The Mice Have a Tea Party
- Kaaren Poole
- Jun 2
- 3 min read
After many more hours, I finally finished my “Mice Have a Tea Party” piece. As I continue to work with colored pencil and strive to understand what place it might have in my art, I discover both things I like and things I don’t like.
Shall we start with the pluses?
I appreciate that this is not a messy medium and setting up doesn’t require a lot of space. This means I can work pretty much anywhere I want. I’m not limited to the worktable in my studio but can sit in the living room or even outside. Also. I could even take it with me when I’m away from home, for instance, when I’m baby-sitting my granddaughters. They’re young enough to need an adult with them but old enough to be absorbed in their own activities, giving me the opportunity to read or work on a project of my own.
These same qualities—no mess and minimal space requirements—allow me to make use of shortt spans of time. If I only have five minutes, I can still do something on my piece.
I can work easily in tiny areas of my drawing because I can sharpen the pencils to very fine points.
On the other hand, for larger areas, I can achieve even color coverage. With watercolor or transparent acrylic, I’m always fighting against the abrupt edges forming around brushstrokes. These make it difficult to get even color over larger areas, especially when those areas meet fussy shapes that need to be painted around—like where the “sky” meets all the little leaflets on the fern fronds.
Since colored pencil is a transparent medium, I can get many more colors than I have pencils by layering. But I also get richer color. I’ve noticed that in other media where you can mix colors either on the palette or on the paper by layering the component colors, layering yields a more vibrant color than mixing the component colors beforehand.
Within a single hue, light and dark depend simply on the pressure put on the pencil. If I press hard, I’ll get a darker color than if I press lightly. And by gradually increasing or decreasing the pressure over an area, I can get a nice gradation of value.
As for the negatives, the first thing that comes to mind is what a slow process working with colored pencil can be. Although in general this doesn’t matter much to me, sometimes it becomes frustrating, and with frustration often comes the urge to hurry and, as a result, get messy. Never good!
And then there’s that pesky problem of value contrast. For me, good value contrast is so important in creating a successful piece, but sadly, I have a hard time getting dark values with colored pencil. Hopefully this will change for me as I get more practice. Meanwhile—and I don’t know why this is true—when I scan my finished piece, the darker values seem to come out. This is purely a surprising result of the scan. In any case, the digital version looks better than the original, which can be a plus depending on how I plan to use my piece!
So, what’s the bottom line? Since I often like to create designs with lots of tiny detail, I feel there’s definitely value in continuing to work with colored pencil. I’ll need to improve my ability to create dark values and also be more patient with my progress. But I see a lot of potential in this medium and believe the work I put into it will be well worth the effort.
PS My favorite part is the second mouse from the right watching the bee. What’s yours?
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