Skillshare: Pencil Colours

Meet inside The Shops at Waterloo Town Square—we will congregate in the seating area next to the Valu-Mart with the trees sticking out in the middle of the benches at 7pm for 15 minutes, and then head over to my nearby apartment’s amenity room. If you’ve been around a few times, feel free to meet up at my apartment front door for 7:30 instead. (There is free city parking at Bridgeport and Regina, 22 Bridgeport Rd E.)

Activity

This week we’ll be learning how to colour things with pencil colours, courtesy of a regular :)

Prep

Pick a reference image before the meetup.

Everyone can pick what they want to colour. Ideally, drawing the thing you are going to colour is done before the meetup on appropriate paper, or within the first ~20 mins. We’ll be colouring things in a relatively realistic style, so you need to pick a photo of the thing you want to colour beforehand. Possible subjects range from e.g. a banana to a person’s face. Pencil colours are kind of ideal for portraits, so it will be fun if you choose to draw a person, but this is harder to colour than a banana (you will also definitely not finish colouring a portrait during the meetup, but this is not necessarily a negative). Post pictures of the things you want to colour in the meetups channel, and if you pick something harder to draw, I can trace it for you, provided you do this by Wednesday afternoon (you can also draw/​trace it yourself if you’re confident in doing this and you have the right kind of paper for pencil colours).

Guidelines for picking subjects:

  • Good resolution in the photo and good lighting, which means the lighting should not be flat and there should be decent contrast between light and dark parts.

  • Don’t pick scenery: pencil colour is not ideal for colouring the sky etc.

  • Don’t pick complicated machinery or something like that: this will be a pain to draw and not particularly interesting to colour.

  • Don’t pick something that is mostly white, because it will be hard to make it stand out on a white page.

  • If you pick a person, for the sake of your sanity, don’t pick someone with curly hair or skin features like lots of wrinkles or freckles.

  • Unless you’re very confident in your skills, don’t pick transparent or translucent objects, like some insect wings, or glass.

  • I reserve the right to veto people’s choices if they don’t meet these guidelines or other guidelines that I have not thought of yet.

After picking your subject image, you can optionally open it in an app with a colour picker tool (such as Paint or Kolourpaint), clicking on different parts of the image and noting what colours they have. You will also need to have access to the reference image on the day of, on your phone or wherever.

Other things to bring (if you have them)

Supplies will be provided at the meetup, but it doesn’t hurt to have extras.

  • (Wax-based) pencil colours, obviously

  • Tablets, for tracing on the day of

  • Erasers

  • Pencil sharpeners

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