Daniel Boone Gardens
colored pencil on pastel board
5 x 7 inches
©Ann Thompson Nemcosky
Here's a piece that I did last week using pastel board. It has been quite some time since I have used this support for colored pencil and when I found a stray pastel board while rummaging around my supplies looking for something else (naturally) I decided to have a little fun.
I first sketched my composition onto the pastel board with Neocolor II water soluble crayons. I wanted to keep the feel of the piece loose and impressionistic. I intentionally chose bold colors for this underpainting step, knowing that the translucent nature of colored pencil would allow some of this highly saturated color to influence the colors placed on top. After I had scribbled in my areas of color, I washed the Neocolor with water. Above is what it looked like after that step, when the washes had dried.
Then I went in with colored pencil. I prefer Derwent Coloursoft colored pencils when working on sanded surfaces. They are softer than my usual Faber-Castell Polychromos. Because of their softness, Coloursofts behave more like pastel pencils on the sanded surface of the pastel board. An effect that I like. My only regret with the process that I used for this piece is that I wished I hadn't started with such a dark blue in the sky. I would have liked the sky to be a lighter value at the end, something I couldn't achieve once I had that darker value of blue in place with the Neocolor wash. Oh well. It was a fun piece to play around with. And I am happy that I had the restraint to stop before I refined to many areas with detail. I do like the impressionistic feel where the mark making is evident and left alone. Pictured above is the finished piece, same as at the top of the post. I hope you don't mind seeing these pieces in stages like this. I never know if it would be interesting to anyone else or not. I know I always enjoy seeing works-in-progress that other artists share and hope you do too.
