French Hen, Pretty Poulet – ruby charm colors

Sometimes a new design just appears in my mind’s eye and this time it was a hen. Perhaps I’ve been thinking about the price of eggs, what a disaster bird flu is turning out to be, or the silly little wooden chicken tchotchke perched on top of my mom’s bookshelf. Pretty Poulet can be found on Etsy and also here on my website if you want to print her out for yourself and add some color.

It took about a day to sketch and create a “clean line” version of the bird, create PDFs of the three variations, and then I got down to the task of coloring one of the designs for my listing sample. But it really wasn’t a task at all. Since I haven’t colored much over the past few months, it was enjoyable to work on this one.

I had forgotten how long it takes me to color something. I imagine it’s mostly due to the mix of media I use, how I usually add in my own details to a piece, then do a bit of burnishing of my (many) layers, and of course, add some embellishments. Why go through this long ordeal? I guess it’s because I truly enjoy the process and the feel of coloring … holding the pencils and working that color around.

I started with my Albrecht Durer watercolor pencils to lay down a base of color on the hen’s body. I have found that an underlayer of watercolor can give the surface of my paper (I printed the grey-line version on 65 lb card stock) a little more tooth. Just be sure to let the watercolor dry thoroughly before coloring over it. I used my Polychromos pencils to start adding more layers of color and also started penciling in some vine designs around the circle with Irojitens. I love using these for detail work because they are quite hard and I can get a nice sharp point on them when needed.

Below, you can see where I used an Indigo Irojiten to draw over the grey printed lines depicting the hen’s feathers and flower shapes.

I bounce around a lot when I color especially when there are repetitive areas (like drawing and coloring all the leaves on those tiny vines) or when my hands need a break from burnishing larger areas. I like the way the vines turned out, but in retrospect, I wish I hadn’t used such a bright yellow for the circle. I might tone it down a little when I work on it again,

As the background got closer to ground level, I switched to small circles and flowers, and once they were all drawn, I used my favorite pencil ever⎯the Caran d’Ache Luminance Buff Titanium⎯to soften up and slightly blend my colors with an almost aged or fabric-like finish.

In the design itself, I left the eggs white so that anyone who wanted to color them would have the choice to decorate them they way they like, or just use a solid color.

I have a long way to go and I probably should have waited until I had more of the piece colored, but I got antsy to play around with the Copic acrea paint pens and add a few embellishments (fancy for dots) on the hen.

I’ll probably pull this out again on Friday and finish it up. Looking forward to having a day off to color and draw again. In the meantime, wish me luck⎯there is another snowstorm headed my way and I am hoping the roads are not too terrible when I head to work in the wee hours tomorrow morning.

That’s all for now …