Summer Drawing Project–lesson 6

This was one of my favourite childhood activities and it was probably one of yours too – colouring in!

You might have noticed that some of the ring drawings you did in the previous lesson made lots of enclosed shapes as well as some interesting background shapes.

These are just waiting for you to add colour to. You can of course do more drawings of rings if you don’t wish to work into your previous series of drawings.

As before, use a range of different media and work out different ways of colouring in those spaces. There are so many different ways of adding colour to a space. Try some of these and invent others yourself.

You can pop back to last weeks drawings to see how this new development stage has transformed them.

1 Add different colours to individual spaces, covering each space with solid colour. I started by placing my colours indiscriminately, choosing colours and spaces randomly. But then saw that it might be fun to put colours into spaces that made up complete rings. What other ‘shapes’ can you discover by selecting where you colour and where you don’t!

 

2 Add different colours as before but this time use a scribbling effect to create the effect of radiating lines to acknowledge some of the circles.

 

3  Add colour to the negative spaces between the ring shapes. This example below shows a scribble effect has been made using colours that reflect the colours of the rings themselves.

A second layer of coloured scribbles were added in the second image of this.

 

4  Add colour to the spaces in a graded way, starting by adding solid colour near the ring and working your crayon so that the colour becomes lighter and lighter – by pressing more lightly with your drawing marker. If using a crayon or pencil you will need to use less pressure and if using something like a felt pen or biro you will need to space out your marks so that some of the white page shows through. This sketchbook page below shows how different media can be used to do this inside ring shapes. It’s fun to see how these flat rings start to look like rounded shapes such as door knobs, balls, or even birds-eye views of cups and saucers perhaps.

 

Graded colouring can also be used in the spaces between shapes. The blue biro has been used to colour in the background spaces in the page below and be said to give the effect of making the rings look as if they are raised up as the background looks as if it’s sinking. The biro has also been used here to outline some of the white spaces inside the rings which I think makes the rings look like the classic rose design of the 1920’s. It’s surprising what you can discover in these exercises.

 

Different stages of graded colouring method using oil pastels – looking like bubbles or a quilted surface perhaps?

Remember the reverse side of a page in last weeks lesson where some wet colour showed through to the next page? Here the three rings have been ‘completed’ with oil pastels to suggest rounded ring shapes – perhaps odd-coloured doughnuts or life belts?

Maybe you have some ellipse shaped rings you can add colour to. Try this idea -

Put graded colour inside each ellipse – placing the stronger colour on the same side of each ellipse. (See the black ellipses.)

Add another elliptical ring outside each one and make the colour stronger on the opposite side of each ellipse. (See the blue ellipses.)

Perhaps you can start to see a row of holes – perhaps port holes in the curved side of a ship or a row of eyelets in a shoe?

 

If you would like to try adding colour using wet media, discover which of your drawing media responds to water. The rings on the page below, left, were drawn onto a page that had been wet with a clean paint brush. The rings were made with different felt pens, crayons and inks (plus fine paint brush). It was exciting to see how far the colour spreads and how some of the marks dried with interesting multi-coloured ‘tide marks’. The spaces in the rings in the page below, right, were made by individually wetting each space and then gently adding the colour and watching it seep into the wet shape. I think these coloured rings look like eye balls!

  

I hope you’ll have fun with your ‘colouring in’ and be inspired with the different things I’m sure you’ll discover.