Secretly Psychadelic

I have another confession. Apart from liking anime, which prompted the Japanese to call me an otaku (more on amazing Japan later), I have another nerdy hobby. And this one is the most seriously loser-ish I have ever had. Not that this is a big surprise from a girl who was in the piano ensemble and the gardening club (I know you're laughing, but I cannot hear you).

Anyroad. I have fallen in love with colour pencilling - like painting, but not.

Thanks to Jay, who set me off on colouring bible stories for her church kids, I discovered that I actually missed and like using colour pencils and, even more surprising, there's a whole community of people out there who do it too. The most interesting and amazing kind of colour pencilling is the photorealistic school, which literally copies photos which you can't tell apart from drawings, vis:

(Cherry Jar by Johanes Wessmark, poached from Empty Easel)

I kid you not, the whole thing is drawn using humble pencil lead.

Not to make it seem more geeky than I already am, but when I found the community of colour pencil artists, one of them noted that it is a lonely, painstaking art which seems far less cool than painting or dashing off pretty watercolours and I quickly realised he was not kidding.

Unlike painting and watercolouring or even sketching, colour pencils take a LOT of time. Layering and colouring all the little bits and spaces takes forever and it's a very precise art. Because the size of the strokes is dictated by the pencil nib, you can only make tiny drawings at a time and one takes weeks and weeks of just... sitting there alone.

Also, unlike painting in which you can constantly layer colours on top of each other and blend them to satisfaction or create texture with lumps of paint, colour pencilling can only take a limited amount of colour, the reason being that paper has teeth.

Once the teeth have been saturated with layers of shading and cannot grip any more, you can't layer any more over it and the colour just slides right off. So it requires a whole bunch of advance planning and careful judgement which I have screwed up time and time again.

Mostly, it requires a whole lot of patience which I found that I happen to have in spades.
It's a slow, plodding hobby, but it's utterly relaxing and by dint of the fact that I have messed up countless drawings, I feel all the more happy and excited when one is going well. It's also been a study in planning and thinking about what I'm going to do before I do it. While I'm talking about it as if I'm some great expert, I assure you that my drawings are cartoony and will never touch photorealism, but they make me happy! And people have asked for them!

At the risk of seeming like a complete dork, with confidence fuelled by the awesome present of a brand new set of 75-colour Derwents (75, folks!! That's more than enough to make me pee with excitement), I present my fridge-pastable artwork!!

I'm a shy lass, but be free with your criticism please.

(Forgive the trashy photography and dark, washed-out looking colour, I wish you could see them in all their sharpness and vividness but I'm just not that handy with the digital camera and the flash kept startling me at all the wrong times)

The first one I ever did, which is Eve having just eaten the apple in the Garden of Eden. I like the cheeky look on her face, because I was trying to imply that she knew just what she was doing. Again, the colours are much brighter in real life.

A Loch Ness monster of some kind - doing the sea was bloody awful and I'm not happy with it, but live and learn, eh.

And here's the one I'm working on right now, from the new Derwents, which is a postcard-sized Octopus' Garden from the Beatles song. It's going well and again, the colours are much more rich and vivid than the Stabilo farm.