I understood as the main focus of this project to explore the variety of coloured media that I have at my disposal, with the aim of getting acquainted and finding out what each medium does best. One element of the instruction was also to experiment with stippling and hatching to achieve tone and colour.
For the experiments, I used felt pen, coloured pencils (water-resistant and watersoluble), oil pastel and watersoluble wax crayon. I used paper of different type, size, texture and colour. Overall, I got quite carried away in the experiments, especially with felt pen, and found it difficult to stop. The possibilites are endless and most of the time, trying one thing generated more ideas for the next experiment, and so on. I just felt that beyond a certain point, it would be more productive to make a break from pure experimentation, and instead to get on with the course program. I would then continue exploring the media in the context of a more concrete drawing task.
During the work on this project, I watched the first series of “Work of Art”, a reality TV show where a group of artists competed for a price. Despite all objections I have against the format of the show, I think it nevertheless influenced what I was doing in this project, because it made me more confident to follow my intuition during the process. I think I will write a separate article to reflect on this series, because it really impressed me.
The next sections are the protocol of my work and reflections for this project.
First exploration: Felt pen
I drew a series of sheets in A3 format to get acquainted with felt pens. The first six were done on the first day, and two more on the second. I enjoyed these experiments thoroughly and was delighted to discover that felt pens can be used in a way that resembles “art”, because I had only experiences with felt pen from drawing coloured lines for math graphs, or much earlier, childhood pictures. I had seen impressive work of other students though, done with felt pen, and this motivated me to put some effort into discovering the medium anew.
I found it intriguing to explore how the colours changed when I drew layers of different colour. I’m very familiar with colour theory, but here I began to experiment in a more systematic way. The resulting colours were not entirely predictable for me, for example I didn’t expect yellow and pink to result in orange.
It was also interesting to see how differently my two sets of felt pen reacted. I was using inexpensive standard felt pens, not artist quality, in boxes of 10 different colours, and the two sets contained different colours: The Faber Castell set had one green and two pink tones, rose and violet. By contrast, the Staedtler set had two green tones and only one, slightly darker rose tone. I have done a direct colour comparison on the first sheet, which shows that even the broadly corresponding colours are slightly different in tone. For the experiments, I used the sets separately, but in fact I might combine them into a palette of considerably more than 10 differenent tones. Maybe I’ll do another sheet to explore mixing of the two sets.
I had considered to buy Copic felt pens which seem to be the top artist tool, but I found them too expensive: A single felt pen costs 6 EUR, and the refill is 8.50 EUR. A single felt pen costs more than each of my boxes of 10 pens… So I decided to stick with my inexpensive material for now, to learn and explore and test whether I really like the medium enough to invest more.
I have learnt already something quite important – before the exploration, I thought that felt pens were very inflexible and couldn’t be used to mix colours, obliging the artist to buy every single tone he wants to use. This was the main reason why I did not buy the Copic felt pens – I thought I would need 30 before anything interesting might emerge at all. But from the experiments, I learnt that this was a misconception, the tones can be mixed quite well. The best technique for this appears to be cross-hatching.
By continuous cross-hatching, areas of colour can be gradually built up, and this also permits to create blendings between colours. Yellow seems to be a particularly nice underground layer for reddish and green tones, giving much warmth, but I found it difficult to create smooth blendings from yellow into green or into red, because the adjacent colours were in too great contrast. A similar difficulty appeared with red and its blendings into violet. I think this discovery is important for the choice of colours, if I ever decide to use artist materials which permit to select individual colours: I now know that I would need a tone between yellow and green – very lemon yellow or very light green, and I would also need a quite blueish red, to smooth blendings between these colours. On the other hand, I might discover less expensive artists felt pens and decide on a box of many colours, which would most probably solve the problem as well.
Next come a few words about the main idea of each page that I drew. I chose A3 format and a paper that was specifically good for felt pens, because it is very smooth and the markers don’t run dry as quickly as with rough paper appropriate for dry media.
Pages 1 to 8: Exploring felt pens
Page 1: black soft brush artist pen and colour test
The first page was mainly dedicated to black felt pen, for a start. I tried out the Faber Castell Pitt Artist pen which is very nice to draw with because its tip is formed into a brush and almost as soft. I have a medium and a big exemplar of these, and both allow to produce really nice variations in line. They can be used with the tip, producing very fine lines, or bent to the side, giving much broader lines. This might also be interesting as a coloured medium. They are about half the cost of Copic markers, but they cannot be refilled. Finally I got back to the main idea of this project, exploring coloured media, and made a brief colour test of my two sets of felt pens.
Page 2: mixing colours and lines
On this sheet I explored the effects of different line types and colours drawn one over the other with the Staedtler set. From some timid beginnings with wiggly lines, the sheet developed into a really colourful abstract paining, which I like. It was with this sheet that I discovered the interesting effects of drawing different colours one over the other.
Page 3: Stippling and hatching from red to blue
Part of the tasks for this project was to draw a stripe which blended from red to blue colour, and to do this in two different techniques: Stippling and hatching. I found stippling extremely laborious and couldn’t restrain myself to using only tiny points, so I followed the suggestion to make ‘flecks and dots’. This produced an irregular pattern of tiny marks. I gradually built up colour and for the blending area, initially didn’t mind whether I drew with blue over areas where I had already made a red mark. This resulted in “dirty” colours – more brown than the violet which colour theory would have predicted. So the blending area contained many dark brown flocks which for me disturbed the impression of colour blending.
I had some more space on the stripe left to try out a different approach, and there I attempted to not draw with blue over red marks. Instead I tried to make blue marks only on white space left between red marks. I find this type of blending more succesful. But overall, stippling is probably not my first choice for blendings between colours, I’m not patient enough.
The blending in the second stripe was done with hatching. This worked much better for me, as it allowed to quickly cover the area with the colour I wanted and also to vary its intensity. But the technique cannot avoid the smudging of colours that results from drawing blue over areas which are already red. Also, the blue lines into a red area always create a rather brutal contrast. A soft gradation from red to where blending begins is not possible when pure blue is used.
With what I’ve learnt from later studies, in the future I’d approach the task with more subtle colour shades, beginning the blending with a blueish red, then violet, before I’d actually blend in a blue colour. That said, if one has only basic colours, then the drawings should be large and viewed from a distance, then the effect of drawing pure blue into a red area might be less abrupt.
Page 4: Transparency and layers of colour
On this page, I wanted to try out the effect of using more than one layer of the same colour, because I had noticed that the colour seemed to intensify when layers were added. So this turned out to be another technique to add more colour values to a restricted palette of felt pens. I also tried out the effects of drawing different colours in layers, using a very dense form of hatching.
Some colour combinations were entirely dominated by one of the two colours, for example drawing dark blue over light blue is not much different from dark blue alone. A similar effect holds for red drawn over yellow. Other combinations give a new colour roughly between the two individual colours, for example pink and light blue together result in medium violet, or yellow and light blue together give a nice medium green. And finally, some combinations drop into a very dark brown tone which would get close to black if intensified, but is more interesting than pure black because of the underlying subtle colour effect. This happened for example with brown and dark blue, but also with red and dark green.
Page 5: Transparency
This page was devoted to a systematic, technical study of the degree of transparency of each colour, and how the colours intensified if I drew up to 4 layers in a dense hatching technique. Colours with weak transparency were pink, red and yellow. Medium transparency was with black and orange, and the remaining colours showed quite strong transparency effects: light blue and dark blue, light green and dark green, and brown.
I found this interesting because it is another way of adding different tones to a restricted colour palette of felt pens
Page 6: Transparency and layers – mixing colours
On this sheet, I systematically explored the tones that resulted from drawing different colours on top of each others, and compared them to the original colours. I invented a “stripe technique” which reminded me of woven textiles. I found this technique very useful to compare the different tones and their original colours. The sheet shows that even with only 10 different felt pens, quite an impressive palette results from mixing the base colours.
Page 7: Colours and transparency
I did another transparency and mixing colours study, this time with the Faber Castell set (all previous were done using the Staedtler set). I knew already what I was looking for and so first assessed the transparency effect of each colour, and how they intensified by using up to three layers. I had noticed that with more than three layers, the paper surface began to loose fibers, so I did not want to use more than three.
Then I assessed the effects of combining different colours in layers with the stripe technique. Again I was quite impressed with the many different tones that resulted from mixing the colours.
Page 8: Hatching
This last one is my favourite page from the felt pen experiments so far. I wanted to try out hatching and colour blending. There are some areas of pure colour and others where different tones are blended. I have gradually built up all the tones, and over the course of this drawing, became quite casual and relaxed in the way I held my hand and drew the lines, a departure from stiff beginnings. I especially like the blending from red/orange with blue into a brown tone which seems to be very well adapted for natural objects. For me, these are typical colours and tonal shadings of fruits and vegetables. The drawing showed me that very subtle variation in tones is possible with this technique. So overall, I discovered that felt pens impose much less limitations than I believed before these experiments!
Some reflective remarks
I’m very glad that I’ve done these studies and have begun to really appreciate felt pens. I’m looking forward to trying them out with more drawings. Maybe I’ll do a study using all the felt pens I have, to try out all the different tones that result from using transparency and combining colours. Unfortunately, felt pens seem to run dry quite quickly despite my use of the special paper, so I’ve bought another box of inexpensive felt pens. This time I chose a selection of 20 for the same price. I’ll see how far I’ll get with them.
As a reminder, these are the ways I found to broaden the colour range of a given set of felt pens:
• using the same colour in several layers to intensify the tone
• combining two tones to obtain a mixed colour
• combining two or more tones to create blendings
It seems that combining tones that result from mixing together with ready-made colours is very effective to create smooth blendings. This might be worth another technical study, especially for the blendings with yellow into green and yellow into red.
The technique which works best for me is a kind of loose hatching, where colour is gradually built up over many hatching layers. I very much like how felt pen can be used to create broken and vibrant colours.
Pages 9 and 10: More felt pen
I was so fascinated by felt pen that I had difficulties getting on to another medium… and I wanted to try out the new set, so I did two more pages. The idea was to build colours and try out blending between colours using the hatching technique.
First, on Page 9, I made a brief assessment of all the colours I now have. The new set contains 4 green tones, 3 blue tones, 2 violets, 2 browns and different shades of red. I thought this must help to get softer blendings between colours.
I first tried out blendings from yellow into green towards blue. The blending from yellow into green was softer than with the 10-pen sets, but the colour difference is still substantive at the point where the first green line comes into play.
On Page 10, I began with a blending from yellow over organge to red and then extended this towards blue and violet, also including green and brown towards black. This study developed into an experiment how to build up different colours. I especially liked the vibrancy resulting from the green lines I drew in the middle area to support the blending into brown tones (yellow > orange > red + green > brown). I also liked the effect of the coloured underworkings in the black areas.
Reflections
I find these studies important for trying out how to create a variety of different tones with felt pen. I can’t await trying this out with a real drawing. On the other hand, the aim of this project is to explore a variety of media, which I understand as instructing me to “try everything a bit and then proceed to the next medium”. Unfortunately my time available for the course is quite restricted, so it might be better to leave it at that for felt pen and proceed. But I’ll see, maybe I’ll squeeze some time in for an observational study with felt pen.
In these experiments, I have concentrated on exploring colour. This may have to do with my interest in painting. But I’ve also become aware that the medium itself lends itself for detailed work, since it permits to draw relatively fine lines which don’t become broader during the process, as is the case with other media, for example pastel.
I think I would like to try out coloured pencils next. Probably I can transfer some of what I learnt about building colours through hatching to that medium. The Supermarket Shop drawing in part 1 was done with coloured pencils, and with hindsight I think I could have improved it by intensifying the colours. I think I was too hesitant with the colouring of that drawing, maybe because it was all so new at the time.
What was difficult with felt pen?
The main difficulties with felt pen I encountered were
• Soft blendings from yellow into other colours are very difficult to achieve
• “Good quality” artist felt pens are expensive and represent quite an investment, like 60 EUR for 10 colours.
• Felt pens seem to be less flexible with respect to the possibilities of mixing exactly the colour one has in mind, compared to other coloured media, for example pastel.
• Corrections are virtually impossible, but some errors can be covered under layers of hatched colours
• Hatching seems to be the best technique to blend colours and create a variety of tones. However, this works best for larger objects because it results in quite a visible texture of the coloured areas. Building up the desired colour with hatching would be quite difficult for fine details. To some extent, mixing colours might be achieved by drawing compact layers of colours over each other, but I’m not sure whether the two techniques (hatching and compact colouring) go well together.
Exploring colour crayons
I had to take some days off due to other commitments, but then decided that I need to free up at least an hour for drawing on a regular daily basis, otherwise I run the risk of not getting anywhere. So today, I got back to the exploring coloured media task and chose coloured pencil. I did a first page in the off-white A3 sketchbook just to try out the colour set, experiment with mark-making and blending colours. I think I will do some more experiments on the other colour pencils I have, especially with the watersoluble pencils.
Page 1: Faber Castell set of 24
I filled an A3 sheet with a colour map of all the pencils in the set and briefly tried out transparency and some blending techniques. Coloured pencils are a good medium to vary colour intensity by applying more or less drawing pressure. This works well both for coloured areas as for lines. The line quality is very variable and lively, as opposed to felt pen.
Blending can be very finely graded. I tried out the blendings from yellow into green and orange and it was possible to have a very smooth gradation, much much finer than with felt pen. I also did blendings from red to blue using stippling, hatching and smooth shading. This all worked very well and permitted quite fine gradations. The pens are erasable so errors can be corrected, and they were even watersoluble to a certain extent although this wasn’t indicated on the box.
My conclusion so far is that coloured pencils are better adapted to make fine colour blendings and draw fine details. Overall colour intensity is less than with felt pen, but applying colour in more layers and increasing the pressure results in quite intense colours, just overall a bit softer than felt pens.
Pages 2 and 3: Using coloured pencil on coloured paper
I was curious how coloured pencil would look like on coloured paper. I chose red and grey sheets in A4 format to experiment with colours and mark making. Page 2 was red paper, and I was intrigued by the visual effect of the red background. Quite a dense colour application is necessary to have a visula colour, and the colours get a beautiful broken character. Really soft blendings from the red background towards intense colouring are possible.
For a contrast, page 3 was on grey paper which is very neutral as a background. There is much less optical interaction between background and colour and much less vibrancy. Rather, the grey support dampens the overall brightness of the drawing. In contrast to the red paper, soft applications of colour are quite visible. The overall impression is much quieter than on the red paper. I also experimented with a chaotic mark making technique to build up areas of different broken colours, this works quite well. I like this way to colour an area as a livelier alternative to the controlled effect of cross-hatching.
Pages 4, 5 and 6: Watersoluble coloured pencils
Continuing with A4 format, I chose watercolour paper for these experiments because I knew from prior attempts that standard paper would dissolve too quickly when applying water. On page 4, I tried out the colour set and how it reacted when I washed it with water. I also used water over a dry blending from red to blue and from yellow to red. I have no experience with watercolour so I wanted to take some time to just experiment with the medium. I tried out mixing colours for mark making, using washes and add more layers of mark making.
I was especially interested in building up layers of washes and mark making. From earlier experiments I knew that layers with watersoluble pencils had the problem that applying more water dissolves underneath layers. Therefore I wanted to try out mixing water-resistant with watersoluble layers.
On page 5, I mixed red, blue and violet colour pencil with ink in black and indigo, and experimented with a bamboo pen for mark making. At one point I accidentally dipped the brush into ink instead of water and made bold black marks. I didn’t like these marks at all and from then on I was occupied with attempts to “save” the image, but I don’t really like the result. Nevertheless I found the process quite instructive and liked to observe how the colours blended into each other.
I did another mixed media page with ink and coloured watercolour pencil, this time in brown tones for a change. I used ink in black and umbra and several different coloured pencils. The page is also a mark making experiment. I think from the colour selection, this page creates a more organic impression. For both pages 5 and 6 I was thinking about landscape and organic shapes, and I enjoyed exploring the materials.
Experimenting with Oil pastel – Pages 1 to 4
I drew four pages to experiment with oil pastels. I have a set of 24 colours, and the first page served to try out all the colours and get a feeling for using the pastel sticks. They are quite soft. Relatively fine lines can be drawn with the edges of a new stick, but during the drawing process the edges disappear and lines are generally bolder. So I think oil pastels won’t work very well for drawings with very fine details. Areas can be covered quickly with colour, and intense colour can be built up by increasing pressure and adding more layers.
On the second sheet, I experimented with blendings. With felt pens I had observed that soft blendings from yellow into other tones, for example green or orange, can be difficult to achieve, and I wanted to know how this would work with oil pastel. I found out that blendings from yellow into green worked quite well, while blendings from yellow into orange and red were more difficult. I applied the same technique in both cases, beginning with thin layers and blending between colours by mixing layers of different colours. But where tiny bits of green didn’t darken the yellow too much, the effect of orange was much stronger. I’m not sure whether this was just a chance effect, or due to the particular colour selection, or to inadequacies in my technique. I will get back to this problem in future applications of oil pastels.
On this page, I also repeated the stippling versus cross-hatching from red to blue experiment. Stippling with oil pastel felt strange and unnatural, but the resulting blending is not that bad. I tend to run out of patience with this technique and produce more white background than with other methods. The visual effect of stippling might be useful when the aim is to create a rougher surface texture for an object.
By contrast, hatching feels more comfortable with oil pastels, although due to the soft material, hatching lines won’t be fine, but bold. The blending can be built up by mixing different amounts of red and blue layers. With oil pastel’s I’m unsure about the optimum density of application. Few layers are enough to indicate a colour, but intense colours are only achieved by applying sufficient pressure or by making many layers. I’m not sure which intensity makes for the best visual effect. I think this needs more practice with the material, to try out and compare what works best.
On page three, I repeated blending experiments with red and blue and worked on different amounts of material on the paper. I tried out whether the blending from red to blue would benefit from adding layers of violet. The violet of my colour selection didn’t work well as an independent colour between the red and blue tones I had chosen. It might work better if applied only as an underground layer. I also experimented with blending red and blue into black to explore the range of dark tones that would result. I think this works quite well, and using coloured black tones avoids the creation of “black holes” which lack correspondence to the rest of the drawing.
Finally on page four I tried out the colours on black paper. As expected, the light colours come out very brightly, because they are opaque, but they tended to change their character on the dark support. For example, white was rather greyish, and yellow changed into a green tone. But there’s a broken colour effect from drawing on black paper which I like a lot and would like to explore further in future drawings.
I was tempted to experiment some more using thinner, because I was interested in the effect of creating washes and using transparency. But I refrained from the idea after reading the toxicological warnings on the thinner bottle I had available. I’ll defer this experiment and will try to find a dissolvant which is less toxic for the environment and doesn’t represent health risks for me.
Exploring watersoluble wax crayons
I wanted to conclude this project with an experiment on watersoluble wax crayons. The medium itself intrigues me, because I don’t know how it is chemically possible to have a wax-based medium that can be dissolved with water. But it works… I chose an A3 watercolour paper because I wanted to have some more space than for the earlier A4 experiments with watersoluble media, and knew I needed a resistant support for working with a brush.
I began with drawing some horizontal and vertical linen with pen and ink. I had a vision of creating a grid of irregular squares, to serve as a background for coloured washes of wax crayon. But then I “changed the rules” for the grid and continued with straight lines that originated from a common centre to the left lower middle. Then I thought, why only straight lines, and drew some curved lines originating in this centre. Then I thought, why only a single centre, and added a second centre of radiating lines to the upper right middle. I realized that I was in a process of inventing rules and right afterwards lifting up the specific restriction they imposed, in a cycle of continously breaking one rule by setting a different rule. This felt quite creative and I enjoyed the process and the inherent unpredictability.
When I found that I had drawn enough lines, I took the crayons. I have a set of 15 colours, and the first step was to decide on a topic for the experiment. I briefly reflected and chose colour blendings as a main theme, with the intention of first trying out how I could blend from yellow into orange and green and add other blendings if it would fit into the process.
I began by applying the medium dry, creating blendings between colours over the whole page, and then applied water over some areas, guided by the grid lines. I was carried away by the process and tried out different techniques: Creating soft blendings through washes between colours, intensifying colours by applying them try over a washed underground (after the layer had dried), and creating broken colour by applying a contrasting colour over a washed layer. I enjoyed observing how the material responded and how the colours changed during the mixing I did.
It is easy to smudge the colours by combining contrasting colours and applying water. This happened to me in the upper right edge of the drawing, where I combined dark red and green tones. But the medium permits corrections to a certain degree, by dissolving the colour with water and taking it off with soft tissue paper. A softly coloured area remains, and after this has dried, the corrective colour can be applied. In my experiment, I then emphasized the green colour and think the area has a quite interesting broken colour effect.
Overall I really like the brightness of wax crayons. When applied it dry only, the colours were much weaker, probably because of the heavily textured paper. I think that smoother paper permits to build up intense colours even without water. But on the paper I choose, the effect of water was very strong and completely changed the character of the drawing, resulting in very intense colour effects. I think wax crayons are also a medium which is not very appropriate for drawing fine details. It rather lends itself for a more painterly approach.
