What you have and what you do

Recently I have been reading the Coloured Pencil Painting Bible by Alyona Nickelson - I should say re-reading it! It is quite an informative book and so is her website. I see she has now branched out from still life's to portraits (hard to believe she creates them with pencil! Genius!)

Reading it for the first time a few years back, was when I discovered the true extent of possibilities of coloured pencils. Before this book I can honestly say I had not thought of using the medium for more than sketching with. 

I believe I can mark it as a corner stone in my art development. I'm more open to the possibilities accessible in art (which truly are infinite). Which brings me to this post on - using what you've got and making the most out of it. 

I am one of those artists that seem to acquire several tonnes of art equipment but tend to think that they don't have the "right" tool or need this or that. So today, I have removed my excuses and am making use of what I have available to me.   

I refuse to use the excuses such as

I don't have the right paper

I don't have a good idea

Today I am willing to say I have more than enough supplies, tools, equipment and ideas to try something new. 

Using Alyona's book as a guide I started sketching in Photoshop one of her exercises twin cherries from page 120. 

But why? I hear you say, if she is a talented COLOURED PENCIL ARTIST who's book is all about COLOURED PENCILS am I doing her exercise digitally?

Well firstly, and this is not an excuse, merely fact, I don't have the right paper. I have sketchbook paper, which might work okay, but I also have a second reason, I wanted to record a video.

I wanted record my progress through this exercise and I felt (for now at least) the easiest way would be in Photoshop.

First off I went in search of a colour pencil palette for Photoshop also known as a Colour Swatch file (.aco). I found one version of colour pencil colour swatch for Photoshop online, which I used in the first attempt. I however, found they were too washed out in colour for my tastes and decided to create one myself. 

new brighter colour swatches similar to the colour choices available in coloured pencil ranges

To get a closer match to the coloured pencils I'm used to, I used a scrap page from my art diary and made colour swatches of all the pencils from one of my coloured pencil sets.

As you can see the "Orange" doesn't look orange at all... 

I had to scan this one separately to get a better colour scan

I then scanned this in to the computer and opened the file in Photoshop, after some minor adjustments I used the colour picker to create a new colour swatch for Photoshop. Some colours didn’t scan too well – orange especially.

And started the exercise again. I am much happier with the second attempt and I learnt much about colour interaction from the exercise.