Month: September 2011

Colored Pencil on Wood

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At the LoLa art crawl, my husband asked me if I ever considered drawing on a wooden panel. I thought that was a wonderful idea and wanted to go to Home Depot and buy myself a nice piece of plywood right away. I quickly decided that that was too much work and visited Dick Blick online.

Of course Blick has birch panels, cradled and ready to go in different depths. The American Easel wood panels seemed to have the promise of a bit more tooth than prepared panels like claybord and similar panels. I ordered a 12×16″American Easel panel to use for my next drawing of a toad still life  and a 5×7″ panel to test my techniques on.

The boards came in and I could tell right away they were well made. Where I work, we get a lot of art on panels; they seem to be really “in” right now. I decided to try a loose landscape on the 5×7. That way I would know if they have enough gumption to hold all of the layers I like and I wouldn’t ruin the larger panel.

Here’s what I  came up with. It isn’t a great photo, but it shows that there is potential here. I used my phone, so the photo is missing detail especially in the grass. There are a lot of darks and midtones missing.  (Man, I need real Photoshop at home!)

The wood does not take the layers that my favorite substrate for colored pencil – Stonehenge paper – does, but there are possibilities mixing watercolor pencils with regular colored pencil on the wood surface. I used some Derwent Inktense with water in the sky and fields and they work very well to put pigment into the wood surface. Prismacolor and Caran D’Ache Luminacne go over the Inktense after they have dried. I found that the coverage differs among pencils in the brands I have. For example, Prismacolor white did not want to go on other layers, but their Artstix did great. Luminance in general worked OK, but the turquoise blue rocked. I need to do more experimenting, so I went ahead and bought three more 8×10″ American Easel wood panels at my local Blick’s. I don’t think these will take the OCD detail of my toad pieces, so I was thinking about either mounting Stonehenge to them or just going a bit more abstract. Either way, I like these panels and I hope to do some good experiments with them.

 

 

 

 

 

Why toads?

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I had a very good experience at the LoLa Art Crawl this past weekend. I was at Glacier’s Cafe on Minnehaha across from the Hub. We had great weather, good traffic, and really good frozen custard and sandwiches. Thanks to Ben and everyone at Glacier’s for a great time! My only complaint would be that I wished I could have gone out to crawl some of the other spaces myself.

I had a lot of interesting conversations with people about many different topics. Some wildlife rehab volunteers told me about rehabbing snapping turtles. I directed a young artist to Wet Paint in St. Paul for the best selection of truly artist quality colored pencils. The question I got most was “why toads?”

I know I gave a different answer every time. Sometimes I talked about the wonder of frogs and toads in fairy tales, other times I just said that they make me smile. I do  think there is more to it than that ; I identify with their ugliness and their ordinariness.  Their individuality is lost on the people they come in contact with. They are defined instead by the odd place where they were found or how close they got to your lawn mower blades. Instead of the princess, I feel like the toad. Perhaps there is some magic behind this toad skin; perhaps not. I just know that this really does make me smile.