This program is a demonstration of creative technique.
With the help of artists John Hughes and Dan Fern, we will be showing you how to get the
best out of your Faber-Castell art and graphic materials.
The Polychromos Artist Pencils, Albrecht Dürer Watercolor Pencils, Polychromos Artist Pastels,
and the Pitt Monochrome Selection of Chalks, Charcoals and Graphite.
Quality products from a company which has been owned for eight generations by the Faber-Castell
family.
John Hughes is a self-taught artist.
In a varied career, he's been a racing car mechanic, an airline steward, a policeman.
But it was his passion for painting beautiful houses which led to him becoming a full-time
artist.
A great deal of my commissioned work is architectural based, turning plans into realizations of
how finished property will look.
In recent years I've spent a lot of time demonstrating my watercolor work at exhibitions.
When I give talks, I like to keep things to a basic level, doing lots of little pictures
to show what I mean.
I honestly feel I can get most people working with color confidently in about two hours.
Colored pencils are the standard equipment for many artists, architects, and graphic
designers.
For sharpening pencils, you can use a pencil sharpener, especially for colored pencils.
On the one side, you get a shorter point, and on the other side, you get a longer, sharper
point for more detailed artwork.
Nice thing about the pencils is that even when you're using them on very thin paper,
it was a very sharp point.
You have no fear of ripping the paper, and the color flows really evenly.
You can use them on all different sorts of surfaces.
Some photocopy paper here, and doing some cross-hatching on the side of this building.
And also using the pencil on tracing paper, mix and blend them together.
Or even using the pencils on some wood.
This is terracotta, so no matter what the surface, you're sure of getting some nice
representations of the colors.
Even using the colors on dark paper, you get smooth flowing colors, and you can mix and
blend all the colors together.
It's total ease.
So it just shows that whatever your choice of surface, whatever your choice of artwork,
you can get some results, some lovely results from the pencils.
Right, working with colored pencils is great fun and really enjoyable.
One of the problems many people have is that they are worried about the perspective, and
they very often don't get beyond the drawing stage.
There's a simple way of getting around that, and that's to trace, trace the picture.
If you want it enlarged, you just enlarge it on a photocopier.
You just put it under some tracing paper, get an HP pencil, and without moving the tracing
paper, draw over the picture.
It's up to you how much detail you put in.
One thing's for sure, that you know that the perspective of your artwork will be correct,
and then you can concentrate on using the color later on.
What you've then got is the image on this side of the tracing paper.
So if you want the image to look in the same way as your photograph, what you'll do is
draw over all those lines again on the underside of the tracing paper like this.
Carefully drawing over all those lines.
If you want to use a colored pencil to draw over those lines, you can do.
You put your tracing paper down onto your chosen piece of art paper.
And being careful not to let the tracing paper move, just draw over or scribble over those
lines.
Now what's happening is the image is coming out in the same way as the photograph.
Take the tracing paper away, the image that's come out on your art paper is the same as
the photograph.
You can see how easily the colors just flow out of the pencil, nice and softly.
Here I've used a very soft textured paper.
If you do make a mistake, as I've done here a little, I've put too much red in the roof,
you can quite simply just rub out where you've gone wrong.
You can reduce the amount of color by rubbing out, I've used a vinyl rubber, with more appropriate
color which is a little nearer the actual thing.
Go over the top, get your color right.
And then there's a few tile lines that go in here, like this, the old tiles.
And here see where the strength of the point comes in handy for making very fine detailed
lines.
For example, let's see the color of this steeple here which is a light blue.
I select a color that's near enough, this color, and a strong line down like that.
A little touch of brown perhaps in here which gives it the shadow.
Another nice little effect can be obtained by making the indentations in the paper where
you press on quite hard with the pencil.
I'm using an HB pencil here but if you use a 2H hard pencil you'll find it'll make some
very clear indentations.
And those indentations, when you rub out the pencil marks, are going to be left in the
paper.
You have to rub on quite hard.
So you need a fairly tough piece of paper that will take it.
So you're left with the indentations and then with the colored pencil you can smoothly color
over the detail that you've put in.
When I took this photograph there was quite a lot of shadow on this side of the building
but the ARSYS license does allow you to play around with the colors yourself.
And in this case here I'm putting some lighter color onto the masonry.
Now with this window, if you're not very good at drawing straight lines then use something
like a straight edge to help you.
After all the idea is to use whatever you can to help you get the desired effect.
Here I'm just doing the bars of the window, if you're confident.
Especially with old houses you don't have to be too straight with your lines anyway.
When you're doing very fine tight lines with a nicely sharpened pen it's nice to have the
confidence that the point is very resistant to breakage.
It's nice to know that the fine lines that you put in with the colored pencil will remain
in the paper.
And then you can go over the top with a darker color.
By applying one color with light strokes then applying a second color alongside and in between
the strokes you can see that we don't only create a third color but also begin to achieve
texture.
By varying the pressure I can influence light, shade and texture.
And by applying one color directly on top of another I can build up layers of color.
Each one that is applied is affected in tone by the color underneath.
If I make the layers too heavy and too dark I can soften or lighten them by applying a
lighter shade.
This really shows the covering power of these pencils.
But now let's see how we apply these techniques to the picture.
Some artists use these pencils to add detail to their airbrush work.
I specialize in watercolor and use them in conjunction with my watercolor pencils.
A very useful feature of the Faber-Castell Art and Graphic range is that the Polychromos
pencils and the Pastels and the Albert Dürer watercolor pencils come in a hundred cross
reference colors.
For example this 172 Polychromos pencil is exactly the same shade as the 172 in the watercolor
and pastel ranges.
And the color on the outside of the pencil exactly reflects the color of the pigments
inside.
This helps when you're mixing your styles.
And also if you look at the end of these pencils you'll see these stars which tell you their
degree of lightfastness.
This picture isn't going too badly.
Polychromos artist pencils are available individually in a wooden box or stand of 100 colors, in
metal boxes of 72, 36, 24 and 12 colors, and in three special sets of selected colors for
portrait, landscape and design work.
What we have here is a watercolor pencil.
They're called Albert Dürer after a famous artist.
What they are is a roll of watercolor paint which is a highly concentrated pigment held
together with a water soluble wax.
There's an amount of interest.
The amount of paint inside one pencil is equivalent to three traditional pans of watercolor paint.
The difference is that you've got a direct contact with your paper.
You've got a less messy medium and that paint is held in a familiar tool, i.e. a pencil.
For many of you who are starting off with watercolor pencils you'll probably find, as
I did, the best way to start using them is to start off dry.
So you've got the drawing with dry paint.
You don't have to worry at all about the water.
And if you can vary your pressure, if you want it dark you press on a little harder.
If you want it light you just release the pressure a little.
So you've got direct control.
If you make mistakes you can still erase them using the vinyl rubber.
It gives you that confidence as you work through the picture.
With this one tool you've got endless possibilities.
What I'll do, I'll add a little bit more detail and color to this picture whilst it's dry
and a few more colors to build up the depth of color.
Doesn't matter how many colors you're using, one top of another to get the desired tones.
Even though the watercolor pencils used dry are a medium in their own right, I'd advise
that you do your picture on a watercolor paper.
There's three main types of watercolor paper you should concern yourself with.
It depends on your picture, you can have a smooth surface, a medium surface or a rough
surface.
And to demonstrate that, this is a medium grain paper here.
And if you put the watercolor pencil on its side and slide it along you're getting maximum
paint onto the surface and you can see all the light of the paper, which are the dips
in the surface, showing through the color.
The smoother the paper the less white coming through the color.
Now to get the fullest enjoyment out of this medium, let's venture into using water.
I'll add my brush, wet brush, into a tissue and make sure it's really dry.
So there's hardly any water at all on the brush.
You can see it's almost dry.
And you can see that with an almost totally dry brush you can still dilute the pigments.
And this just shows how soft these pigments are and how easily they dilute.
So you're not altering the composition of your picture, you're just gradually softening
out the drawing lines that you've put down and turning your drawing into a form of watercolor.
The more water you use, the more like a traditional watercolor painting your picture becomes.
So I can move the paint about the picture with the water and the brush.
You don't have to start off with large pictures, you can get nice little pictures in a small
little area like this to experiment with the possibilities of the medium.
If you want some really fine detail in your artwork, whilst the pencil is dry you can
use the sharpener to get a fine point.
Or if the pencil is still wet you're better off using a knife.
The fine sharpness of the lines obtained with these basically soft paint pencils, the Albert
Jures, is absolutely fantastic.
The essential thing about watercolor pencils is that the pigments dilute completely.
Just create the wash, brush with water and just dilute all the pigments and create a
nice soft wash like that.
When you finish the wash, just use the tissue to dab out the cloud formations in the traditional
way you do with watercolor.
I'm going to show a technique putting cuts in the surface of the paper, making sure I
don't go all the way through.
Then you get your color, and as you dilute the pigments you'll find that in the slashes
the pigment is more concentrated and gives you a nice effect of grass.
Whilst on this little picture here I'll demonstrate how to make the clouds by introducing the
color pencil into the water.
The softer the paint gets it feels like squeezing the color out of the tip of the pencil.
It starts building up this texture, it's like an oil acrylic effect.
To add some nice effects to this brick section here, I've got a light pencil.
What I'm going to do is to introduce some water, quite a lot of water, so you've got
a blob there like that.
Get your chosen color and scrape off the pigments from the end of the pencils into that water.
You'll find it'll create a sort of a paste effect.
As soon as the pigments touch the water they'll completely dissolve.
You can use different colors, I can introduce green here.
You can build up all sorts of formations whether it's moss or plaster work.
Along those lines what I'll do now is put down an amount of water.
I'm using quite a thick paper.
I'm putting a lot of water down like that, getting a couple of different colors and using
the sandpaper drop the speckles of color pigment into the water and you'll see as they hit
the water they just dissolve.
It creates some marvelous effects like this.
Here I'll demonstrate the effect of using a dry pencil on a wetted surface.
The surface is quite wet.
I'll introduce a dry pencil.
I'm putting no pressure on the pencil at all and the pigments are starting to just spread
as they touch the paper.
It's a really nice autumn effect like this.
I'll just add again a dry pencil onto the wet surface and as soon as the pigments touch
the surface they just dilute and merge with each other.
You get some nice effects working wet like this.
A handy way of using the pencils is to use the paper as a palette by putting an amount
of pigment down at the side of the paper with a wet brush taking that color to another part
of the paper.
While the paper is wet and the color is wet you can use the same color to either remove
the colors to show through to the whiteness of the paper or to add detail that way.
You can see now how even this green pencil removes the green color and shows light below.
Here's an identical way of using this technique using the blue.
You've got a very, very versatile medium here as well as a very portable medium, just a
pocketful of pencils to take outdoors with you.
The amount of work you can do and the sort of creative techniques you can get is absolutely
marvelous.
Here's a picture that I've drawn on dry paper with dry pencils.
I'm going to show now the effect created by spraying water over the picture.
Holding it at this sort of angle, putting a fine film of water over the picture.
It's just like a thousand droplets of water, a thousand little paintbrush tips going over
the whole picture and the colors are starting to bleed and blend together in detail.
The more water you put on, the more they start to react and run.
Carefully with the tissue dab off the color that's running into the areas that you don't
want.
You're getting some fantastic effects, especially if you're dealing with water or river bank
scenes.
The more water you put on, the more the picture changes.
And of course you can use mixed media by using the Albrecht Dürer range with the polychromos
pencils.
Because all the colors are cross referenced.
Now here I'm drawing a tree with the polychromos pencils.
Knowing that all the colors are totally water fast.
So there putting down some blue and put a wash over and around this tree.
With some clean water.
You can see from that that the lines you put down with the polychromos pencils remain exactly
as they were.
They haven't bled at all.
Just like the polychromos pencils, the Albrecht Dürer range all have stars showing the varying
degrees of light fastness.
The main thing for you to realize is that the complete product range is highly resistant
to fading.
Use the polychromos pencils for adding that extra detail to the fine branches, highlights
and shadows of your previously painted picture.
And here I'll introduce the white at the end.
And you can see again the terrific covering power of these pencils.
As a self taught artist, the thing I enjoy the most is finding techniques, new techniques
that enhance my work all the time.
And finding new creative ways of creating pictures.
It's just great fun and having this vast range of product to choose from.
It's endless, the capabilities.
Albrecht Dürer artist's watercolor pencils are available individually in a wooden box
or stand of 100 colors, in metal boxes of 72, 36, 24 and 12 colors, and in two special
sets of selected colors for portrait and landscape work.
Dan Fern trained as both a graphic designer and illustrator.
He is now professor of illustration at the Royal College of Art in London.
The pictures I make are mostly abstract using blocks of color or texture and I collage them
together.
Drawing is a very important part of my work process and the drawings are usually done
in monochrome, either in black or sanguine.
I find this sort of work very enjoyable physically.
It's a very hands on medium for me.
I have three main areas of work, teaching, making pictures for galleries and commercial
graphics.
Posters, record sleeves, magazine covers and so on.
These pestles have a good practical square shape which is ideal for both fine work and
for covering large areas.
A beautifully dense pure pigment all the way through.
It's a lovely solid color.
Whatever the thickness of the stroke, the color is absolutely consistent so I'm in control
of any change of weight.
If I want it darker or lighter I can do that but it's all in the same tone.
The thing about pastel is that you want it to be chalky and gritty because that's the
nature of the material.
But you don't want it to shatter in your fingers and ruin the picture which would happen with
a poorer quality pastel.
It's a lot less likely to happen with these and that's particularly important when you're
working with several colors and overlaying them one on top of another.
It even works very well on black or on darker colored papers.
Look at the way it mixes there.
I work with paper.
I make paper collages and so wherever I go I need to collect paper to have a big store
of raw material to work with.
These for instance I picked up during the summer in Russia.
The color is printed onto white which means that when I cut them or tear them I get this
really beautiful white line.
This is all paper material that I've collected in Japan and India and all sorts of other
places around the world.
I just find it very inspirational, the shapes and the colors and so on, the paper quality.
And I just think it's very important that you should enjoy every stage of picture making,
absolutely every part of it.
Colored paper when you buy it in a shop is really rather bland and characterless and
flat so what I'm doing here is preparing some sheets which I'll use later on to make pictures
with.
Traditionally pastels are used for subjects like still life or life drawing or landscape
but personally I prefer to use them to work with texture and color and shape.
I'm really rubbing the pigment into this paper and although it's crumpling it and scratching
it to a certain extent that doesn't matter, that's all part of it.
Really brings it to life.
I don't want a hard sharp edge there so I'm going to use the ruler to tear along.
When you tear like this always tear into the ruler that way the edge will stay nice and
soft and floppy.
So what I'm doing now is just preparing blocks of color, carrying on preparing blocks of
color which I'll incorporate into collages later on.
So I'm just tearing them and cutting them and so on, sometimes straight edges, sometimes
torn edges.
And as you build up these little piles of this beautiful color the pictures almost start
to make themselves.
So what I'll normally do now at this point is to just take a look at the picture as it
builds up in a number of different ways.
One way is to take two L-shaped pieces of card and by just slipping them around like
this you can look at the picture in a number of different formats.
Another thing that I might do at this stage is to take an old frame like this one and
it's useful to collect frames like this when you see them in junk shops and so on.
So you really start to get an idea of how the picture is looking as a work on a wall
already if you like.
I'm using a very shiny coated card here and I'm going to make some pigment by using the
sandpaper stick here.
Get a nice little pile of this really beautiful red.
And then I'm going to use an oil, this is just an ordinary baby oil, to mix the pigment
onto the surface of the paper.
Now when you think of pastels you quite rightly think of something which is very dry and brittle,
it's a very dry brittle medium.
But by making it soluble in this way you retain the brilliance of the color but it also becomes
a very painterly medium.
Get some lovely pure yellow in here as well.
A little bit more.
And see how beautifully that mixes together with the red.
Now if you don't want it to look quite as worked as that you can actually just dab it
off a little bit and the dabbing off process in itself gives very interesting textures.
More oil.
So if you're into making landscapes this is a lovely way of doing it, you've got a lovely
broad brush stroke here if you like.
Dab it off a little bit more.
And so see how nice this texture is, it's picking up the texture from the tissue there.
By taking an artist's knife here you can score into the surface of the texture there and
make these really rather nice lines.
They can be broad or sharp depending on what you want.
One of the beauties of pastel is that you can work on almost any surface, wood or stone.
This is a slate from the roof.
I'd say it's a lovely material to work on, it's a lovely colour for one thing.
It's a very good idea to keep any materials that you find interesting personally.
This is actually the back of an old map and I use this quite a lot to work on.
You can see here that the grain of the linen is brought out very beautifully by the pastel
and that's the sort of thing which can be exploited.
It's a very nice clothy texture in here.
And of course you can use paper to take impressions of things which are laid underneath the paper
too.
It's quite nice because it's picking up an imprint, see at this line here, it's quite
nice, it's an accidental mark taken from one of the folds underneath.
But for me this is what makes it interesting working on old material that's got some sort
of quality to it.
It's been lived in a little bit.
Now even with really top quality pigment like this you have to be careful when you fix it
because it can alter colour quite radically.
Here's a piece that I fixed just very, very lightly and here's a piece that I haven't
touched at all yet and you can see they're quite different.
Polychromos artist pastels are available individually in a wooden box of 100 colours and in metal
boxes of 36, 24 and 12 colours.
I like the pick range very much and I use it a lot.
It's all of the colours that I really like, natural colours, colour of earth and minerals
and clay and stone and so on.
This sort of material is used a lot by contemporary artists but it's traditionally associated
with people like Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci.
You can get these pencils in 16 degrees of hardness.
It's the combination of graphite and clay that makes the hardness, the more graphite
there is the softer the lead.
Graphite's a very dense slippery medium, it's not like pastel which is very brittle
and powdery, this just slides along.
You can do very sharp focus drawings like cross hatching for instance using the point
or larger areas of shading like this using the side and they're very strong these pencils
because all the impurities have been removed from the lead, they're really smooth and
consistent.
This sketching pencil has a flat shaped lead so that in one direction it's broad and in
the other it's narrow.
So it's ideal for calligraphy for instance.
The hexagonal graphite crayon is for rapid shading of extended areas or rubbings.
It's wonderful this, it feels like ice slipping over the paper.
Pressed charcoal is very dense and black, there are five different grades of pressed
charcoal from hard to soft in the pit range so you can choose exactly which grade you
want and it's good for smearing with a finger.
And this is natural charcoal which is even softer and has an almost liquid feel.
Sometimes I find it quite intimidating to start to work on a piece of paper that's very
blank and very white like this so it can be a good idea to either use an old piece of
paper which has already got a few marks on it or to spend a few minutes preparing the
surface of a new sheet.
The great thing about oil, I'm using baby oil but it could be anything, is that it has
the quality of mixing with almost any drawing material and making it very soft and liquid
and for the sort of work that I do that's quite important.
Can't wait to try it out.
Go for it.
This is a lovely, fine liquid line here.
What I'm going to do now is just mask off part of the drawing and develop the tone over here.
Looks a bit messy to begin with but...
If I drop more oil we'll make this into a really beautiful wash.
There's quite a high level of accident involved in this of course.
I mean the oil does eventually dry out to a certain extent but not completely
and it leaves a very rich patch of off-white.
Don't forget what I'm doing here is just really preparing a surface.
It's just making a surface which I'll find beautiful and interesting to start working on.
Quite often spend the whole morning just preparing a series of backgrounds like this.
What I'm doing here is just putting down a very dense graphite coat onto a patch of oil
which is making it very fluid and thick.
One of the interesting things about working like this is that there are actually three or four different surfaces
all working away with each other, any one of which might prove to be the most interesting final drawing.
I've got this surface here, I've got the under surface there and I've actually got two surfaces
so potential drawings underneath that.
I'm going to use one of these harder graphite sticks to really push down into the surface of the paper.
I'm working with shapes and forms that I personally find very satisfying
that obviously mostly based on geometry but these lines could be completely free form
or they could even be figurative.
Several quite interesting things are starting to happen here.
One is that there's a nice transfer drawing happening on the back of this sheet.
See the line quality is very nice and soft.
It's picking up some nice tone in here but also interestingly the transfer is creating a lighter line here
and so I'll set them aside, leave them to dry out a little bit more and see how it goes from there.
There are all sorts of ways of doing drawings and one I use a lot is making rubbings.
This is a tray of wood type like they used to use for printing posters.
I'm using wood type here but it could be all sorts of things.
You can use anything you like, pressed flowers or fabric or corrugated card, anything with a good texture.
These pit materials are ideal for working on a larger scale.
They're chalky but they're not too brittle.
They've got exactly the right consistency.
They bite really beautifully into the paper.
And you could use the polychromos pestle for this as well.
I've done this rubbing using the sanguine from the pit range
and now I'm wiping into that with a rag soaked in white spirit.
And finally I think I'll just add these cut out letters.
I'm drawing this fine border using a wood cased sanguine chalk.
Now I'm going to make a letter in the centre of this block that I made with graphite and oil.
I'm using a stencil together with the kneadable eraser which really pulls the pigment away beautifully.
On to this drawing. I'm going to try adding some coloured pieces that I've made with the polychromos pestles.
And I'll add a white circle with the wood cased chalk here. I don't know whether this will work or not.
It'll be interesting to find out.
The high quality pit monochrome range of traditional dry art materials, chalks, charcoals, graphite and accessories, are all available individually.
Thank you for watching.