Wednesday, July 29, 2015

Me and My Shadow

"Measure your mind's height by the shade it casts."    Robert Browning

As you all probably know by now, I love my pastel pencils. I decided to do a little (very little) experiment to see how they would work for adding shading over my Tombow brush markers. First I tangled on an official Zentangle tile (3 1/2 inches square). I added color where I wanted it, using the markers. Now I could have shaded with the markers also, either by adding more layers of the same color, or using a darker color, but I have never had great luck with having those layers blend nicely into each other. So I tried my pastel pencils. Wherever you detect shading, that's the pencils. Unfortunately, as I blended them with my smudger (tortillon), the paper had some shredding and pilling going on. And I did not need to rub hard at all to do the blending. So I wasn't too happy with that, but I actually think it turned out pretty good, and you can't really notice the shredding. Since the Tombows are water based, I did wait a couple of hours before shading....maybe I should have waited even longer.



I decided to try another one, this time on watercolor paper to see if that would work any better. I cut a square, this one 4 inches, from 90 lb. Canson watercolor paper. I should have rounded the corners before taking my photo, but forgot...the squares I cut on my own always look classier with rounded corners. In the same manner as before, I colored my tangled design with Tombows, gave it a while to dry, and added the shading with the pencils. This time there was no pilling or shredding. Maybe I waited longer before shading? But I think it was because this paper is better meant to handle the watercolor.



Would I use my pastel pencils to shade over Tombows again? Definitely! But I will remember to do it on watercolor paper.

9 comments:

  1. Awesome experiment, thanks for sharing. I love using chalks and pastels, too because they blend so nicely.

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    1. Thanks Jodi. They do blend very nicely, that's why I love them.

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  2. These look great. For the shading, did you choose a pencil that was a couple shades darker than your marker color?? Did you try to see what would happen if you used a lighter pencil color (highlights??)

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    1. Thanks JoLene. I used either a color that was very similar or slightly darker for the shading. Even when the color was pretty much the same, the different texture of the pencils made it look shaded. I did not try highlighting, but that's a great suggestion and I will definitely try that next time.

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  3. these look great. love the colors. i may need to give this a try :)

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    1. Thanks Alice. I'd love to see what you do if you try it.

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  4. Caren, you have probably answered this somewhere, but would you please tell me the brand of pastel pencils you use. I haven't heard of them before - I like pastels but find the thick shape a little difficult to control. Really like the look you have been able to achieve; like you, I find shading with Tombows quite difficult.

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    1. I have a set of 24 General's pastel pencils. As far as I know that's as many as they make...they come as a set of 12 also. I added a few Stabilo CarbOthello pencils, but I may like the General's better. I haven't used the Stabilos enough yet to know for sure. There are also some other brands of pastel pencils out there that I haven't tried.

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    2. Thanks for the information - I am going to try some!

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