My Process -Eagle
I’ve decided that it might be fun to walk y’all through a process post of a few of my pieces. I enjoy reading other artists process posts, plus I’m in the need for a few good ideas myself.
This piece all starts with a story. A few months back (last year actually, if I’m remembering right) I placed an order at Jerry’s Artarama. In said order I had bought some white Crescent board, but when I got my order they had accidentally shipped all black Crescent board instead. (I contacted them, they fixed the issue, yadayadayada and said I could keep the black board for my troubles.)
So now I have FOUR packs (of three in each pack) of black Crescent board and no idea how to use it, but I’ve been diving more into the colored pencil world and wondered how it would do on the black board. If you are wondering what board I am talking about, here it is:
I searched through my stash of reference photos and found this gem that I’ve been wanting to do for a while:
I had this reference picture for a while but I had been saving it, not wanting to draw it in black and white.
The main struggle was just getting the transparent yellows and oranges to appear opaque enough to cover the black of the board. I did blend a few of the spots out with Zest-It but overall I did not use any OMS.
I believe it was at this point that I ordered the Derwent Chinese White Drawing pencil in hopes that it would come to my rescue. I was layering SO MANY blues, browns and greys into the white that I couldn’t get my actual white to show up very well on top. Thankfully, the DCW did exactly what I was hoping it would do.
Overall I put probably around 15 hours into this piece. Ultimately the part that bothers me the most is how the texture of the board constantly shows through, regardless of how many (many, many, many) layers I put down. I switched back and forth between my Polychromos, Luminence and Derwent Drawing so I don’t think it was a pencil issue.
On the brighter side, whenever I got smudges on the part of the board that I wanted to keep black, I just ran my black polychromos over them and *Presto*, they vanished.
I am satisfied with how this piece turned out. I learned a lot through the process. I believe I could have achieved a more photorealistic look if I would have used white board and just filled the background black like I normally do. To me, the texture of the board is what throws the whole piece off.
That being said, he is now happily hanging on my wall. Now, what should I do with all of the black Crescent board I have left?! *nervous laughing*
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