Colour Pencils

A week of discovery and rediscovery for me. I chanced upon a wonderful blog by artist Kal Barteski (link) and was captivated both by her art and, in particular, her enthusiasm for using colour pencils. Check out her amazing shoe paintings, btw. Kal shares her artwork but also her techniques and I had one of those lightbulb moments ....
Now I haven't used colour pencils for years but I knew I had some somewhere. A quick rummage produced a battered tin of Berol Karismacolour pencils in varying stages of use - favourite colours being the short ones of course. In my formative years I could never get on with colour pencils finding them scratchy and hard to get strong colours without a good deal of pressure. Not so with Karismacolour - these are waxy, soft and semi-translucent and they lay down a good degree of saturated colour without too much pressure. Ideal for blending and overlaying. ( It seems that Karismacolour pencils are no longer made but they have re-emerged as Prismacolor and are made in the USA. Other manufacturers have similar soft pencils in their range and are readily available in art shops etc.)
Then I had fun finding out how the pencils worked and looked on different papers. Besides the obvious choices of artists' papers there are a multitude of different supports that can be used. Textured Bazill cardstock proved to be easy to work with and gave an interesting canvassy look, made more subtle by using the smoother reverse. DCWV patterned card also proved effective, as was their textured solid colour blocks.

This led me to thinking about using coloured pencils more for scrapbooking and with the current trend for doodling on layouts it seems like a good choice. Being a dry medium, and easy to use, it has obvious advantages over painting for freestyle scrapbooking.
This led me to my next rediscovery. One of the banes of my life has been having slightly uncontrolled hand movements when drawing or doing other detailed work. It's a mental thing - the more I try to keep a line smooth the more likely it is to wobble! Not too bad for straight lines - I can use a ruler - but keeping curved lines looking right is much harder. Enter stage right - my flexible curve! Another thing bought a few years ago and then hidden by the junk in my studio. I imagine most people will know a flexible curve when they see one, but just in case, it's about 18 inches long, encased in softish rubber with a flattened surface to the underside, and it can be curved any which way to sit on your paper and used like a curved ruler. So simple to use and it gives very satisfying results. I used a roller-ball pen for the the outlines and then coloured in the design with my pencils.
These pencils will work on any colour background, even black. The example below was done on buttery-yellow DCWV cardstock.

The next example was by way of a further experiment on white Bazill textured card. I printed my image straight onto the reverse of the card, giving a subtle but soft effect like a painting. Then I used the curve to make the sweeping lines and coloured them in. This is 8x8" and it could easily go onto a sheet of 12x12 for further embellishment etc.

Another idea would be to get children creating art onto a layout of photos of themselves. Older children can do their own thing, whilst younger children could maybe simply colour in patterns you've created with a flexible curve or hand-doodling. Get the whole family involved - and no mess!