Colored Pencil vacation

For many, adding color to drawings is so obvious and so habitual. But since my preference is to keep things black and white and machine-like, adding color is almost like a vacation.


Colored drawing

Design Sensibility
I'm noticing that two of my design moods could be considered opposites of each other. One mood shows up in extremely simplified, geometric, almost cold sculptures and drawings. Another design mood shows up in extremely elaborate abstract patterns.


geometric drawings as sketches for sculpture



exercise exploring how similar patterns organize the space



some organic forms



a few common styles I use


In each of the examples of drawings above that show abstracted or ornamented ideas, it will be obvious that I haven't colored any of them. Moreover, I never had any inclination to color them. When I do get into the mood for color, either I go monochromatic, limited palette, or lushly colored things.


if you're going to go monochromatic, make an impact!



nearly monochromatic, with two colors



several related colors not by design, but simply by intermixing


Color as content, not surface
As much as I like the works presented here, I do think I should do more to integrate color as a sensibility, rather than whatever has been going on. What if I wanted color in my work not as a vacation, but as something more regular? I don't have the answer to this distinction, but perhaps the colored drawing above is a step in the right direction. Maybe I photocopy the blank, black and white drawing several times and try different color combinations. I usually do everything by hand, and I think that's been making me hesitant to develop a color sense. In fact, if anything is going to push me to integrate digital techniques into my workflow, it will be the desire to explore color in a quicker, less motor-skill intensive way.

I know I enjoyed making watercolors on drawings I'd photocopied onto heavy paper.


watercolor on heavy cardstock


Even if I don't go into full-color, maybe the black and white lines can have multiple line weights. That said, I'm incredibly fond of the drawings I make with a single line weight. (Now 1000+!) I believe that using a single line weight captures the logic of the thing in the way an engineer might lay out a part. Or the way a fugue might appear in manuscript form without instrumentation. As uninflected as those forms are, I must admit thoroughly enjoyed using multiple line weights. Did I do more than a dozen or so? No.


Drawing with multiple line weights.
Why only make less than a dozen? Non lo so.


Put another way:
Color as intrinsic, not extrinsic
The next step for the drawings might be to use a few more ink colors than plain black. In this way the lines would already be colored.

The next step for the ceramic sculptures might be to make the technological leap to build out of clay something that was designed first as paper. I adore this paper thing: the angles and the colors both. Especially the colored tape. If this design is for ceramics, the clay itself could be colored maroon (or similar) and blue paint added afterwards. Then the separate, and seemingly arbitrary, decorating gesture is eliminated. A sculpture does not start as a white thing that is painted maroon, but is built from clay that already maroon-colored. This intrinsic color feature instead of applied color gesture strongly appeals to me.


Cardstock and blue painter's tape. Did I say that I adore this thing?


I can easily imagine some bland-looking structures that emerged from metal templates to be colored in the maroon-paper-blue-tape color scheme above.


Metal flexible thing (on right) is both cutting template and posable sculpture for me to copy as "portrait" in clay (on left)


Toward a less clinical approach
I plan to make more colored drawings and sculptures. Even I admit they're a little more interesting than the versions of things that are only black and white or unadorned. Using color emotionally is a much more complicated undertaking, which is probably why I have to almost force myself to remember that color moves audiences so much more than plain design otherwise might.