Around and around and ....

 In late 2019 I began working with Faber-Castell watercolor pencils. They are a beautiful medium. And I happened on a way of glazing with the pencils. Drawing the image in water soluble graphite, like a grisaille background and painting over the watercolor pencils and Derwent graphitint pencils. I even had an article in the February 2021 issue of  Colored Pencil Magazine.

Here are a few of the paintings I completed with this technique.

 You may still be able to get a back issue.  

Life happens and I found that even though this process made the colored pencil work faster, my fingers were being overstressed. Arthritis. So I switched to watercolor and tried other variations and went back and forth with soft pastels and Pan Pastels. Now grisaille is not a new method. It was used in the 14th and 15th centuries by Northern European artists. At first this was  a method of creating paintings that appeared to be stone reliefs. Then artists began using colored glazes over them and created a new method of oil painting. I learned this method way back in my college days when I majored in art at Jersey City State College. It can be done with shades of gray or browns or umbers or any color you want. The idea is to build the image using shades of a monochromatic base.

While researching the best papers to use for Pan Pastels, I saw a video demonstrating photo tinting using the pastels on mat photo paper. Cool, I thought. I can use that. So I printed out a drawing that I had done and painted it with Pan Pastels. This is the result and the original drawing.

What fun and what an interesting path before me. Finding the best papers, the best graphite for the paper, the best tools to apply the pastels. I'm planning a class for Skillshare using this method. All of my classes on Skillshare are devoted to Pan Pastels. 

What fun! My sister loved my portrait (above) and wanted a portrait of her and her dog, Brewster, so after some Photo Shop work I produced this piece.

So now, two and a half years later, I'm working with grisaille and tinting. I'll let you know how my work progresses and you can follow me on Instagram and Facebook. I share on both of those venues. My title? Around and Around and... Nothing is new under the sun and you never know when an old method will offer you a new opportunity to create.

Thanks for reading!