Chateau de Chenonceau Drawing

I was introduced to Koh-i-noor's "magic" style colored pencils by my life drawing professor at EMU. He used them in his own daily sketchbook drawings, and encouraged us to use them for large scale and small scale sketches. I purchased several back then, and then rarely used them, focusing instead on the standard Prismacolor pencil set I had.

Then, when I was reorganizing my studio lately, I "rediscovered" those pencils. I decided I wanted to play around with them again, and landed on using travel photos as source images - because I also wanted to practice my architecture/perspective drawing skills.

These "magic" pencils have multiple hues blended together into one fat pencil. The color scheme I used for this drawing was the primary color triad pencil, which combined red, blue, and yellow. The source photo I used was a picture I took in 2005, on my class trip to France. The castle is Chateau de Chenonceau, near Paris.

Here are the process photos for how I created the drawing step-by-step:

And here is the finished sketch, with some close-up detail shots of the drawing and the "magic" pencil I used:

The sketch turned out so well that I decided to do several others. Tomorrow's post will show the next drawing in this series.

I posted the final image on Instagram and got a lot of positive comments!

French Castles

I also got the chance to see a few of the many beautiful castles France has to offer. In 2005, we took a day excursion from Paris to tour the castles of Chenonceau and Amboise. And in 2010, my husband and I took a tour of the Palace of Versailles while we were staying in Paris for a few days.

(As noted earlier, the camera I had in 2005 wasn't great quality - but then, digital technology has advanced just a bit in the last eleven years!)

Here are some of my favorite photos from those tours:

Our tour ticket did not include admission to the Versailles Gardens (though we were told that it would; I was pissed). But I did manage to snag a couple shots of the gardens from the gate.

Another shot of the Versailles Gardens

Chateau Amboise, the supposed inspiration for the story of Sleeping Beauty

Chateau Chenonceau, my favorite castle. It's not very big (for a castle), but it's built *as a bridge* over a river, which is pretty freaking awesome.