Gathering Strength Finished

"Gathering Strength" - Coloured Pencil on Stonehenge Paper, 55cm X 41cm by Belinda Lindhardt

Finally I am all done on this one. Its been marathon effort for more reasons than one, my largest CP piece ever and i think once i get it framed it will be stand up quite strongly in a room of other pieces (fingers crossed).

I promised i would talk bit about my technique on this one so here goes, as this piece was particularly large for me, the majority of my piece has been produced almost upright on an easel and standing up. This technique allowed me to not only alter the way i was holding the pencil regularly but gave me a bit of distance during its production to see where i was going.

I am going to break this post into two and add the second half of it tomorrow, so just for now i will cover about how i created the background.

Background
If you look at the photo below you will see that the background is actually compiled with lots of and lots of scribbles. There is also lots and lots of colours that perhaps typically you wouldn't expect to see. From a distance it pretty much looks brown but it is very rich brown, close up there are lots of oranges and blues dark purples in there which gets to the effect i was after.

I started the background initally by covering the paper with a few layers of NeocoloursII, i tried to use complementary colours where i knew there would be shadows. Then i did a very dry wash to blend the colours and cover all of the white paper (i don't like ANY to show through). Following that i started with the pencil and did a few layers with lots of scribbles as well as cross hatching for areas i wanted lots of colour into.
Next came the solvent to blend these layers together using a makeup pad in a circular motion, it takes a bit of the pencil away but makes everything smooth and allows you to add more layers after.
I then continued the process again and again with less solvent and just gentle rubbing to with the makeup pad to take off the wax bloom and blend things together, I also occasionally used a short bristled brush. Eventually as i worked on the other areas of the piece i eneded up adding a couple of coats of workable fixative over everything and then after that more and more scribbbles varying the size of the circles as well as and the closeness of the scribbles and the colours.

For those who want names, i used lots of Prismacolor Dark Umber, BlackGrape and Chocolate Browns to get the colours that i wanted.

More on my technique of how i developed the skin and the overall peice tomorrow.