So, coloured pencils. I like using coloured pencils on paper when it is just too cold in the studio or too late at night and I just want to relax and play with colours. A drawing like the one above takes about six or seven days to complete. It is on A3 paper which is about 42 x 29 cm. I posted the picture on Instagram and that is why it is only a partial of the whole drawing and is square instead of rectangular.
Coloured pencils are very different from painting. The first enormous difference is in the speed of work. Paint is as fast as you want or as slow as you want and, if using oils, can involve putting the painting aside so colours can harden before adding to them. Coloured pencil is slow no matter how I go about it. It is unhurried. Sometimes I decide on a palette of colours and use it as a challenge to make them fit together in some way, and sometimes I start with one colour - the new one that I started after the one above, for instance, is all burnt umber at the moment - and then have to decide where I want to go from there.
If I start with a palette, then I seem to develop some sort of impatience in getting them all represented on the drawing as soon as possible, which is not always a good idea. This approach is all about colour, for me. I chose a palette and I have to play with that selection. If I start with one colour, then the focus is on shape or depth - it is a monochrome picture for the first phase which can last several days. Then comes the difficulty of deciding which colour or colours to add to the picture. The drawing could actually stay monochrome and sometimes, I think it should have, after I added colours and ruined the whole thing: wrong colour, wrong intensity, wrong combinations, loss of depth or effect, etc.
When I paint, I have to have music playing and it has to be the 'right' music. Some paintings are the result of Massive Attack or Leonard Cohen or Gilbert and Sullivan or Verdi or Big Bill Broonzy or Ravi Shankar, and some paintings are the result of mixed lists of many different musics or different artists within a genre. Therefore, the first hurdle when painting, is deciding what music will be required. Also, it is rare that I start and finish a painting in one sitting. Typically, I work on up to four or five paintings on a good day. As not all of my paintings were started on the same day or with the same music or at the same time, my choice of which painting to work on next might depend on the music that is playing at that moment. The music choice is the result of a particular mindset or mood at the time of the choice, but the painting is affected by how the music changes or influences the mindset or mood. Working on the 'wrong' painting or changing the music for a work-in-process painting is difficult, so I tend to automatically choose paintings to work on that fit the music that is currently playing and if there are none, I'll start a new painting.
When I use coloured pencils, it is completely different. I don't usually put music on - I have done so on occasion, but the sound from the computer is not as good as the one from the loudspeakers in the studio and so it can be bothersome, lacking, irritating. Instead, I put on Youtube videos or films that fill in the silence. I can watch and re-watch whatever I had playing while drawing because my mind drifts from sound to visuals to colour to shape and wherever else it travels. If there is no sound to fill in the silence, my mind goes into overdrive and I end up writing or tidying up wherever I am.
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