UKCPS - Steps - Swanwick

"Frosty Morn" by Ronald Swanwick Using coloured pencil, ink, graphite, watercolour and gouache in a mixed media approach to a winter landscape

I find it hard to be a purist and so I continue to experiment with mixing media to get the finish I want. In this picture I started with a watercolour background on watercolour paper and then used a mixture of wax and watercolour pencils to get a strong textural difference in the trees and the fence. I sometimes work up an interesting sky in watercolour and then draw in the landscape with pencils. I use a wide variety of brands of pencil because I find that each brand has a different density of pigment and softness. This gives me more flexibility in blending. For this demonstration I have chosen a grey mount board as the support. For the purposes of the article the picture is cropped so as not to show the border all round but you will see from the remaining bit on the right that I experiment in this space if I am not quite sure about a particular blend or effect.
		My strategy is to plan the whole picture out in white pencil. Then I work from the back to the front, drawing each part in white first, then introducing the colours into the background trees. The next step is to use an HB graphite pencil to put in shadows and sharpen texture.
Once I am satisfied with the background I can put in anything that I want to be on top of the background. I start with white and again build up the colours on top. Notice how bright the colours are on the tree and grass. It is always advisable to make the colours very bright as it is easy to mute them down with the graphite pencil, but it is very difficult to brighten them up after you have applied the graphite, it just goes dull and muddy if you try.
To reach this third stage I have built up layer on layer of colour and then refined the textures with a graphite pencil. You could say I put in the shadow spaces in with the graphite. To get a very soft finish I will often put on white first, then a colour, then more white then perhaps another colour followed by more white and so on. Incidentally I never use black crayon I prefer to blend dark blue and dark brown to get a dark space. Now the final touch, which is to use a black pen, and in this particular picture, white gouache. I used two sizes of fibre pen and also a Chinese brush pen. I restricted the pens and the paint to the foreground trees and grass so as to emphasize their sharpness, which increases the sense of depth in the work.