Coloured Pencil Workshop

Well, i am back. Today was my first coloured pencil workshop which I was asked to do earlier in the year by the  Central Coast Art Society. I had such  a fantastic time really enjoyed it!

There were 12 participants in all, which is a fantastic turnout, and i feels so honored that some people had made a special trip from quite a distance to come. Thankyou all so much!

The workshop was an introduction workshop, I covered alot of information about supports, materials and well known coloured pencil artists etc. I questioned myself that i was planning to speak for such a period of time in a “workshop” but I felt it quite important to cover these things as coloured pencils are  a medium which is not so known in Australia and for those which are new it i thought it would be valuable to share the info to see what is possible with a humble pencil.

I also thought it important to cover information about materials, mentors for coloured pencil artists are overseas, so alot of the information artists will receive here in Australia is conflicting and confusing particularly in relation to supplies etc.  It is also limited further up here on the Central Coast as opposed as to range that you can get in Sydney so again i wanted to cover alot of that today to help artist alleviate some of the confusion and run around that you can get when trying to get into this form of art.

As well as all the info, i had some exercises for the artists to do on values, pressure, building layers, colours just to get the ball rolling for people to get the feel for themselves on the technique. If i was to have jumped straight in and tried to get people to work from a reference today i felt that i might have lost a few people or  when trying to do it themselves at home people may have become a bit frustrated if i hadnt taught them the “right” way to go about.  So hence the structure of todays workshop, i also covered a bit towards the end about mixing colours, blending lifting colour. All in all some good groundwork.

The next workshop is in a fortnight from today, so i am hoping in that one i may  expand a little bit more into  tips for creating an artwork and some of the more advanced techniques etc. Again tho, time will be a factor trying to do all of that in 3 hours is a tough call, but i hope to be able to give a good indication of what you can and cant do.

For all of you pencil fans, here is a photo that may interest you all, one of the ladies brought in these vintage pencils to use. Look at that packet! Fantastic!