Drawing : Drawing in colour

I've just been looking at the pastel drawings of Ken Kiff and was reminded that as drawing students you don't have to avoid colour. In particular pastel is a wonderful medium to work with if you want to work in that territory that sits between drawing and painting.

Ken Kiff

Kiff's images often suggest dream journeys or adventures, with himself as protagonist. A good introduction to his work is to look through 'The Sequence', a body of work that is allegorical in nature and which deals with actual and imagined situations. He worked at the interface between perceptual experience and how stories and memory reshape and re-work our inner dreamscape. He spent time undergoing psychoanalysis and used this to help him understand how and why he could and should tap into his unconscious.

Paula Rego is another artist who uses pastel, this time building complex narratives based on memories and thoughts about her own life, these biographical images are often drawn directly from situations she constructs in the studio.

This image (above) is useful as it allows you to see how Rego's studio is set up. On the left is the construction of a 3D assemblage to work from, this as a working method is often used by artists to give veracity to their drawing. The use of large scale drawing boards and very solid easels to support them is also important, these basic things mean that she can work effectively on large sheets of paper, as it allows her to stand back from the image and see what she is doing. She also uses 'live' models, they will be posed in amongst the constructions, the grey sheet on the floor next to the stool, is probably where a model would be positioned.

As you can see from these images Rego goes to some lengths to people her studio with characters that will appear in her large drawings. She collects dolls and mannequins as well as having puppets and stuffed figures made by other artists.

Paula Rego

“In these pictures every woman's a dog woman, not downtrodden, but powerful. To be bestial is good. It's physical. Eating, snarling, all activities to do with sensation are positive. To picture a woman as a dog is utterly believable."

Paula Rego

Paula Rego was married at one time to Victor Willing, his pastel drawings are often of sparse 'theatrical' settings, or islands of lost objects, that sit somewhere between ideas for sculpture and thoughts for paintings. Objects and furniture 'arrive' in gallery like spaces, suggesting that these spaces are always incongruous and 'awkward', objects in galleries being like 'fish out of water', isolated perhaps as Willing felt himself to be, a victim of multiple sclerosis, the drugs for which often made him hallucinate; another source for his imagery.

Victor Willing

Two 19th century artists set out a template for working in pastels. Degas and Redon. They were in some ways poles apart, Degas is all eye, an observer of life's brief moments, whilst Redon is a fantasist, a man who tried to re-create his inner visions. These drawings of women below, are typical of Degas, he is interested in holding on to the moment, capturing the intimate awkwardness of people when they are not performing, his pastel marks feeling for surface and texture, as well as locking these figures into their environment by using colour reflection. The strokes of these pastel marks are clear, working as frozen gestures, although the surface beneath them is often smudged and pushed into the ground of the paper, the drawing being layered and suggesting different degrees of touch.

Degas

Redon is looking for an almost hallucinogenic intensity. Pastels come in a strong range of colours and he eliminates the black of charcoal from his palette.

Redon

Kiff you could suggest is still working through the symbolic implications of Redon's approach and Rego references Degas' ability to suggest the physicality of the body.

The ability of pastel to carry very intense colour and its natural 'soft' touch has meant that it has also been used by those artists who are romantically attracted to landscape. Loriann Signori's pastel landscapes being particularly intense examples of this approach.

Loriann Signori

Colour in drawing is of course not restricted to working in pastel, inks and watercolour washes can be used as well as coloured pencils. The line between drawing and painting is a very flexible one and can be stretched as far as you want it to be.

Hockney

Peyton

Compare these two pencil crayon portrait drawings by Elizabeth Peyton and David Hockney, Hockney uses same direction marks to sit the image in the space, but Peyton is more interested in changing direction to explore planes and volume, both mixing colours directly on the paper by laying strokes of colours alongside each other. Drawings of this sort can fade in and out of the paper support, the layering of marks adding to the way pictorial depth is created. The fading in and out can also suggest changes in focus. Change in focus when making a portrait drawing is probably at its most subtle in the drawings of Watteau. In the drawing below the chair is of least interest to him and is therefore loosely sketched in, the folds of the dress are slightly firmer, their rhythm being used to help the eyes rise towards the more interesting areas. Once we come to the face itself there is far more attention to control and detail. Look at the ear and compare the difference in how the hair is treated. The top of the head is barely there, but the small escaping curl of hair above the rise of the neck is picked out in tender detail. The rhythms of line and mark combine together with subtle changes of warm and cool applications make this a wonderful chalk portrait.

Watteau

Heiko Blankenstein uses coloured pencils, inks and ballpoint pens with which to build his complex fantasies. He also gessoes the paper so that he can get a good smooth surface to work with.

Heiko Blankenstein: coloured pencil, ball point, ink and gesso on paper 150 x 220 cm

Heiko Blankenstein

Samira Badran is an artist who makes narrative drawings about her past relationship with occupied Palestine and how the environment and culture of that region has reshaped itself under the occupation, and eventually reshaped her poetic perceptions towards it. Often drawn on large sheets of brown paper, her work partly reflects a Western graphic tradition, (she was trained in etching) and partly one of an Islamic tradition of Persian miniature painting.

Samira Badran

It could be argued that all drawings are coloured drawings, every black is different, the soft greys of graphite are very different to the dark blacks of charcoal. Sepia inks look nothing like the blue black of fountain pen ink. The gradual shift from monochrome into colour is a wonderful territory to explore, but at times we all need to let colour flood back into our work. Redon is an interesting example of an artist denying colour in his work for many years, but when he did begin to use it he used it with a visionary intensity that easily matched that of his earlier black and white images.

Redon

If you already really enjoy a rich palette of blacks, greys and whites, perhaps you ought to explore whether or not you can also work with a much wider colour palette.

See also:

Drawing in colour part two
Drawing in colour part three
Drawing in colour part four
Colour names

Colour and control

Drawing in stained glass

How to work in stained glass

Using wax crayons and oil pastels

Using chalks and coloured pencils

Elizabeth Peyton and Watteau