New Colored Pencil Project - In Dreams

I had the idea of doing flying or dreaming scenes for a while now. Looking through Deviant Art stock photos I came across the perfect reference for what I had in mind. Dazzle-stock at Deviant Art has a wonderful collection of images of graceful and dynamic poses. I based my figure drawing on the image called I Want to Fly (which you can see here).

I made a few changes to get it looking like she is actually flying and probably will continue tweaking as I go.

I decided to reuse a Canson C' a Grain Art Board I had experimented with before. The experiment failed, by the way. I took it to a pastel workshop hoping I could try my pastels on it, but soon found out, it definitely does not like pastels. Anything more than one layer of pastel fell right off. I was ready to toss the board in the trash when it occurred to me that I might be able to remove the remaining pastel. I took a stiff brush to the board and managed to remove most of it. Then using the fabulous General's Tri-Tip eraser, I got a lot more of the embedded stuff off. I've used this eraser before to remove pastel from sanded boards and was amazed at how well it worked. This was a tip from Lisa Ober in a pastel workshop I took last October.

Still after all my erasing, the board was stained, but I figured it could be an interesting under painting!

This is what I had after transferring the drawing and doing a little coloring around the edges of the figure to see if I would be able to cover up the ghostly image of Marty's smiling face in the background. It seemed doable.

It's been slow going building up the colored pencil to a good dark for the background. I decided to use solvent to make the job easier. Here it is so far, the result of alternating between laying colored pencil and brushing with solvent.

Here is a closer look.

I changed the feet a little from the original drawing, shortened and slimmed them down. I rotated the heel on the bottom foot to make it look a little more natural, hopefully. Now I see that the arms look too long so will probably shorten them too.

I like this C' a Grain Art Board very much for colored pencils. It has a resilient surface which can take many layers of pencil and erases very well. The surface is somewhat textured, something like stonehenge or the Bristol 500 vellum papers. As for using a solvent, the surface didn't seem to roughen or be any worse for wear after using Turpenoid on it.

Lesson learned: The C' a Grain Art Board is a no-no for pastels, lovely for colored pencils.