A Bit Of Fun With Colour

It's Monday again..... ugh!

 (faffing about with collage images)

I'm not a fan! I think if I had the option, Mondays would - every one of the vile things - be DUVET DAYS!!! So to combat the bleakness of the general Monday effect, AND the VERY cold English winter, I thought I'd just throw a bit of colour at the day. So here we go!

Never Underestimate The Humble Coloured Pencil!

I have a scary amount of coloured pencils, and I managed to keep them all due the convenient fact they pack up REALLY small! See - lookee....

...I mean, it may not seem a lot to some epic art supply hoarders, but it seems a heckuva lot to me! They represent quite a few years of judicious investment and have been worth every penny.

For long enough (ooooo, eons ago) I only used coloured pencils for dry shading and blending, mixing with graphite to ease the blending process and make the colours more natural. I don't have much from that time but I do have this picture of sea gulls that I did as a gift for my uncle WAAAAY back when -

I'm really sorry for the slightly iffy clarity there...it's behind glass in a frame and I honestly couldn't face the hassle of undoing it all just for photos so I hope it's clear enough....kinda.  This was done using my then favourite set of Faber Castell blendable coloured pencils which I pretty much wore down to stumps over the years. Again, I used graphite as a blending base to mute the colours and then added all of the detail with a Faber architect's graphics ink pens, which came in a handful of separate pieces and could be filled with lovely india ink. Very sexy pens they were too. Some bugger nicked them years ago and I still wish I had them as they had the finest and most reliable points ever! Here're some close-ups -

Again, sorry for the slightly gammy photography...the glass kind of mucks about with the tone somewhat, but you get the idea.

Aaaaanyhoo, I ended up using mainly ink pens for years and years and then fell out of arting altogether for quite a while. When I started again, I slowly - li'l bit by li'l bit - built up a set of Derwent watercolour pencils, and when I used them it was always as a wet medium. I guess that's just how my interests developed. If you're new to my blogginess you can see illustrations using these pencils HERE.  Adding Derwent Inktense and Graphitint sets just reinforced pencils as a tool for wet mixed media.

THEN, when mum died earlier this year I had to move, clearing the equivalent of a three-storey house down to a very, VERY small storage unit. I had to be extremely judicious with what I kept and harden my heart to everything else which just plain had to go. The stress was ooooooooo...very stressy McStressface. So I set aside a sketchbook and one set of Crayola coloured pencils that mum bought me AGES ago that I'd never ever used because they weren't water soluble (SUCH a pencil snob!). I made a quick little journal from odds and ends to help me drain my brain every night while I packed up the rest of my life, and started using those pencils as it seems, as I've said before, that I can't live without colour! I'll share a bit of that journal with you in my next post - kind of a 'part two' thing....

SO it turns out that those pencils are AWESOME. AWE-SOME! I can't find any more on websites so I'm worried that Crayola don't make them any more (they have been sitting idle in my old studio for YEARS!) They layer like an absolute dream! I forgot how much fun it was to scribble layer after layer of colour and just play!  As an antidote to Monday blues, I'm going to share some scribbly, sketchy, bright, garish pencilly fun with you and hope it lifts your day! They're not gonna hang in any gallery, but BOY oh boy were they a load of fun!

I guess the moral of the post is not to dismiss ANY art product until you've had a good old play with it - you never know what fun is waiting for you and your arty muse!  Don't forget the silly side of artyness!! Photos will now follow - sending hugs to all, Shroo :) xxx