May 11th, 2006 – It’s time to try out colors. I have pastel pencils but have so far avoided doing anything in color. Now is a good time to try. While color can bring out the true image you’re trying to draw, it also can be difficult to learn to shade properly. I wanted to start with something basic enough but still vibrant, so settled on a favorite butterfly of my youth… the Swallowtail butterfly. I used to catch these all summer long as a kid.

Analysis – I used a combination of pastel pencils for color and graphite pencil for the gray scale and lines. I like using graphite too much and have become too comfortable with it. It’s hard to achieve the same shading with the color pencils I have and don’t know if it’s the pencils or my technique.

Pretty easy to see that I’m not blending the colors together enough as there are hard edged between them. The color pencils also don’t lay down on the paper the same as graphite and coverage is suffering. I’ll need to learn how to better use them.

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Note – I’ve decided to start posting my drawings to my blog. For a few reasons… To share the art, to stimulate me to draw more, and to keep a record of them all. Click on the small image to get the larger size view. There will be a small flood of posts as I put up all of my back dated drawings, then only as I produce new works.

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