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My friend Carrie Lewis is fully immersed in colored pencil. At the end of December, she put out a call to artists for their best colored pencil work from 2023. I realized that I had done none all year, but suddenly, I had an overwhelming desire to work in colored pencil. It might have been related to working on multiple paintings that felt too hard for me, wanting to do something easier.
After looking through my photos for something that I could easily complete in the one week remaining in 2023, I chose this photo of our little tomatoes. (Small garden, small crop, even smaller fruit).
I chose Strathmore 500 series Bristol vellum paper. (Won’t mean a thing to most of my readers, but it helps me remember in case Carrie wants to know). In looking at my extensive collection of colored pencils, I decided to keep things simple, so I chose Blackwing Colors, a set of 12. Yeppers, only 12 colors. (For a short time, they offered a set of 24, but as a never-early-adopter of anything, I missed it.)
First I drew the tomatoes. In keeping with the desire for simplicity, I didn’t draw all of the tomatoes in the photo, so it was ready for color very quickly.
To make the darker and shaded reds, I used purple and brown beneath the red. To brighten the red in some places, I used orange and pink beneath the red. I used many layers of red in both instances, keeping a very sharp point (on all the pencils).
It didn’t take long to for the red pencil to get used up. Of course, if the last 3 inches hadn’t been broken inside, I could have kept using it. I don’t remember dropping it, but I could have. New pencils are always a bit of a thrill. (Don’t tell me to get a life—this is my life and it’s a fine one!)
Better add the shadows so the ‘maters aren’t just floating. I used purple and brown, but I may try that silver pencil (or is it gray?) over the top to smooth it out. Later.
That was decent start. The daylight was running out and my feet were cold, but I did one more little thing before calling it a day: I smoothed and sharpened all the edges of the tomatoes.
What’s left: finish the background, correct the color on the stems, fill in tomato color more to get rid of the white specks, sign, and scan.