Colored Pencil Art: The Gears of Progress
2015
I call it, “The Gears of Progress.” It is done in the style of pulp sci-fi, one of my favorites. It measures 12x15 inches and is made on heavy-weight Canson Bristol board. Dramatic coloring can be had owing to Bristol board’s heavy grain. Like most of my colored work, it is done in the “painting” technique, meaning the pigment is applied in such a way as to prevent any portion of the paper from showing through. Prismacolor Premiere pencils are used. Soon I will post a Powerpoint slideshow showing about 40 steps on the way to completing the finished product.
Colored Pencil Art: The Gears of Progress
Above is one of the first drafts of the drawing. As usual I used copy machine paper. I like that it is loose leaf and readily available. Also, I will sometimes use a lightboard to test ideas and copy paper has a good degree of transparency. At this stage I remain flexible. Some ideas (such as showing the scientist in profile) were scrapped while other were still being explored. The skyscrapers, for example, are only rectangular cubes at this stage, and the woman is releasing a bird rather than summoning a flame from her hand.
At left is a palette I created so that the finished product has consistent colorization as the draft. With so many blends and color combinations, it is easy to forget what colors were mixed to obtain the desired effect, so I will refer to this key. Therefore, it contains (almost) every single color used. When it matters, I placed the color in the order that it was applied.
Notice how the woman at left is “talking with her hands.” The wringing of her hands reinforces the facial expression of worry.
Above are the steps along the way to making the watch-like gears.
Colored Pencil Art
A cyborg superhero forged during the early atomic age. The Three Angels of Progress plodding along the desert of a forgotten planet, the archangel summoning a flame from her empty hand.
I envision this piece as a sci-fi book cover. Collages are particularly well-suited for book jackets, movie posters, video game boxes etc because each of the principle characters and settings can be shown at once. The key is to allow each of these elements to flow from one to another seamlessly without any of the juxtapositions seeming forced or otherwise contrived. Also, because each setting can function as a work of art in its own right, the source of light need not be the same for every component. For example, the light shines from the left of the scientist, but from the right of the women.
