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pencil to deepen the shadow-shapes. Grasp with your mind that the middle tones are supplied by the value of the colored paper. Try to see the color of the paper as value. This is difficult. Imagine for a moment that the world has turned to shades of gray, as though twilight has fallen, draining color from your paper but leaving the value in the form of a gray. Where on a value scale would that gray be, relative to white and black? Then, relative to that value, where is the darkest dark in Degas’s drawing? Where is the lightest light? Your task is to match these values in your drawing.

When you have finished: Pin your drawing to a wall, stand back, and enjoy your first small step into color. Some student drawings using colored pencil are shown in the color section. As you see, very few colors were used in each of the drawings. Student Thu Ha Huyung used the largest number of colors (four plus black and white) in her Girl in a Flowered Hat (Figure 11-22). The colors she used were canary yellow and ultramarine blue (near complements), magenta and dark green (near complements), and black and white (opposites).

“To me, painting—all painting—is not so much the intelligent use of color as the intelligent use of value. If the values are right the color cannot help but be right.”

—Joe Singer

How to Paint in Pastels, 1976

Based on his teaching at Yale University, the great colorist Josef Albers wrote that there are no rules of color harmony, only rules of relationships of quantity of colors:

“Independent of harmony rules, any color ‘goes’ or ‘works’ with any other color, presupposing that their quantities are appropriate.”

—Josef Albers

The Interaction of Color,

1962

Another view on harmony in color:

“After learning to see color as value, the next step is learning to see color as color.”

—Professor Don Dame

California State

University, Long Beach

A Heightened Self-Portrait

A wonderful example for this exercise is found in Figure 11-7, the self-portrait by the German artist Käthe Kollwitz.

Exercise:

1. Set up lights and a mirror. Arrange your drawing materials so that you can both draw and observe yourself.

2. Take the pose and spend a few moments studying the logic of the lights and shadows created by your lighting setup. Where is the lightest light? The darkest dark? Where are the cast shadows and the crest shadows? Where are the highlights and the reflected lights?

3. Lightly sketch your self-portrait on colored paper, checking the proportions carefully.

4. Quickly paint in the negative space, using black ink thinned slightly with water and a fairly large brush (a one-inch-wide housepainter’s brush will do, with ink poured in a small bowl).

5. Use a dark colored pencil to define features and shadows.

6. Use a white or cream pencil to heighten the drawing, using hatches that follow the curves of your face and features.

Thu Ha’s color is harmonious because it is balanced and colors are repeated from area to area. (See Josef Albers’s statement in the margin of page 239.) The pale magenta of the lips is repeated in the pink flower. The green of the leaves reappears in the hair. The blue of the blouse reappears in the eyes and hat. The black is used for the shadow-shapes, and the white heightens the lights. And, finally, the yellow of the hair is a lighter value of the ochre paper that forms the ground and middle value.

If you haven’t yet tried a colored-pencil portrait on a colored ground, I urge you to find a model or to draw a self-portrait, following the suggestions in the margin. Because the colored ground so beautifully supplies the middle-value tones, you are sure to enjoy this project. With the middle-value ground in place, it almost seems that the drawing is half-complete before you start. Recall that in Chapter Ten your rubbed-graphite ground supplied the middle-value tones, the eraser provided the lights, and the darkest dark of your pencil supplied the dark shadows. The transition from that drawing to drawing in color on a colored