No New Notecard Sets

I really wanted to make some notecard sets of my "30 Days" and "28 Years" colored pencil drawings, to sell on Etsy and at the Paint Creek Center for the Arts in Rochester, Michigan (where many notecard prints of other colored pencil drawings and paintings I've completed are already for sale). My vision was to have a notecard of the entire drawing and then several close-up details of the flowers, available in box sets. I figured it wouldn't be too hard, since I've done notecards like this before. Unfortunately, I was wrong.

The problem is the size of the drawings. Each one is 22"x30", which is too large to scan all at once on the size scanner I have at home (which can only go up to 11"x17" size). I have made notecards of watercolors this size before, but I didn't scan the artwork - I took a picture of it with a camera. When I tried to do this these drawings, however, the pictures were not a great quality for printing. For starters, the only camera I have right now is the one on my cell phone. Usually my cell phone takes pretty good pictures, but because of the texture of the colored pencil and the detail in these drawings, I just couldn't get one I was happy with that didn't look either blurry or pixelated when I printed them out. I also tried to scan the artwork in four different 11x15 quadrants (top-right, top-left, bottom-right, and bottom-left), so I could at least get some good detail shots - but this also didn't work out as I'd hoped. I don't know if the problem is the colored pencil itself, the texture of the paper, or the fixative I sprayed over the final drawings, to prevent the colored pencil from rubbing off as I move it around and store it - but even the scans had trouble getting good quality images. Everything ended up out of focus, or still ended up pixelated when I printed them out.

I spent about two days on this. The first day, taking photos with my cell phone and trying to make those work. Then, more recently, I spent another day scanning them, cropping them down to the detail shots I wanted to use, and printing some out. Both times, I ended up wasting some of my notecard paper on images that were too pixelated to sell. It was more than a little frustrating.

I don't want to say I'm giving up, because I still would like to have notecard sets of those two drawings available sometime in the future, as well as for my "Race Bouquet (Stronger Together)" drawing, and the other drawings I'll be doing in that series - but I am putting this on the back burner for now. I would rather spend my time right now making artwork than figuring out how to make my own prints of them; once I finish my "stronger together" series I should have more time to revisit this problem and think of a better solution. Maybe the answer is getting a better digital camera, and getting some good photos of the entire drawing (and completely scraping the idea of also doing "detail" shots on notecards). Or maybe the answer is to send my artwork out somewhere to have it professionally scanned and made into high-quality prints (higher quality than I can print at home anyway). Maybe there's even some middle ground there, where I can find a printing service that has a scanbed large enough for 22"x30" paper, which can scan my artwork for me.

In any case, as much as I would like to say I have some new designs available as notecard sets, that's simply not the truth. I do, however, have many other colored pencil drawings, acrylic paintings, and watercolors available as notecard art prints. I recently restocked my notecards at PCCA in Rochester, MI, and I also have all notecards available through my Etsy shop. These make great gifts (and Mother's Day is just around the corner)!

Life Drawing

As I mentioned in my last few posts, I was first introduced to the Koh-i-noor "magic" pencil by my life drawing professor at EMU, Prof. Washington. He used the "magic" pencils in his own sketchbook, paired with a hatching or cross-hatching shading technique, and encouraged us to try them out as well.

Here are some of my best drawings using the Koh-i-noor "magic" pencil from the two Life Drawing courses I took at EMU (in 2007 and 2008). We also did a lot of drawing in charcoal, but I'll save those for another future post.

A couple of these images are #NSFW - Life Drawing classes tend to work from nude models. But most of these are sketchbook pages/self-portraits, focusing on the face.

Green Experiment

When I started my current acrylic paintings, first I had to determine which of my old acrylic paints were still good.

This led to some experimenting, when I realized that my tube of green paint had mostly dried up and would no longer squeeze out of the tube. I cut open the tube with scissors, then dropped the dried part into a bucket of water. I soaked some ripped up strips of paper in this green water for a few hours, and then crumpled them up and laid them to drip-dry on a small flat canvas board I had. I figured it would give the background some interesting texture for whatever not-yet-planned acrylic painting I would use the canvas board for in the future.

I mean, I couldn't do anything else with the dried up paint tube, so I thought I might as well try. The paint was destined for the trash can otherwise.

So here is the end result of the experiment:

Strips of watercolor paper soaked in green water

The canvas, complete with the texture of dried, crumpled up bits of soaked green paper strips

I don't know why my phone camera has started putting these shadow stripes across my pictures. I don't see it happen anywhere else but when I'm trying to take a photo of artwork in my basement studio. Maybe it's something about the fluorescent lighting down there? It doesn't seem to have problems in any other room of my house, or outside.

It's really annoying.

Anyway, the response on Instagram was pretty great! I got several comments:

It's not something I'll be using anytime soon (I'm a little busy with other projects at the moment), but eventually I'll come back to this canvas board and make a cool abstract painting out of this. :)

More Abstract Colored Pencil Drawings

Yesterday I showed you some detail photos of two of my latest abstract colored pencil drawings. Here are the next two - similar in form (both feature organic arcs and swirls) but different in color scheme.

Both were created with Prismacolor brand colored pencils and Strathmore Toned Gray paper.

I didn't plan either of these out in advance other than choosing which colors I thought would 1) stand out nicely on the gray paper and 2) work well together. Once I had my palette selected, I just went for it, seeing where the doodle took me - a departure from the structured, well-planned-out way I usually approach my artwork.

I'm calling this one "Retro Wave Doodle."

And this one is "Soft Swirls Doodle":

Here is the response I've received on Instagram:

I'm sure I'll keep doing more of these in the future. They're fun to do, and fast, and require little forethought or planning. Especially now that I have this new part-time job that takes up my mornings, I'll probably do a lot more of these quick, easy projects so that I can still squeeze some art into my day.

Abstract Colored Pencil Drawings

In an effort to gain more followers on Instagram (and, in turn, get more people to check out my Etsy shop and this blog), I've been trying to post a pic every day - often sharing the link to each "gram" via Twitter and Facebook as well. Of course, just as with my attempts to write a blog post every day, some days there is more to talk about than other days - and some days I work more on art than others.

But in an effort to try to get a least a little bit of art done - and an Instagram post put up - every single day, I've started doing some quick abstract colored pencil drawings. My thinking is that these might make cute little prints for blank notecards or bookmarks or other things I might eventually sell. And in the meantime, they help me get my creativity flowing and give me practice with how my colored pencils work on different colors of paper.

Usually the art I do involves a lot of planning - photos that are manipulated and cropped and used as source imagery for colored pencil drawings, or photos that are collaged together with patterns I've designed to make a composition for a watercolor or acrylic painting. Even once all of the planning is done, these pieces tend to take awhile. I'm still working on those acrylic paintings I started a few weeks ago. They're not big paintings - each is only 8"x10" in size - but because I put so much planning into them, they take time. Part of that is the detail I planned in, but part of that is probably due to the planning itself - the idea that I've already put so many hours into this painting before I even pick up a paintbrush for it... I have to have something to show for all of that time and effort; I have to get a quality piece out of it.

So these quick little drawings give me an opportunity not to worry about that. If they turn out great - great! If they don't, it was only about an hour wasted, not several hours. No harm done.

They've gotten a pretty positive response on Instagram so far (some more than others). I have done four lately. Here are two of them (I'll show the other two tomorrow).

I'm calling this first one "Retro Garden Doodle." I used a carefully selected palette of the eight colored pencils you see in the picture. With my floral colored pencil drawings I usually do a lot of layering and blending, for these doodles I let the colors stand alone. They touch each other and work together as a palette, but there is no blending to make "new" colors - other than some shading for the two colors used to accentuate angles in the background.

The colored pencils are Prismacolor brand and the paper is Strathmore Toned Gray paper.

This next one I'm calling "Retro Stick Doodle." I used a palette of only six colored pencils for this one.

Here are the responses I've gotten from Instagram:

Updated Colored Pencil Chart

Recently, I posted some photos of some "color charts" I made of my Prismacolor colored pencils on gray and tan toned Strathmore paper. But now I have a bigger, better color chart to show off - one that has all of the colors side by side.

I decided I wanted to see how the colors looked on black and white paper as well, and that it would be nice to see how the same colored pencil would look on all of my paper options - so that in the future, when I go to use or purchase more pencils, I can better gauge which ones I use the most and which ones work the best on different papers.

So here is my new and improved color chart -

What I found most interesting was which colors didn't work at all on certain papers. The neon colors I recently purchased, for instance, do not show up on black paper - which is unfortunate, because I thought the neon would really pop against the black. Neon Pink, Neon Yellow, and Neon Orange are best used on white, tan, or gray paper. My metallic pencils, on the other hand, really stand out against the black paper; though they're also shiny and slightly metallic on the white, tan, and gray, they definitely work best on black - so I think I'll save those only for when I'm working on black paper.

As to be expected, a lot of the dark colors don't show up on black, and the lighter colors don't show up on white - and, to some extent, tan. The gray paper probably allows for the greatest set of visible colors - even colors that are grayish in tone compliment the gray paper well.

I also made sure to write down the colored pencil numbers on this chart as well, instead of just the name of the color. The numbers are at the very bottom of the pencil, so once they've been sharpened down to a stub, the names are no longer visible - but the numbers still are.