The cover for Glimmerglass begins to shimmer with colour.
A dragon and a snippet of a tree-of-life. The finished work will, like this study, be made in coloured pencils.
Clive Hicks-Jenkins' Artlog:
views from the artist's studio.
The cover for Glimmerglass begins to shimmer with colour.
A dragon and a snippet of a tree-of-life. The finished work will, like this study, be made in coloured pencils.
Clive Hicks-Jenkins' Artlog: 
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WOW! now this is fantastic! i was wondering how you would bring together the impact of the black and white one with the color…amazing! i love so much about this, the variegations and –no, everything. perfect!!
Aha, I love Polychromos 🙂 I was recently given a gift of some Caran d’Ache Luminance pencils which are very lovely, but I do worry about bloom with those as I think they’re wax based.
Bloom is a problem with wax-based pencils, especially with dark colours when they’re used quite heavily. All my original Mare’s Tale drawings were made in wax-based black Conté pencil, and the bloom was spectacular and enormously time consuming to correct. The drawings were large and presented under glass, and the blooming process unfortunately continued for quite a few years. Some of the drawings were cleaned on two or three occasions. Two of the works that went into museum collections had to be opened and repaired by conservators. I opened and cleaned away the bloom from quite a lot of the drawings in private collections. Luckily it’s not difficult to remove, manifesting as a light, powdery dust that wipes away from the surface of the drawing with a fine silk cloth. The inside of the glass has to be cleaned too, as the dust migrates to it. Wax bloom appears a lot worse than it is (it looks like white mould caused by damp) and its removal leaves the drawings pristine with no change of pigment density and no details lost. But it is a pain to deal with. I plan never again to use Conté for large, dense drawings.
Use oil-based pencils only. (My best tip.)
A very useful tip Clive, thank you! It’s very interesting to know about the cleaning process, I’d always assumed that bloom became part of the drawing so to speak, and that it couldn’t be removed, so it’s good to know that it could be if any of the drawings I’ve already used wax-based pencils for develop it. They are all rather tiny in comparison to the Mare’s Tale drawings though, it sounds like it was a painstaking task removing it from those!
Taking the dust off is not painstaking. It’s quite simple and quick. But opening my frames… especially the very big ones… that’s the painstaking bit. I find that cleaning a glass takes longer than cleaning a drawing, mainly because of having to vanquish all smears! (It’s a job I hate!)
Oh gosh yes, it drives me mad cleaning glass! I make more free hanging work now but but on the odd occasion that I framed behind glass or perspex the work would be in and out of the frame so many times, and just as I thought it looked okay I’d spot a speck of dust or lint >.<
Oh Chloe, we have ALL been there! (-;
Wow! Just the thing for this very grey blustery morning. I was already quite happy with the red blue combination you posted up yesterday, but this is excellent!
Yeah, that blue and red was just a little experiment that was far too restrained. But now the colour has been unleashed, and I feel that it captures some of the character of Marly’s book, which is wonderfully evocative and vivid. Glad to have brought a bit of brightness to the grey and blustery morning.
Thank you for my early peek at this flicker-tongued fellow! I do love all his incarnations so far…
And I have something you will like in return, an evidently fresh-out-of-the-box Thaliad review http://inverarity.livejournal.com/221406.html. You are “the renowned Welsh artist” here (we knew that.) This one succeeded in being a review that made me laugh at my own strange wanderings after the muse!
And me on the review, linking up to Midori’s as well–http://thepalaceat2.blogspot.com/2013/10/amusing-my-muse.html
The internet never fails to amaze me. Things pop up all over the place. How lovely that Thaliad continues to gather admirers a year after it was published.
Wow, mouthwatering colour! It’s been great seeing this dragon evolve from sketch, to collage, to maquette and now this drawing – and the way the segments of the maquette and the textures of the collage have found new expression with the coloured pencils is fantastic 🙂
I work so much in black and white, but then suddenly colour gushes to the surface and floods the paper. I’d thought the cover was going to be pretty colourless, but it seems not so. Tee hee!
Fantastic 😀
Hello Chloe! Good to hear from you. I’ve been admiring your recent drawings of folk-art-ish horses. Scrumptious.
Ah thank you 😀 Apologies for the lack of comments of late, I’ve been trying and failing to keep up with blogs as we’ve had a selection of computer and internet problems unfortunately >.<
Commiserations. Hope that’s all sorted out now. I know that when things go wrong in that realm, it can leave one feeling quite cut off from the world… or cut off from ‘blogworld’ at any rate.
It has been strange and quite frustrating not being able to get online, I’m hoping it’s all sorted now, fingers crossed!
I meant to ask too, if you don’t mind me being nosy and asking that is, which brand of coloured pencils do did you use for this delightful fellow? 🙂
Faber-Castell ‘Polychromos’. They’re ‘oil-based’, which I prefer because there’s no chance of the dreaded ‘bloom’ you can get with wax-based pencils.
Looking fabulous, Clive! I particularly like the way you have reduced the size of the feet/claws…….more menacing, somehow, than the larger ones in the early versions. That bit of spotty turquoise around the neck is just scrumptious. XX
Thank you, Shellie. He’s been fun to work on. And yes, I too like those dainty feet. Like a fox’s paws!
….they look perfect for creeping, tip-toeing and pouncing!
I really liked the larger clumpy feet too, so I hope he kept them, maybe under his bed, ready for rainy days, and jumping in puddles!
Ha ha! I think I see an animation in that!