a something finally got finished:
The original is available in my Miniatures online gallery for $35.00
This is the first work in a series of small landscapes that I plan to do. All places in the series will be from California parks and preserves.
