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robertsloan2 — Ruby-Throated Hummingbird
Published: 2007-02-12 04:36:59 +0000 UTC; Views: 512; Favourites: 3; Downloads: 12
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Description
3.6" x 4.2" Derwent Coloursoft coloured pencils on paper.This drawing was done entirely with six colours of Derwent Drawing Pencils: Cadmium Deep, Red, Green, Indigo, Dark Brown and Black. Using this selected palette, the six-colour bubble pack set, I managed to convey a lot of different subtle shades and blends in a heavy, nearly textureless way and I think I captured some of the iridescence of the little bird. For textural contrast and to give the bird a little more sparkle than the background, I used a tortillon heavily to blend the background. I did the background in overlapping tonal layers of all the colours, strongest on the darkest three.
Drawn life sized, this little fellow shows the rich soft expressiveness of Derwent Coloursoft coloured pencils. They are unique among all artist grade coloured pencils in both softness and a particular feel that I associate with harder Derwent coloured pencils. Tortillon smudging is especially effective with them and could have brought background elements to a full range of non speckly tonal values.
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Comments: 12
Wonderful little drawing Robert. you did a great job with the colors. They closely capture the iridescant quality of the hummingbirds feathers. The beaks a touch thick but other than that it's spectacular. All done with only six colors. That's great.
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Thank you! Yes, the beak's a little thick. Working that size I think I was not sharpening the pencils enough before I did the beak. I'm doing some other small birds with Coloursoft too, and going to post an 8 1/2" x 11" bird-and-border either done with Coloursoft or Inktense -- haven't decided which yet.
Those six colors enthralled me. They were perfectly chosen to do that subject, and if I add a white Derwent Drawing Pencil, I also have all the light values in that soft textureless look. If I were drawing textured I could have all the pale values of the mixtures too. They are actually softer than Prismacolors -- something I didn't realize till I did this bird, it's hard to judge before doing an actual artwork.
I might try doing a textured drawing using hard pencils at first and then working softer to get the deep darks, like I do with graphite. It could work blending Coloursoft with Verithins or Blick Artist Pencils or any harder pencil, or just lay them all out and start working hard-to-soft till it's done. I have the six-pack loose in my basket of sketching goodies for fooling around in the living room and the 24 color set to explore in this much depth, which is going to take more than one drawing. I can see that with the color combinations it'll take a while to assimilate this set and truly understand all its potentials!
So naturally next time I do a serious restock I'll get the big set too, for the complete series. I just love big ranges of mixing colors.
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Thank you! I'm going to post the entire page once I finish the drawing of a whippoorwill that I started in 6H graphite -- debating whether to go over it with colored pencils or just complete it by darkening its values with an Ebony pencil. Either way the page will be a lot of fun. I'm working on trying to compose sketchbook pages so that the entire page looks good.
I always envied the sketchbook pages that occasionally get published from famous artists -- and recently got the Leonardo da Vinci Sketchbook for inspiration. You know the kind of thing, where even if the drawings overlap and the subjects have nothing to do with each other -- a plant, sketches of people, anatomical sketches of foot bones -- the entire page looks good and the space is used effectively. Rather than how my sketchbook pages tend to look with either just one big drawing or a lot of bad drawings floating disconnected from each other and maybe one or two good ones surrounded by ugly squiggles and scratchouts. I will achieve this someday, a sketchbook that's worth letting people see its innards in place...
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sketchbooks are wonderful... on the pan's labrynth website they have this whole bit about ho awesom sketchbooks were in the making of the movie... theyre great tools
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I know! And as I come to the end of my first 4" x 6" ProArt wirebound, hard covered microperforated pages sketchbook, it's the first one I've done that I'm actually proud of. A few pages got pulled out when I did that whole big spate of Celtic knotwork bookmarks, because they were perforated and I cut them apart to laminate them. I plan to do another series but this time I'll do those on watercolor paper or Stonehenge loose sheets and use archival laminating film I just bought instead of two inch wide clear packing tape. Other than that, every page I did in that sketchbook is still in it. Most are at least tolerable. Some are sketches, there's a series of preliminary sketches for a pastel painting of Ari in the window of my room here that I haven't scanned because they're too light -- I did them with a 6H pencil and I'd have to ink or darken them to make them visible. But they're decent working sketches.
Most of the drawings in it are up in my gallery, decent small artworks and miniatures. Many are a little too simple to turn into larger works but could be good preliminary drawings for elements of larger compositions. Others are that complex and could be expanded and then rendered in other mediums. Some were just flat out cool, like Leopard of the Sea or that Prismacolor candle.
I just got the same type of sketchbook in 8 1/2" x 11" and I think by the time I finish that one, I'll be able to compose sketchbook pages the way Brian Froud or da Vinci or my friend Quentin or ~arkratirma do -- ~arkratirma is a graphic artist working on a wonderful graphic novel and her sketchbook pages range from character development to parodies of her own work and surreal drawings of unrelated subjects. Sometimes numerous sketches occupy the same page, in different styles and mediums. They might overlap. They might not. The page itself has a composition as gorgeous as a page out of Sandman or any good graphic novel -- and that's something she's far and away ahead of me on.
My friend Quentin might be on deviantART but I don't know his username here, and he's a manga artist. He was years ago when I first met him and even then he filled sketchbook after sketchbook with good drawings. He didn't use up one every month but he used every inch of space in them with drawings that had my jaw dropping. He'd use two or three in a year, sometimes take a year to fill one, but nothing in it to my inexpert eye looked bad although a lot of it wasn't inked.
I guess if I do enough sketchbooks I'll have that kind of quick-sketching looseness and confidence in line and tone -- and especially composition -- to be able to relax and just throw casual sketches of anything at all together to have well laid out, appealing pages. I feel as if I'm on the edge of that now and it's one of the biggest challenges I face at the moment, where I'm growing the most.
I think if I can get that, I can start catching the fleeting impressions and ideas that I get and put them down in workable form like the rough drafts of my writing. When I think of a new magical creature or alien environment, I'll be able to jot it and have it for reference whether I do the painting or just write the novel. That's part of why I love my new Conte set and don't know how I lived without it -- I think I needed to wait till I could let myself sketch loosely before I could really do justice to the medium. Conte is not a finicky perfectionist-line-and-hatching medium like technical pen, or a burnish and get fussy with detail medium like colored pencil. It demands looseness the way pastels do, but it's finer and more detailed and doesn't need to be done large to get down all the details I want. It has its own middling place for me bridging colored pencils and pastel, and I may use it most for preliminaries to either and for fast drawing the way I did my street pastels.
I'm all excited about the new sketchbook and so far all four drawings in it are birds from the new birds photo reference. I have one penciled as of last night that has a freehand knotwork and art nouveau swirly border turning into a perch for the bird, and the bird sitting on a branch of swirly knotwork ends. A bit like the border on Blue Rose where it also grew into the stem of the flower, it turns into a perch. I had fun with it and will probably finish that one in colored pencils, maybe Derwent Inktense if I want it painted.
But I know I don't want to do finish drawings on all the pages and I'll be very happy if some become ink and wash studies or graphite sketches and Conte and charcoal sketches too. I think I'm starting to get it!
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Wow! Amazing pic. I love all the colours and detail =] Great job!
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Thank you! I love the Coloursoft pencils, they are softer than Prismacolors and blend so richly!
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No probs =]
Ooo never heard of Coloursoft pencils, will have to check 'em out!
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They are fun! They are also the first brand that I would honestly recommend trying the small set -- the six-pack is so well chosen it's neat as a sketch-set and the range of colors in the 12 color tin is also well chosen enough that I was tempted to that for portability. Most times I get so frustrated with 12 color sets for lacking gray, white, pink or shades of brown that I don't like getting them in any kind of coloured pencils. But the Coloursoft twelver does have a color that can shade up to pink by smudging, it does have a nice warm ruddy color, it has the ones I usually grit my teeth and get annoyed at doing without.
I'm definitely planning on getting the giant set later on this year, next time I do the big-order thing I'll get it.
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Wow they sound pretty good! I'll definently have to try them one day =] Thanks for the recomendation!
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They rock. If you don't have a lot of money, try the little six-pencil bubble pack -- the colors are so well chosen that I use the six-pack freebie as a sketch pack independently.
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