Bull.
I've returned to colored pencils with a fury. Finding new favorite tools in Prismacolor's Col-Erase. These pencils are awesome. Not because you can erase them, though that is nice, but because they blend more like graphite pencils. Traditional colored pencils are waxy and you really have to build up the layers of color, like you would a crayon... becasue that's all they really are... fine pointed harder crayons.
Col-Erase pencils blend and shade so nicely. I now work with a range of 3 similar colors and a black for lining. I sacrifice colored fingerprints all over my background for gentle and subtle gradations that give my pieces a depth and vibrancy that graphite can not.
I always felt very comfortable with monochromatic mediums like india ink and even sepia oil pastels. In fact, I would watch as one of the older non-trad students at Longview Community college would craft gorgeous figure studies with that reddish pasty stuff. To this day, I have little of the skill she used so effortlessly. These new pencils help though, and I find that i am generally happy with the outcomes.
My advise to school age illustrators... don't abandon what you are comfortable with... But also, don't deny yourself new experiences in mediums... I know my instructors just wanted me to explore.
Take a look. I will load more of the originals later.
This is the Vellum I've been working on.
The King of Clubs.
After I get them to this level... often using several vellums to allow for alternate poses or errors, I scan the images and convert to gray scale. these will eventually exist on cards and be made to look like sketches on natural parchment.
