Purely Pencils ii

Jill Robertson kindly wrote about the Purely Pencils II workshop for the blog.  She writes; Purely Pencils II was run for CCS with Gemma Black as the tutor. About two thirds of the group had attended Purely Pencils I a couple of years ago, so it was a follow-on from that.

The whole weekend was focused on using the huge variety of pencils that are now available for both writing and creating interesting backgrounds to work on. It seems that all the best pencils still come from England and Derwent is still the top choice!!

We started with an exercise called “Nature to Paper”. We were asked to bring a flower or two with us and as the garden is full of flowering bulbs at the moment, that wasn’t hard! We then had to choose one flower and make little swatches of all the colours we saw in the flower. Then we had to make a “Charles Rennie Mackintosh” style square and draw the initial letter of the flower and then make a pattern in the rest of the space and fill it in using the colours from the flower. We filled it in with water colour pencils, then used water on a brush to bring the water colour to life.


There were some beautiful examples around the room. I did the iris first and then a freesia. I enjoyed that exercise.

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Then we were introduced to watercolour canvas, something I had never heard of before, and we did some background patterns on that with various sorts of pencils. Again, it was dry from the pencils then wet to create the background patterns. That had to dry off overnight while we tackled another Art Deco style piece with just one word spread over the piece. Mine was ENJOY. I rarely go for reds, oranges and yellows, but as this was with the really intense coloured pencils (called Inktense!) I chose to go with them. Then today we started putting words onto the backgrounds we did yesterday – ones that suggested themselves when we looked at the colours and effects we had produced.

After that we moved on to working on heavy calico – laying down the pencil patterns first then bringing the colour out with a textile medium instead of water, so that they are then washable! The Sophie one is the one that came from that exercise.

Finally we did an exercise using two scripts on top of each other to produce an interesting word with little shapes that could be coloured in. I thought of Christmas, so that is my last piece. Possibly a design for a Christmas card will develop there!


Thanks again Jill for sharing this wonderful workshop with us.

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