colored pencil – Art Bern

Keep Those Pencils Sharp

*Central Coast – Morro Bay* | 9 x 12” | Colored Pencil on Paper

A few months ago we took a trip to indulge in wines of Paso Robles, California. This is a beautiful area, a little hard to get to, and the wine is fantastic. Don’t get me wrong, I’m no wine snob… my palette is worth a $40 bottle of wine at best. However, over the years we’ve done a lot of travel around the world and there is no better way to find wines you like than to be in the actual region and explore. Again, we tend not to go to places for the purpose of doing wine tastings, but what else are you going to have with dinner?

We took a beautiful drive from Paso Robles, CA to Morro Bay. Along the way we came across this stunning view, giving a first glance of the ocean as we wound through the hills. As you can see from the reference photo, it’s beautiful, but as an artist you see a whole lotta green!

I chose to do this piece in colored pencil instead of oil paint for two reasons. First, I’ve recently started experimenting with colored pencils and the investment in a new pencil set needed some return. Secondly, it gets brutally hot in my upstairs studio during the summer, so having the pencils setup downstairs is an easy way to get my creative fix for the day if I don’t feel like running the AC for 3 hours in the middle of the afternoon. Pragmatism, go figure.

I’ve done a few practice sessions with colored pencils after taking a workshop from Jenny Granberry, who is a great artist and instructor, a rare combination. This piece was a challenge and intended as a massive practice exercise with the goal of something “completed” in the end. This composition was a challenge for reasons beyond my lack of colored pencil experience. First, I can’t remember the last time I’d done a drawing-based landscape, and secondly, the greens!

What I find the most interesting part of this piece is the fact that I worked from the top down (far to near), and I don’t know about you, but I can definitely see that the bottom part of the drawing is notably better than the top. I can hear Jenny now… keep your pencils sharp and go slow. I hear you Jenny, I hear you, it just took half a page to get there.

As to the greens, I focused on blending variations of blues in the more distant hills, segueing to stronger yellow in the foreground. I wasn’t excited about the final look initially, as it lacked warmth from the sun, so I drank some wine to work up some liquid courage to grab an orange/red pencil to add an overlay to the foreground hills. Unlike oil painting, you can’t just wipe off pencil – true, it can be erased, but then you’re compromising the “tooth” of the paper, and at some point I hope to be good enough that something like that matters.

In the end, Central Coast – Morro Bay was a great learning experience and provided a wealth of knowledge through trial and error. I also think I’ll return to this subject matter in landscape perspective for a larger oil painting.

Thanks for reading!

July 7, 2022 by Bern Categories: colored pencil, Drawings, LandscapesTags: art, california, colored pencil, drawing, landscape, morro bay, Paso robles, pencils 2 Comments

Yellow Rose Botanical

Yellow Rose Botanical | 8” x 10” | Colored Pencil on Paper

I finished my botanical drawing (virtual) classes last week and this Yellow Rose is my final project. The sessions were 2 hours weekly for 8 weeks, the instructor (Jenny Granberry – @jennygeeberry) was hilarious, and I learned a lot about both botanical artistry and how to use colored pencils properly.

The biggest challenge was figuring out how to incorporate a range of colors beyond basic yellows to add interest, value variations, and realism. I was using a limited palette (12 pencils), but through some trial and error I managed to land on a few color combinations that added a lot of depth to the overall piece.

I’m hoping to do a few botanical series over the course of this year. I like the idea of colored pencil drawing because it incorporates drawing and a lot of oil painting concepts, although the techniques are very different.

#contemporaryatx #berntx #crashboomzip #rose #art #drawing

March 29, 2021 by Bern Categories: Drawings, Flowers, still lifeTags: art, botanical drawing, colored pencil, drawing, Flowers, rose 1 Comment

Vine Tomatoes in Colored Pencils

As we settle into a new year, hopefully a better one than 2020, I thought it was time to learn something new on the art front. To that end, I’ve been attending a weekly Botanical Drawing class. The theme of “new” is splattered all over this class – it’s done virtually (a first for me), focused on botanical drawing (another first), and in colored pencil medium (yet another first… kinda).

This week’s subject was a pair of tomatoes on the vine. The first two classes were graphite only, no colored pencils, so this was the first session that introduced color. I’m using a small set of 12 SoHo colored pencils, which are very vibrant and so far seem to do the trick. It’s going to be a challenge pivoting from oil painting, where colors are seemingly endless through mixing of a core set of hues. The colored pencils are a different challenge because there’s only so much layering of colors that the paper will tolerate. In oil painting, if you overdo it with oil paint colors it goes brown or a dirty grey, but you can wipe it off the canvas. The colored pencils, however, can only support a limited amount of mixing on paper, and it’s largely un-erasable. It’s a wee bit stressful at times!

I really like the challenge of capturing the reality of botanicals, which is at the heart of botanical drawing. It will be interesting to see how the various compositions evolve on the color and value front over the remaining 5 weeks of class.

This week’s composition vine tomatoes is done on standard paper and measures about 7 x 5”.