- Which of the media you have experimented with did you find most expressive? Make notes in your learning log on the pros and cons of each medium.
- Which medium do you think lends itself to very detailed work?
- Which techniques, tools and effects do you particularly enjoy? Make notes about your experiments
I explored the following coloured drawing media:
– felt pens
– colour crayons (colour pencil), both water-soluble and water-resistant, and mixing with indian ink
– oil pastels
– watersoluble wax crayons
I tried out different techniques, sometimes mixing with other media and using different types and colours of paper.
I liked felt pens for the intense colouring they produce, and they tend to be well adapted to drawing relatively fine detail. Beautiful blendings in colour with vibrant effects can be obtained by using hatching techniques. But these effects work best when looked at from a distance, because subtle and smooth gradations from one colour to another are only possible if the artist has many shades of colours at hand. But overall, felt pens are much more flexible in their ability to blend into many different colours than I initially had imagined.
Colour crayons were particularly good for creating very nuanced and smooth blendings between colours. Especially the water-soluble crayons can be used for very experimental drawings because the effects of mixing colours together are somewhat unpredictable.
Oil pastels worked very well to create intense colouring, but blendings were less subtle than I had hoped. Oil pastels created very interesting effects on coloured paper, probably because they are opaque. I especially liked the visual effect of using opaque light colours on dark papers.
Watersoluble wax crayons also create wonderfully intense colours when used with water. Application of water also results in beautiful watercolour effects. A problem is that the colours smudge easily when applied in layers. This may spoil the visual effect when trying to achieve broken colours.
I’m not able to say which of these would be the most expressive medium, because I think it all depends on how the media are used. For example, I would say that coloured crayons lend themselves to orderly and detailed drawings, but from my experiments I know that they can be used together with ink in a mixed media technique which I found quite expressive.
Similarly, oil pastels are a rather bold medium, not very well adapted to fine detail and lending itself to an expressive drawing style. But I’m quite sure that when used in a large format, they would permit to draw in a very accurate and realistic manner and would result in a more convincing drawing than for example the softer colouring that is typical for colour crayons.
So I think it depends more on the specific artistic idea which instrument works well for the task at hand. I found all of the media rather flexible and satisfactorily applicable in a variety of contexts.
Similarly, I have difficulties saying which of the media I liked best, because I liked them all for the specific effects they permitted to explore. I was intrigued by the intense colouring of felt pens, I loved the subtlety of colour crayons, I very much enjoyed experimenting with the mixed technique of ink plus watersoluble crayons.
From all I tried out, I’d say there’s one technique which I would tend to avoid, and that is stippling. Being obliged to make millions of dots makes me intensely nervous and wanting to run away immediately.