Project 1: Prismacolor Final

I'd never really thought about using colored pencils before doing this piece, and when we started the project I was honestly a little bit intimidated by the prospect. After making several practice sketches and blocking out the colors, I felt pretty confident in beginning. I started with the reflection of the chair and the bear in the pendulum, using lots of golds and oranges and yellows to give it a warm look (while leaving room for the chains in the background). The next step was to add in the chains. During previous sketches I had had difficulty in making the chains pop out from the paper and the background. Mrs. Rossi suggested using a blue to emphasize the shadows. I really liked how the blue not only made the chains pop from the warm yellowy-orange background, but also tied in the blue that was in the rocking chair to the rest of the picture. The chains were easily the most time consuming part and I did get a little bit frustrated with them, especially the smaller two chains on the left, but I am really happy with how they turned out. After I completed the chains, I put in dark values for the foreground and the wall in the background, mostly dark browns with little bits of whites and greens to add variation.

I had a great time with this project and definitely look forward to using colored pencils again. I really like the bold colors you can achieve with the Prismas and the great variations in texture that are possible as well. Another aspect of the Prismas that I really like is their ability to be layered. Not only does this enable you to achieve very rich and varied colors, but by layering the same or similar colors on top of each other throughout a piece,  you can really create a color scheme that ties the whole piece together.