Color Pencils lesson series: Apple (Step by steps)

I really took a long time while doing it, I think it took more than 4 months to get finished. To be honest I had almost given up on it many times and in the end I was happy to see it finished and finally paint fixative for closing.

I did one thing here, took many photographs of the picture from my phone camera hoping to cover it in a blog post.

To get started i just added the images. with time I will add more text ...

Apple (finished version)

Basic Outlines with pencil on toned paper

Adding details

Adding dark tones with charcoal with few color pencil details

Readjusting proportions and adding flesh outlines

(Still) More details and colors

Final finished version

Reference Photograph

Inspiration: Seurat

Georges Seurat (French, 1859–1891) created mysterious and luminous works on paper that played a crucial role in his brief but influential career. Once described as "the most beautiful painter's drawings in existence," these works captured Paris and its environs, urban dwellers, and cafe singers and other popular performers of the day.

"A sudden stupid sickness carried him off in a few hours when he was about to triumph: I curse providence and death."

Art critic Jules Christophe, writing after the death of Seurat in La Plume, September 1, 1891

More references to explore

• http://www.artchive.com/artchive/S/seurat.html
• http://www.cdc.gov/ncidod/EID/vol11no01/04-0269.htm
• http://www.artic.edu/aic/exhibitions/seurat/seurat_overview.html
• http://library.thinkquest.org/J0110603/Seurat.html
• The science of Seurat
• 
  

Beachboy with Hat

A quick copying from masters lesson.

Charcoal on white paper. Scanned and converted to monochrome using Picnic editor.

Dadaji

Color pencils on paper

Post scanning processing for artwork

In the good old analog days life was really uncomplicated. You think about what you need to draw, gather material (or whatever is available) and draw. Work on it till you are satisfied with the outcome and then take a chai/smoke break. If you really like it, you frame it. That's it.

All this changes when you scan it and enter digital world. For starters the scanned images hardly comes close to what it should look. Main pain points are:

1. Image brightness /contrast
   
2. Color tones.
3. Image sharpness.
4. Image size (large size convey more details but is difficult to store.)

In other words we need to figure out

• Which image editing features to use
  
• How much of these features to apply for best effect
  

To illustrate I'll use a recently scanned drawing Keef. It was done with charcoal, graphite and a bit of chalk on blue toned heavy pastel paper (I think).

The original raw master looks like:


Using Auto enhancement


Auto levels tool


Manually adjusted levels


Adjusted using curves tool


So far so good. Now the tough part, which ones look good and which ones don't?

Thats where you are needed, please share your take on which actions actually enhance the piucture