Pencil vs. Colour

An over-riding theme in my recent posts and something very much on my mind, is the concept of pencil vs. colour. I love pencil; I feel most comfortable with it and I can produce images full of detail. However, it is rather grey and not best from a commercial, or professional, point of view. Paint has that colour advantage, but I feel I simply cannot get the detail I wish for. I have had success with Acrylic paint before now, but I feel that is simply too slow; images take me weeks, whereas pencil is in hours.

I had the idea of what if I can combine the two? What if I could draw the image as I wished in pencil, and then simply tint the areas with colour. Below is a lot of my experimentation.

The first thing I did was jump straight in to a full image. With the end of year looming I thought it only appropriate I revisit the theme from my summer show in my level 0 year. This was drawn, then Gouache applied, and then pencil drawn over the top again. The gouache does like to cover up the pencil due to its opaqueness.


 Next I did this is an experimental page. I played with whether to do pencil shading before and after paint had been applied. I cannot remember whether this is watercolour or gouach, but it does look like watercolour.





Out of the experimentation I did this hideous creation using gouache and pencil. Due to trying to get the colours right and various things it ended up being too thick and it is simply a mess.

 
However, I did a second portrait type picture and I feel this is an improvement. This is with Watercolour paint, rather thn gouache, as after a bit of research I found out that watercolour is inherently more transparent; indeed companies pride themselves on its transparency.

It has maintainedmore of the pencil detail that was originally drawn. There have only been a few touch ups with pencil after the paint was applied.

The problem i discovered with watercolour though is called granulation. trying to do a nice smooth sky is problematic.


My next thought was what about colour pencil? Errr...no. As you can see on the images below, the two do not gel well and I even tried to add a bit of ink to one of them to rescue it. I am disappointed colour pencil has been so disastrous.

After reading up on Van gogh I did the below. I dislike the pecnil outlines and so next time they will have to be black paint.