www.penciltopics.co.uk
THIS PAGE IS PART OF THE SECTION DEALING WITH
This link will take you direct to the main contents page for the site
THIS SECTION ALSO CONTAINS PAGES COVERING :
AQUARELLE PENCIL TECHNIQUES -
Dry Point Pencil ( that is to say wax or oil based pencil used without any solvent ) builds up layers of transparent and semi transparent colour on your paper. It depends on the tooth of the paper to take off pigment from the point.
The TOOTH is the grain of the paper, the roughness of it.
The tooth is critical to the number of layers you will achieve -
Too fine a tooth and you will have limited layers and limited colour depth.
Greater tooth will achieve better depth of colour through more layers but you will find it difficult to get fine detail.
The prime problem is the little flecks of white coming through from the valleys in the paper tooth. The pencil point skims over the paper surface laying down colour, but misses out on the little valleys in the paper grain. We can burnish the colour by pressing firmly down with further layers to press the colour into the grain, but this kills the tooth altogether for further layers.
UNDERPAINTING is the solution to the problem and is the method used by very many of our top Coloured Pencil artists.
If you are working to strict CP Society rules for exhibition standards, you will need to use Pencil sourced colour ONLY.
This means that Watercolour pencils, Neocolor crayons, and Cretacolor woodless pencils are available as a source of colour.
If you are working for your own amusement or for sale of images commercially or where Exhibition standards do not come into it, you can use other media such as traditional watercolour, fixed pastel or inks for enhancing the colour depth and filling the grain of the paper with colour first.
Either way, with a layer of colour bonded to the whole of the paper surface, you
are now able to work your layers of dry colour on to a pre-
This ensures that you are able to start work with your dry point colour, with an element of tinting and shading already down on the paper, but all the benefits of the original paper surface grain still available to you.
Where you are using a heavily sized watercolour paper like Arches paper, which has quite a polished surface as sold, the working of a wet process first washes off some of the size from the surface and lifts the grain of the paper slightly, which benefits the later addition of dry point colour.
There are two images below of a country lane picture. The first is the underpainting The second is the finished picture
The original underpainting (left) was positioned on the paper with plenty of room round it.
As a result it was possible to add some more to the scene on the left hand side as the picture developed.
I think this improved the overall composition.
You will also see that I removed some of the underpainted tree foliage to the immediate right of the copper beech tree on the right hand side to open out the sky over the field. Putting a cloud in was not entirely successful, but it hardly shows in the original completed picture.
The scene does not exist and is entirely constructed.
You will see (below) that the cottage down the lane has had very little additional work done to it.
It sits right in the background as a result
There are more notes on Underpainting in the sub-
‘8 ways of using’ Aquarelles
Latest revision April 2010
AQUARELLES
