Mandala Nr1
Experimenting with another celtic knot pattern and some silver and copper colouring. Turns out the Moleskine paper doesn’t like my Faber-Castell Polychromos colour pencils much – it doesn’t have sufficient ‘tooth’ to grab the oil based colour. The copper colour in particular was hard to apply as that particular pencil is quite hard and easily damaged the paper’s surface. Ended up switching to a wax-based Karisma copper pencil, which is a bit softer, to colour the semi circles on the outer ring. Unfortunately my little Canon Lite scanner doesn’t deal with these metalic colours all that well, so the copper is showing as a brown and the silver is more of a blue-ish grey. Ah well, I’ll know for next time.
Sakura Pigma Micron fine liners, Faber-Castll PITT Artist pens, Faber-Castell Polychromos silver and copper pencils, Sanford Karisma copper pencil in 13 x 21cm Moleskine sketchbook.
Again, you have a remarkable knack for making 2D artwork look 3D!
Thanks bccmee. I’ve used a little bit of Indigo Blue underneath the silver to add some shading to the overlapping parts of the knot work & kept one side of the knot just a little lighter than the other, so it creates the illusion of a light source. This worked reasonably well on the silver but, unfortunately, my copper pencils refused to play ball on this smooth Moleskine paper so I wasn’t able to add a similar illusion of depth to the semi-circles and ribbed edge of the two outer rings of this mandala. I’m pleased with the end result though, learned a thing or two in the process & enjoyed myself so it’s all good 🙂
This is incredible work. You’ve overcome all the adversity your pencils and paper through at you and created a beautiful piece of art. Awesome!
Thanks Molossus. I’m really glad you like it. I’m still trying to find my feet – experimenting with materials, styles & subject matter – but thoroughly enjoy the results of these trials. I made myself promise never to discard a piece of work, even if it feels like everything about it is going wrong, and so my perseverance has paid off and I’ve been rewarded with some really surprising effects.