Sketchy Thursday

Late last year Pantone announced that their colour for 2013 was Emerald. If you are not familiar with Pantone, in 1963, Lawrence Herbert, Pantone's founder, created an innovative system of identifying, matching and communicating colors to solve the problems associated with producing accurate color matches in the graphic arts community. His insight that the spectrum is seen and interpreted differently by each individual led to the innovation of the PANTONE MATCHING SYSTEM®, a book of standardized color in fan format.

From the Pantone website: Most often associated with brilliant, precious gemstones, the perception of Emerald is sophisticated and luxurious. Since antiquity, this luminous, magnificent hue has been the color of beauty and new life in many cultures and religions. It’s also the color of growth, renewal and prosperity – no other color conveys regeneration more than green. For centuries, many countries have chosen green to represent healing and unity.
“Green is the most abundant hue in nature – the human eye sees more green than any other color in the spectrum,” said Leatrice Eiseman, executive director of the Pantone Color Institute®. “As it has throughout history, multifaceted Emerald continues to sparkle and fascinate. Symbolically, Emerald brings a sense of clarity, renewal and rejuvenation, which is so important in today’s complex world. This powerful and universally appealing tone translates easily to both fashion and home interiors".

In response to this colour choice, I've played around with some paints to try to get my own emerald, keeping in mind that it will never be an exact match but that's not really my point here.
I'm trying to find what I can create using emerald as a stepping stone. Here's what I did:
I set up my paints, sketchbook, and palette in front of my IPad so I could refer to the Pantone website. Remember that colour memory can be fleeting.....especially for me!

Then I did lots and lots of sampling combining the colours and trying a bit of yellow, a bit of blue, a bit of white and so on until I had several brush strokes that I thought were close. Then I painted a page of leftover colours for an interesting background for some notes I wanted to make.

So that' my experience with Emerald....Why not give it a try!

Sketchy Thursday

I love the start of the new year, new beginnings, new ideas, new inspirations! I decided that I would try to post on my blog on a more regular basis and try for a few different themes to keep it interesting. So for each Thursday I plan on posting something from my sketch books.
I've maintained sketchbooks for a few years, I think the habit came from the variety of workshops I took with Gail Harker, first a series of City and Guilds classes and then some of Gail's own series. Check out her offerings at www.gailcreativestudies.com I sure can't recommend them highly enough and now she offers them online-a real bonus if you don't live in the Pacific Northwest!

Gail introduces her students to one of the best quality sketchbooks that are produced. They come in a variety of sizes and I love the 9" x 9", but also the 8" x 10" and the 6" x 6", the 6" x 9" and probably every size there is! The line of sketchbooks is called the AquaBee and they are perfect for mixed media, wet and dry applications and are a Natural White paper. I use a variety of marking products, this time I'm using felt tip markers. Just a note on markers----don't use Sharpie, they tend to leave a hard dot at the beginning and end of a line and they often smear when wet. I much prefer Faber Castell Pitt Artist Pens, Pigma markers or Pentel markers. Actually my favourite is the Pitt marker as it has India ink which is perfect for using in my Thermofax machine!

 

 

If you are nervous about putting a line on a BIG WHITE PAPER, many people find it to be helpful to mark the paper first in some way. I love to paint my pages first. You can use any colours or media you want, such as acrylic paints (great way to use up bits and pieces of colour) Procion dye washes, watercolours or gouache. Try a variety and play with colour combinations. You can't make mistakes! I used complementary colours of yellow and mauve on the pages below and added some iridescent wash as well.

 

 

 

Next I chose to use circles as a theme for one page, how many ways could I draw lines through those circles or divide them up into other shapes? Here's just a little sampling of limitless possibilities:

 

 

 

On the second page, I following the colour changes and made contour lines to emphasize the borders between the different colours, I also played around with some silver pen to highlight some areas. There's so much more that I could add to these pages, let's try some other ideas out for next week!

 

What do you like to try in your sketchbooks?