Wednesday, July 8, 2009

Espresso & Pastry

After a week of house guests and July 4th festivities, I really needed to get back to drawing. I was craving my colored pencils and some quiet time in my studio! The lesson for my Tuesday morning class was to work on a small still life set up of a coffee cup, a spoon and a cookie. While they worked, I worked. I finished this small drawing in a few hours and it felt like therapy to pick up those pencils again. One of my students asked how was I going to render a black cup while I prefer not to use a black colored pencil? Good question. I prefer to mix darks instead of using a black pencil because black by itself seems to look flat. So I decided to challenge myself and use the black pencil, in which I laid down first for my darkest areas on the cup. To the black, I then added indigo blue, true blue, black grape, terra cotta and cool gray 90%, 70% & 50% to give the cup depth and reflections. Looking at the drawing now that it is scanned into the computer, I see that I need to pick up the pencils again and fix the hard line under the saucer.

1 comment:

Kathy said...

I agree with the idea of black by itself looking too flat. I often mix blues, allizaron crimson and even some dark green as well as colors you mentioned to get a very rich, dark black. This is looking beautiful.