water color pencils on black water color paper.....

Here it is. My first water color painting on black paper. I worked sort of. I had great difficulty with the jellyfish and creating a sort of luminescence. Well, you don't really get that with watercolors as you can with pastels and oils but ....  and while the lionfish looks pretty cool, the deepening of the colors as I wet them worked against me. When I work with colored pencils on black paper I don't have to anticipate the color. It's there. I do believe, for now at least, I will stick with white water color paper. I have plenty. 

I used black Stonehenge hot press watercolor paper. Cold press might have been better but I think my color application is more the issue here. Good composition though. I didn't tape this project. 

Thanks for checking in:)

 

Owls.......

 The epic of the owls continues.  

I drew a picture of a barn owl on black Canson drawing paper using white colored pencil and black colored pencil along with a touch of eraser and exacto blade although I fund the blade to be ineffective. This was a fun and free drawing. I don't even remember if I filmed it. Oh well. I'll find out soon enough

Then, I just can't get the photos set up correctly today, I drew the photo on the top using Derwent drawing pencils on black Canson drawing paper. Both images are 9 x 12; well the paper is anyway.

I just bounce back and forth between B & W and Color and then between media. I went from soft pastels to pencils in three days and now!  Well now I'm going to work with watercolor pencil glazing. I did a blog about that a little bit ago. I really enjoyed the process and the outcome but it's been 2 and a half years since I worked with watercolor pencils. I even have a project that will look really good on black water color paper if the medium will let me. I have not have great experience with watercolor paints on black watercolor paper but I'm thinking, if I take the right approach with the watercolor pencils I might be able to make it work. I'll see. I was going to do a painting of a tiny bird but I think I'll start with he black paper and if it doesn't work, it doesn't work. 

This is the composition I created on photos shop from a couple of photos that I got from I don't remember where a few years ago. Jellyfish and a lionfish. I'm looking forward to this project. I've never used either reference photo before so I don't have any notes on them. It could have been Pixabay or Lisa Lachri or even a trip to the local zoo or some combination thereof. 

Thanks for stopping by. I'll let you know what happens with this project.

I stopped the tape...

 ... so I could just concentrate on the composition. Worrying about the camera, zooming in and out and lighting not to mention narration just got in the way. I enjoy sharing my work but....the technical aspects sometimes get the better of me. For a woman of a certain age I have done well with keeping up with the technology that began about when I was born. Now I wouldn't mind having a large enough space so that I could have better camera coverage and I could hire a proper editor but I'm all I've got right now. Still, sometimes I just want to draw without the technology.

So, midway or someplace, while working on this white Pan Pastel on black Canson paper, I didn't turn the video back on. 

I downloaded four photos of the barn owl from Wildlifereferencephotos and did these drawings. Not good enough for sale but to better get to know the subjects so that by the time I was working on the pastel piece I really wouldn't need to pay much attention to the reference photos. 

I used my mechanical pencils, 3 MM (HB, 2B, 4B, 6B) on vellum tracing paper. Then I took to Photoshop for some cut and past. I created this first:

Then I decided it would be better to work from the reference photos so I created this composition in portrait layout for some reason. I could have changed it but then the owls faces wouldn't have been as large so I went with this reference photo. Did I mention that I desaturated all of the photos first so I didn't have to worry about creating grayscale in my head?

Now, this is a rough cut and paste. I wasn't trying to fool anyone, just create a working reference photo. I developed the background as I progressed through the painting. And this is the completed, finally tweaked painting of the barn owls.

I started out with lovely swirls of white pastel in the background. When I finished working on the owls, or thought I had, I erased away the middle of the paper and created a forest of pine trees a the bottom. I worked on the swirls at the top and turned them into clouds and then I created mountains in the center of the composition. Then I kept going back to tweak the barn owl in the front. I don't know how often I retouched the beak until it was just right but, it was a lot. I don't know if anyone but me noticed. But I did so it had to be fixed. 

Oh right. Materials. I used the round and oval Sofft tools, the baton Softt tool, an egg shaped sponge, a Tombow mono eraser and a plastic eraser. I used black and white Pan Pastels, and a black and white Caran D'ache pastel pencil. The eraser is a very important tool.

Thanks for checking in.