What Medium to Use?
- Kaaren Poole
- Apr 7
- 3 min read
Here are my finished three bunnies, but it took a while to get here!
When I don’t have energy for anything else, it seems that I can find the energy to draw. As a result, I have a lot of drawings that aren’t yet finished pieces. With this one, I knew I wanted color, but I wasn’t sure what medium to use.
Sometimes, when I haven’t gone really far with the drawing—that is, not going darker than an H pencil—I’m tempted to try watercolor, as it is unlikely that the watercolor will smear that hardenss of pencil. And that was what I was thinking with this one. But I couldn’t quite face it. My confidence level with watercolor is low on a good day! But any kind of brush work with all those little leaves would be challenging. So, I started with colored pencil. And the result, as you can see, was very pale.
At that point, I was kind of stuck. I sprayed the drawing with a layer of fixative because it didn’t feel like I was getting very far with colored pencil over colored pencil. I thought maybe more colored pencil would work better over the tooth of the fixative.
But then I thought I’d just switch to transparent acrylic washes. The various greens in the leaves would still show, and I thought I’d do better with the rabbits. Plus, I've worked with that medium a lot so I was comfortable with that approach.
I started with the rabbits. A little Raw Sienna, followed by Burnt Umber then Raw Umber finished the brown fur. Inside the ears, I used Quinacridone Burnt Sienna, but very lightly. Finally, I added Black to the eyes and shaded the white fur with Manganese Blue. Then I added a little sepia penwork. So far, so good.
For the leaves, I thought I’d mix several different greens and paint the leaves one by one with those different shades. But that seemed really tedious, plus I’d used different greens with the colored pencil. Maybe a wash of Sap Green over all the leaves would both darken them and preserve the differences between them, especially as Sap Green can be pretty transparent. Much to my delight, that worked! Then I added penwork, this time with Hunter Green.
Next, I turned my attention to the lines of the spirals. I have a green micron pen, but decided on a liner brush and Sap Green instead. It was difficult. I was tense, so the lines didn’t flow smoothly. They were OK, but a little rough. So I decided to draw over them with a green Neocolor II crayon.
These are water-soluble. Although they don’t lay down really smoothly when dry (like a crayon), when you go over them with water (or something water-based like gel medium), the color activates and smooths out. The effect was a sort of green “halo” on either side of all the lines. I liked the effect, and it took some attention away from the uneven liner brush work.
I added some more color with the Neocolor II crayons in the curly ends of the spirals and around the white flowers. When I painted the flowers with white acrylic—and added the colored centers—the Neocolor helped the flowers stand out against the background.
All in all, I’m happy with this piece. My only problem was with my scanner, trying to get the full image in the scan.
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