Exercise: Using Other Colour Media

 

When I first saw the Begonia in the garden centre and it was crying out to be drawn the I had pictured in my mind's eye lots of splashy bold colour via a water-based medium and wax resist to allow patches of green to show through the red and purple tones. I experimented with watercolour paint and wax crayon plus water soluble markers. I then tried neo-colour crayons but found the limited range of colours I had weren't sufficient for the subtlety of the colours of the leaves although I did like their boldness. The wax crayon worked very well for resist but again, I had a limited colour range and the greens were a bit lurid.
Oil pastel also provided a resist and the colours were better but I didn't like the character of the resist as much as with the waxy crayons.

I also tried putting bleach or salt on wet watercolour washes which gave some visually exciting effects but with my first attempts the colours were a bit insipid. Using a hairdryer to dry the ink resulted in a less interesting effect. The most interesting effect was made with vivid ink and lots of salt and allowing the ink to dry naturally without heat. 

I then moved on to using oil pastels. I put thick oil pastel on the paper. I then tried scraping into it with coloured pencil. I also scraped with a sip pen nib and rubbed coloured ink into the sgraffito surface. I really liked this way of working so I drew a few of the leaves of the begonia  like this and I include an orchid. The sgraffito technique with addition of the coloured ink was good for the veined texture of the orchid petals. The drawback was that I got so absorbed with the colour and the texture of the petals and the leaves that I didn't really concentrate hard enough on the composition which meant the the plants ended up having less impact than they really deserved.

The changes of medium in this case from coloured pencils to oil pastels reduced the amount of fine detail I could depict in the drawing but they allowed a more vivid and fluid approach to the drawing which was more satisfying to me.