Joy of Nature in Colored Pencil

This week, we learn from nature and bring its joy to our colored pencil art.

It makes me sad how colored pencils are used only for replicating photos, and how little there is room for free expression. Nature grows freely, so why not give our art the same opportunity? I hope this post inspires you to do more intuitive coloring!

Joy of Nature: Patchwork

Think about nature sceneries as crazy quilts that have fabrics and seams! The fabrics are larger areas and the seams are lines. Patchwork has short seams, so keep your lines quite short too.

When you walk in nature, stop, and see the quilt by searching for the mesh of trees and bushes. Observe how twigs cross over each other and form nature’s patchwork.

Then when you start coloring a blank paper, focus on building the asymmetric and abstract style quilt, rather than thinking about trees and such.

I find this kind of “patchwork coloring” a lot of fun. Many call this mark-making, but I like to think about creating a patchwork instead. Marks are a more abstract term but textiles connect me to the creative world that is full of ideas.

Joy of Nature: Harmony

Despite its patchy structure, nature sceneries have harmony that our art often lacks. When you walk in nature, step back to admire the big picture and point out the areas by their dominating colors. You could think that the sky and earth both have a few quilts: patchwork areas that mostly have similar colors.

So, when your paper has all kinds of patchwork, compose larger areas by coloring over them so that they get a stronger identity in color. For example, you can have a couple of green areas, a dark area, a more neutral brown area, and one with very light colors.

So, first, you start coloring gently with a wider color scheme and then add larger unified layers over the colorful patchwork.

Joy of Nature: Spirit

I like to think that light is nature’s spirit. When you walk in nature, seek for this spirit. You miss the spirit, if you only point out the big concrete things in the scenery like bushes, trees, water, and sky. To see the spirit, you have to step into the abstract world and look for the light: odd shapes on the trunks of the trees, pattern play on the leaves, and in general, all kinds of small reflections.

For me, it’s helpful to think that the spirit has twins. One is the light and the other is the shadow. When you want more light, you will also get stronger shadows.

Light and shadows add contrast and scatter. When you add them to your piece, it becomes less harmonic, but also less boring.

Joy of Coloring Small

Recently, my colored pencil pieces have been quite small, and the paper has been divided into smaller pieces.

Coloring can be a bit like weeding: you can do it little by little.

First, the result is nothing, but it will bloom over time.

Colored pencils beat other supplies when we are creating this kind of small joyful art.

Here one A4-sized paper has two pieces of colored pencil art. So, you can take short walks or long walks to express the joy of nature in colored pencil.

Mother Nature is the best art teacher. That’s why most of my classes are about what I have learned from her.