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.

Monday was the deadline for signing up for the Minnesota State Fair Fine Arts Competition. It is a highly competitive show with artists from all across the state. Hundreds enter, but only a fraction of us get in each year. I have decided to enter my newest drawing “Lipstick” which isn’t quite finished yet. Here it is as it stands tonight:

I need to straighten the horizon line, crop the entire piece, deepen the shadows on the left, lighten the toad in the mirror and blend the toad in front better. I am not sure about the blue background or the black background in the mirror. I might make the handkerchief on the right more cream than white. I need to alter the shadows around the lipstick base. So, in other words, I am close to finishing it! :p

I have entered the State Fair four or five times and only made it in once. The first time I tried, “Nesting Snapper” made it in. “Nesting Snapper” was my first large colored pencil piece and she took me over a year to complete.

Making it into the fair really validated my use of colored pencil as a serious medium, so lets hope one of these years I will get in again! Good luck everyone, and I can’t wait to see the show at the fair.

This year I am participating in the League of Longfellow Artists’ 2011 art crawl. It is happening August 27th and 28th and I am very excited to be a part of it. The LoLa Art Crawl takes place in the greater Longfellow neighborhood in South Minneapolis. We have a lot of talented people in the neighborhood and I look forward to seeing everyone’s art! A listing of the participating artists can be found by clicking here.

I hope you can come out and see us!