Psychedelic begonia

[eller]

A while ago I wrote a bit about cheap art supplies.This can be considered as a continuation: what you can and can not do with materials that are, technically, not suitable for "art" in a professional context.

In this case, I've been using a quite suspicious item I received over swap-bot. (Yeah, so I like random mail, sue me!) You know these multicolor pencils for kids, with rainbow-y lead? That's what some nice person sent me. Complete with eight colors in the lead and kawaii print all over - clearly a toy rather than artist material. Right?





Right. So I decided to draw no not obsessed at all no no no this begonia to show off my technique see if it's possible to actually get acceptable results with that kind of material.

The first thing I noticed was that it's really impossible to get a "clean" color without other colors mixing in. Of course, this is as much of a blessing as a curse: when trying to portray interesting light situations, "object reflections" in other colors are frequent, and this is a simple way to convey that kind of effect. Also, it looks kind of psychedelic. I actually quite like the look of the whole thing.

The definite downside is lightfastness: obviously, children's toys don't come with lightfastness ratings and I'll have to assume the colors will fade. I did treat this ATC with UV protection varnish in the and, but that's probably just delaying the inevitable.

Still, I decided this pencil is a lot more fun than I had expected! If they ever make a thing like this with proper pigment information, I'll totally buy it even if I'm the only one.

Comments

[jainas]

Interesting experiment! The begonia looks really cool.


You talk about lightfastness quite bit, but I never realy paid attention to it. How is it usualy mentionned on art suplies? (I'll have to dig ump my supplies still with their boxes an see what they say... ^^)

[eller]

Thank you! :)

I think I'll answer that question in a separate entry, because it might become quite the wall of text...

[eller]

I typed something: https://eller.dreamwidth.org/8800.html hope it helps!

[yhlee]

This is really cool! Thanks for the example--if you ever find an artist-quality version of such a pencil, I'd sure love to hear about it. ^_^

[eller]

I doubt we'll ever see anything like that - this kind of pencil is difficult (okay, near-impossible) to handle; that begonia was more work than it looks! Not particularly practical, really just a toy.