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A sketch is a visual memo to remember an experience. It doesn’t have to be detailed or even accurate. Lately I’ve been exploring various media (pencils, crayons, markers, gel sticks, and brush pens) looking for a small set of materials that is easy to carry, drys fast, doesn’t smudge, and works as a kind of shorthand to capture shapes, values, textures, and color.
A charcoal pencil is easy to carry and use. It can make fine lines and can produce a wide range of values.
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The only disadvantage is that it is easily smudged.
Wax pencils and Sharpie pens do not smear and they come in a variety of colors. The value range is less and there is more to carry.
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Crayons and pen are a great combination for line and color. I wanted to try them in a portrait. I did this one of Rebecca Collins for the Julia Kay Portrait Party Group on Flickr.com.
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Besides testing the materials, I also wanted to try an underdrawing technique that uses geometrical shapes (squares, triangles, and circles) as bounding boxes for the major shapes instead of doing a rough drawing of the actual shapes (the hair, the face, the scarf, the hand). I drew the geometrical shapes on an overhead transparency, placed my paper on top and backlit it on a light box. I then used a pen to draw the actual shapes on the paper using the underdrawing as a guide. This worked out well to quickly get the placement and proportions right. I could then spend most of my time doing the fun part – coloring. I noticed my coloring skills have not advanced since about the age of 8. Still fun though.
My next experiment came at the breakfast table. I wanted to sketch the same subject using three different approaches – line only, line with color, and color only. I sketched flowers in vase sitting on the window sill.
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I did the line only with continuous line. It’s a good way to find the edges and indicate the shapes and proportions and is the quickest and easiest approach.
For the line with color I started with doing a geometric shapes underdrawing in blue pencil. If you look closely, you can see some of the light blue lines. I then drew outlines of the shapes with a pen and then added color using colored pencils. This is the more traditional approach for sketching. It adds values and color to the shapes.
I used dual-tipped brush pens for the color only sketch. One end makes thin lines. The other is a nylon brush tip that can make thick brush like marks. The advantage of this approach is that it is more direct. You just draw the shapes using the shapes’s colors without doing an underdrawing or a pen sketch first. The disadvantage is there is more to carry. I usually take the whole set of 24 colored pens.
For my final sketch I wanted to carry just four tools – a mechanical pencil with HB lead, a brush pen with black ink, and two Pentel Multi-8 pencils. The two pencils can hold 8 colored pencil leads each for a total of 16 colors. I put a piece of inkjet paper on a clipboard, stuck my four tools in my shirt pocket, and sketched in our backyard.
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I first sketched standing up the clematis blossom at the top with my black brush pen and then added color with the colored pencil leads. That was easy.
Next I sat in the hammock and sketched a bigger scene of the backyard. I worked with the HB pencil first to layout the scene. I then worked with the colored pencils. This took a while because it takes a long time to color in large areas. The last thing I did was to add some blacks with the brush pen.
I then walked over to the mountain ash tree and sketched the orange berries with the HB pencil and added color with the colored pencils. Again this was easy and fast to do standing up.
Cheap colored pencil leads don’t have the contrast range and saturated colors of watercolors, colored inks or crayons, but they are easier to carry and they work fine for capturing quick ideas in small sketches.
I like sketching. It is relaxing and fun. I still enjoy the challenge of doing finished drawings and paintings, but I find I’m doing less and less of them because they take longer and feel more like work.
Jim
