Colored Pencil - Marbles - Work in Progress

Some time ago a fellow artist Robert Sloan
recommended that if you were interested in Colored Pencil drawings, a good book to learn from was "Masterful Color" by Arlene Steinberg. Achieving wonderful vibrant color layer by layer. I chose this marble photo to use as a reference from the WetCanvas reference library.

I've done a small aceo (2.5" x 3.5") two marble drawing before, but wanted to learn the technique better so this time I'm doing an 8" x 10" drawing. You can barely see the drawing on the paper, but you have to have a light hand or the pencil shows through on your piece. I have a heavy hand so spent some time erasing areas that I had pressed to hard.

I started with the red? marbles. In her book she shows how to start with an underpainting of complementary colours and gradually building layer upon layer. So the green marbles should be red in the end. The final painting should have lots of depth with rich colour and brilliant light.

This is my first layer. You can see that it doesn't look anything like the reference photo other than the placement of the marbles. I have found the choice of complementary colours very confusing, but am muddling through the instructions and colour wheel in the book. I have confidence (I hope) that this will turn out because I have done the two marbles (as I mentioned) and a tomato using this method. I think I had the tomato on here some time ago. It started out green and ended up a wonderfully bright red.

I'm ready to finish the 2nd and 3rd layers today.