Coloring!

My kids love playing with sidewalk chalk and constantly request that I draw things for them.  Too often I'd look down at my chalk scribbles and be unable to recognize what I set about making.  This left the boys disappointed, and that clearly wouldn't do.  So for about six months now I've been making an effort to learn to draw.

It's been an interesting thing to figure out and I'd really like to write a bunch on the various techniques and processes I use when drawing stuff.  I've already changed my approach a few times and I'd like some way to track this better.

My most recent experiment is trying to color my drawings.  I got a box of cheap colored pencils to try out on a few pencil sketches to try and come up with something more interesting than gray scale shading.

I'm not terribly good with them yet, but then after only a few attempts I really shouldn't expect too much.  Despite being unhappy with the results I really enjoy breaking up the monotony of monochrome images when sketching.

In my first attempts I treated the colored pencils much like crayons.  Just gave a solid outline of each colored area and filled it in.  The results weren't all that great, still had color but really didn't make the picture any more interesting.

In an attempt to refine this I started tying to use different colors together to build up some texture in the image.  You can see some of this in the owl picture to the right.

This added some nice detail to the image, but the colored regions look rather sloppy.  I suppose that in time I'll get better at making the colored ares and transitions between them a bit smoother.  Or at least less like some slap-dash approach to doing it.

I tried a few attempts at blending the colors to make smooth transitions between them, but haven't quite gotten that right.  I've seen a bunch of guides that talk about rubbing the picture with tissue paper to make the colors smear a bit and blend together.  I'm not sure what I need to do to get that right, either adjusting the pressure I use or maybe find a more accurate tool than my fat fingers.

The last thing i tried with them was to do some shading.  This was doomed from the start since my ability to shade at all is pretty poor.  I get the idea of what needs done to make good shading, I just can't translate that into the image very well.  It's just another area I need to practice at.

At first I tried doing shading the way I've done it digitally.  Color the region in a light shade, then go over it with semi-transparent brush in black where it needs darkened.  It works great in Gimp since the colors will automatically blend together.  Colored pencils don't work like this, or at least not in that same automatic way.  The end result does have a bit of depth to it; however, to me at least, it didn't look right.

In a later attempt I tried what I suspect is a better approach.  I colored the region with the color I wanted, just a lighter shade, almost a highlight color.  Then using increasingly darker shades of that same color I'd go over the regions again to build up the darker tones.  The turtle image on the left is an example of this approach.  I think the end result looks better than my previous attempts, but still needs some work.

I'm not sure how much coloring via pencils I'd like to do.  In general I consider my pictures done once the line art is complete.  Shading and colors have always felt unnecessary, possibly because my attempts at them never look quite right to me.  There's also the fact that I don't really have any goal for my drawings.  There's no intent to use them or sell them so once I'm satisfied there's just no reason to keep working on it.

It's yet another area that I'd like to see how my opinion changes over time.  Maybe as I get better at coloring I'll deem it necessary in my drawings.  Maybe it'll always be extra, and the lines will be all I need to bring the image to life in my mind.