Framing Colored Pencil Without Glass

Today is an art working day, but no new artwork has been worked on. Why? Because I needed to finish off and frame the 2 pieces I just finished and deliver them to the gallery. This blog post will explain what I do to finish off a piece of art, but first I'll have to explain the process and supplies I use.


Most of you know that my still-lifes are framed without glass.  I do this for a couple of reasons:
 1. to make pictures seem more approachable/intimate.
 2. to bypass the perils of framing with mats & glass.


I've tried quite a few surfaces for colored pencil that can be framed without glass, but my favorite is Ampersand Pastelbord which is described as "a clay and gesso coated hardboard panel with a granular marble dust finish comparable to a sanded pastel paper..." It was first recomended by my friend/artist Louise Sackett who thought I was a little nutty trying to make my own sanded board with grit, paint, etc. when Ampersand has a pre-made board. 


Choosing a Color


It comes in grey, green, tan and white. I find the white board unusable for my techniques unfortunately. The grain is quite large on Pastelbord so whatever the color the board is, that color  will show in the "grain" as dots in the finished artwork. The white is just too white when seen in dark areas of the composition, throwing the values of the piece off. I prefer working with one of the colors and choose the color based on what I think will look the best in the grain of the piece. If I have a piece like Tea with Milk  that is mostly cool colors, I'll choose the grey board because the little specks of grey in the grain will influence the overall tone of the piece. 

Pieces like Italian Decadence is a bit harder to choose. The overall tone is warm, but the tan board is light and would lighten the dark areas of the cloth and bottles of oil too much... so I'd be better off using either green or grey board. 


Building Up Your Lights. 


Using colored board is a bit different than using white or beige paper because you have to make sure that your light and medium colored objects look bright enough on that color, especially after varnishing. What I do is build up my lights in the light and medium  areas to make sure they glow.  Since this post is on what I do when I finish a piece, I'll save this explanation for another post. 


Colored Pencils That Can Be Varnished


 Not all colored pencil brands can be varnished. Faber-Castell Polychromos (which I use for all my portraits) can not be varnished. The paint thinner that is in spray varnishes to keep them liquid eats away at the colored pencils, and the oil binder in Polychromos can't withstand it so your drawing literally dissolves away. I've found that Derwent Coloursofts, Prismacolors, and Caran d'Ache Luminance pencils all do well with spray varnish, although you still have to be ready for some colored pencil to dissolve and color changes with the process. 


Using the Prismacolor Colorless Blender to Minimize Dissolving Pencil

Despite these changes in the drawing when you varnish, I still think it is worth doing to stay away from glass. Plus you can anticipate the changes that will happen and minimize the changes or use them for your advantage. One thing that happens when you varnish is a small amount of colored pencil will dissolve, making more of the color of the board show through. That is why I build up my lights in light areas when working on a dark surface.  If there are enough light layers of colored pencil under your color, it will darken less (demonstration in future post). Also if you regularly build up your pencil to burnishing levels it seems to not have as many significant changes. I don't usually burnish however, so I've found that  if I put a layer of Prismacolor's Colorless Blender on my pieces, especially in the lighter areas, the colors stay brighter. Going back through the piece to add the blender pencil takes time, but it also gives you a chance to blend the pencil in some of the grain and soften edges if needed. I've found that adding the blender only on the areas that I don't want to darken is sufficient and actually adding the blender over black or dark areas leaves some light colored wax, so I wouldn't do it. 


After you finish adding colorless blender over your drawing just make sure you remove any colored pencil dust before varnishing (or hair or whatever else has fallen on your artwork) as it will be a permanent fixture to the piece if you leave it there!   


Varnishing, Finally


I use canned spray varnish over my pieces. I once sadly tried a brush on kind and wiped my entire drawing off, so using a spray on varnish ensures the pencil stays in place until it dries. There are matte, semi gloss and gloss versions of the spray and any of them will work, so choose the look you like best. I've used them all, and right now I am enjoying the look of the glossy finish. Today I used Grumbacher's Picture and Oil Painting Varnish in the Gloss finish which I purchased locally at Michael's. You can use other brands; I've even used Krylon's Kamar varnish from Walmart, but you need to make sure it says "Non-Yellowing" and test it first on a scrap drawing. 

When you spray, hold the can at least 8-10 inches away from your piece and only spray a fine mist at a time. If you spray a whole bunch so it pools, more colored pencil will dissolve. After spraying the whole thing in a fine mist, let it dry and do it over again. Repeat until it is evenly coated and the entire surface has a glossy wet sheen. I hold my drawing up to the light and tilt it to see if there are any dull areas that indicate missed spots. That's it, if you have a nice even finish without any exposed colored pencil purchasers of your artwork will have a protected surface that they can then wipe clean with a damp cloth  if need be. 


You might notice that the dark areas of your drawing got a little deeper or that very subtle glazes of colored pencil disappeared with the varnish. The more you varnish your colored pencil work, the more you will be able to anticipate these changes and work them into your design, As a last note... if you are going to photograph your artwork you may want to do that before you varnish so you don't have to work around the glare of the varnish finish. 


Italian Decadence and Tea with Milk are now showing at the Monadnock Fine Art Gallery in downtown Keene, NH. Call 603-352-3201 if you are interested. 

Still-life with Moo-cow

I bought this cow creamer a while ago, but had trouble fitting its long shape into a still-life. Putting the tipped over cup behind it offered the composition a similar shape which I think makes it work. That same cup with the spoon sticking out of it plus the curving and waving fabric added a lot of movement to the composition which was a lot of fun. That movement almost animates the rest of the objects, which makes it seem like the cow creamer is threatening to walk out of the composition. Which makes me think... if personification is "the attribution of a personal nature or character to inanimate objects" then is this animalification?

I  tried something of a new technique on the background. Since I was using a grey board and I wanted a grey background, I laid down a colored pencil the same color as the board: Dove Grey Coloursoft. This gave me a smooth texture to smudge other greys into by first scribbling them on, then swirling them around with a 1/2 inch bristle brush. I like the effect and it took less time than usual. 

Sorry for the blurry photographs (like usual) and you can click on them to see it larger. 

Since Art in the Park I've gotten one artwork finished, but its not something I can show you presently... sorry about that. Its Top Secret for now. :)

So on to other things...

I was asked to participate in a fundraiser for our local arts theater: the Colonial Theater.

It is one of these dinner/art auction/raffle things that they have every year. They always do themes for it and the artwork auctioned goes along with the theme. One year it was "Tray Jolie" and we decorated trays. This year the theme is:

 “Birdland” : Birdland was a jazz club founded in New York City in 1949 by Charles Parker, a noted saxaphone player. The club still exists today but not in the original place.

So of course we are applying our artwork to birdhouses. Mine is the one that I am holding above. Ignore the face I am making - that is the face you make when a 7 year old is trying to take your picture and is taking a long time.

I have never drawn on wood so my daughter and I practiced today on little $1 birdhouses I piked up at the craft store. The wood is rougher than the wood on the nicely crafted house I will be using but it allowed me to try out which pencils worked and how much detail and layering I could get.

I found that the waxed based pencils worked best. I preferred Derwent Coloursofts over Prismacolor because they are very soft and covered the wood much more quickly. The Prismas worked fine but would take longer to over the wood.

As far as details and layering goes - they both performed the same: not that well. The colors go on bright and pretty but you will only get a maximum of 3 layers on there. So I think my design will have to be pretty stylized which is okay.

I am thinking about doing apples in a tree for the birdhouse so that's what I did for practice:

Black Backgrounds...

I've gotten some "whoas" and some questions about my black backgrounds on my portraits. They really don't take too long despite my whining - about a days work for a really big one like this.

First off I use Polychromos on Fisher 400 paper for my portraits which has its pros and cons. The pencil acts sort of like a semitransparant pastel... where you can both smudge the pencil but the colors will mix together instead of just sit on top of each other for most colors. The con is that it smudges which can be annoying for storage, framing, shipping etc. Sprays don't seem to help much either. 

So for a background like this I'll put down just enough pencil - well scribble it on really. Then I'll use my handy dandy blending tool - my finger - and smudge it all in. Oila it is smooth and has no grain showing. For a black background it doesn't feel much different than using charcoal. 

In the swatch below you can see part of the Shannon background when I had enough pencil down and hadn't smudged it in yet. 

At this moment I noticed I have 99 followers! Wow! Thanks everyone for coming to see my blog!! 

hair - info not covered in workshop

For those of you that were at my workshops... I didn't discuss the topic of rendering hair. Actually I very conveniently chose a reference photo that didn't have any hair showing! :-O

OK colors for the hair underpainting... are not the same as the flesh colors (unless they have rosy colored hair - oh my). What I do is choose colors I see in the reference and try and use one or  two or three  colors from the flesh toned underpainting palette. So maybe with a sandyblond hair - I might use burnt umber, a sandy brown color, cinnamon, and a yellow ochre. The more colors I can use from that flesh palette the better - for color harmony. 

Here's some samples below. I tried to figure out what colors I used... because I didn't have them written down.

This is an example of dark hair.. that when lit by a warm light has a lot of red tones. So I was able to use burnt umber and Pompeiian Red in the colors. To which I added a greenish brown and some soft blue highlights.

This is ummmm my hair which is that ash color. I managed to get burnt umber in there... and then made sure I used some cinnamon in some highlighted areas in the later stages.
This hair is a strawberry color so it was easy to get my underpainting colors in! I left out the Pompeiian Red in Place of an orangey-er color.
This last one has some burnt umber, cinnamon and ivory in it... but again the Pompeiian Red was replaced with a golden brown color. I think I galzed some greenish color in areas as well.

Colored Pencils vs. Pastel Pencils

Liz in colored pencil (above)
Liz in pastel pencils (below)

Someone just asked me these questions in another post:

"What are the differences between the colored pencils [both the wax and oil based
ones] and the pastel pencils? why getting involved with pastels?"

Differences:

1. scumbling - you can't realy "scumble" in colored pencil.
2. Blending - you can blend more easily in pastels. This can be a problem if you overblend, but besides being able to more easily achieve a smooth finish (which you may or may not want to do) you can more easily achieve soft edges and not the hard edges so prominent in pencil.
3. Pastel & pastel pencils are opaque and colored pencils are semi-transparent. This means that in COLORED pencil every layer will effect each subsequent layer when the lower layers show through the upper layers. Which can be beautiful - but allows less wiggle room and a much more controlled process of steps.
4. Pastels are dry.... and colored pencils are either waxy or oily. That means that with colored pencil you can not work past a certain amount of layers without a buildup of either oil or wax which fills up the tooth of the paper. With pastels I have not reached a breaking point with the amount of layers - it seems like you can work forever. This again can be good or bad. Many colored pencil artist "burnish" which means they use the buildup of wax to their advantage - its something I personally don't like doing.
5. They just look different. :)

Please feel free to add to this list or contradict what I said. This is my first experience with pastel pencils and these are just some things I found while working with them.

Why:

1. I am drawn to work in pastel. When I go to galleries, museums or scan through the art magazines at Borders - that is what I seem to like the best. There's something about the softness, the vibrancy, the way the layers lie on top of each other.
2. I've always told people that I work more like a pastel artist than a colored pencilist and really I wasn't sure if that was true. It turns out that is right - although maybe a hard pastelist?
3. To give the people commissioning portraits from me an alternative to colored pencil - something they've heard of before.
4. and finally: To push myself.

When I started colored pencil I started with smooth white paper, moved to other white papers, tried colored paper, then sanded paper... all the while trying different brands of pencils (each of which worked differently). I think it makes you grow when you try new things. Plus I just plain ole enjoyed working on sanded papers and it transformed my work. If I had never pushed myself to try them, where would I be?

Pushing yourself beyond your comfort level makes you grow so much more as an artist/human being. I compare it to my workout routine., I run 40 minutes every morning. If I keep on running at the same pace, same incline, same amount of time everyday my muscles don't grow, but if I push myself to add a little speed or an incline here or there I get stronger.

I'll have an update on the school portrait!

A work in Progress!

More experimenting with watercolor pencils.

This is 11 x 14" overall and so far I've put 6 nonstop hours into it. I'm not even half way through yet.

Disaster!

You won't believe me when I tell you what I did... its something that was so stupid, that it can't be true.

Well, the pretty portrait of my daughter Lizzy... is no more. I sprayed it with two coats of my usual Lascaux fixative and then used my new Lascaux brush on varnish on it... and it picked up the colored pencil and redistributed it with every brushstroke. It made me sick to my stomach to see it wrecked like that.... so I had to redo it. :-(
The one on the left is the wrecked one. It is darker because the pencil from the dark areas are now spread around, plus you can see the brush strokes where the pigments huddled together.

So yes the one on the right is the beginning of the redo. I was heartbroken and hoped I could replicate it. I find redoing a picture I was happy with very very hard to do. Instead of doing things in order I jump to what I know I did before and forget some important steps.

Well here is the finished do-over. Remember when a do-over was a good thing... something you begged to be able to do??? I hope this one doesn't disappoint.

Sealing Experiments

I've had loads of questions on how I seal my colored pencil drawings on Pastelbord to make them frameable without glass.

I've been using first 2 coats of Lascaux fixativ and then 4 light coats of the Kamar varnish spray. I have had good results except that it ALWAYS darkens the colors. Sometimes that's a good thing... sometimes its very bad. Ideally your spray shouldn't change colors though... I mean you work hard to get a picture perfect and then hope the spray doesn't change it too much. That's not good policy.

I found out why the spray (aerosol) varnish and some fixatives change the colors. To keep the sprays liquid they all have a little bit of solvent in them, in differing amounts for different brands, which is why some brands of fixative change colors more than others. If you've ever used solvent when you are making a drawing you can attest to the fact that the solvent with colored pencil really darkens the colors.

So that's why I am so excited about my friend Gary's experiments with brush on water-based varnishes and why I'm joining in on the fun. I had been using the spray aerosol varnish because the colored pencil on Pastelbord is a bit unstable anyway (can be brushed off fairly easily) so I was afraid to brush on a varnish. BUT it seems like if you use a good fixative first you can avoid smearing. Gary has tried Golden's varnish for acrylics with good results so far.

I tried brush on varnish from Liquitex yesterday on a test piece and had some trouble with the pencil smearing. Lots of trouble when the colored pencil wasn't fixed first and much less when it was fixed. Gary gave me some tips to try and I'll see if I can't get it not to smear.

Next I'm trying Lascaux's varnish for acrylics. It too is water-based. They also sell a sprayer that you can use with it so I bought it as well. I'm hoping that since I use Lascaux fixative first, that the varnish, although it is water-based, will have no problems adhering which could be another problem.

The nice part of these alternatives, as well as them not changing the colors of your drawing, is that they also have lightfast qualities to protect your work even more.

So I'll let you know soon!

Step by Step colored pencil drawing

Here is a step-by-step to entice you to come to my workshop this weekend (mentioned in yesterday's post). You will have to come to the workshop to find out the color theory behind the piece. :)

It is done using only colors from the Prismacolor Lightfast 48 color set, as that is what we use at the school. Pencils are provided for all students and Pastelbords (5x7) can be purchased at the workshop.

Feel free to click the images to see them larger. Maybe you can tell me what I'm doing in each step!

Wine Bigger

Welcome to my new and improved blog. Well its new and improved because I mistakenly erased my other blog which was stored with my website. So this time I thought I'd use blogger and let it be hosted there. Of course someone had the blogger url I wanted - my own name! That's the first time that has happened!

This was the last artwork I posted on the old blog. It is 18 x 24" and the first time I used solvent on a large scale with my colored pencils. It gives a very painterly look, essentially because it is painting.

I put the pencil down messily but like I was doing the beginning layers of pencil on any drawing. Then I used a flat 1/4" watercolor brush and brushed solvent over the pencil. You have to be careful with this step if you don't want to mix all the colors in a part... like with the wine bottles I have all the shading on there so I had to clean the brush in the solvent and go back in when I switched between the dark parts of the bottle and the lighter parts. If it wasn't coming out the right values I worked wet in wet and scribbled pencil over areas and brushed again with the brush. I used a lot of solvent I think... and it felt like working on a watercolor painting.