Denise Howard

California, USA, Myriad, colored pencil, 20 x 20"

My Inspiration

I aim to engage viewers in a longer, closer look at my subjects by way of the level of detail I can achieve with colored pencil. Many of my best ideas start from scenes I encounter while hiking in nature. In this case, a stream near my home was still running in late spring, so that the sun was high enough to reach the water and illuminate rocks I’d never noticed before. I was fascinated with the dappled light, the colors, the refractions and the transition from dry to wet to submerged. I wanted to capture the moment and make something that would encourage lingering and visual wandering.

My Design Strategy

From several photos that I took with my iphone, I chose the one with the best depiction of dry, wet, and submerged. I experimented with different proportions, crops and orientations. I settled on a square format (which I don’t normally use), with the large blue rock as the compositional counterbalance to the many small, dynamic, abstract shapes in the submerged rocks. Orienting so that both of these are at the top created more tension, as you can see by turning the image yourself, and the large rocks at the bottom also block the eye from wandering off the bottom.

My Working Process

With so many details, I had to plan ahead to avoid getting lost. I noticed that the darkest values were the darkest recesses of the rock shadows, so I mapped all those with black. I rendered all the rocks along the bottom side, then turned the paper 90 degrees to do the next side, and repeated, so that I never had to reach across finished work. The very abstract-looking submergedrock zone was a lesson in how everything is ultimately just shapes, colors, lines and textures. Sometimes I rendered a larger rock first and then filled in the pebbles around it, and sometimes the opposite, just to maintain my sanity. The process was like assembling a 1,000-piece jigsaw puzzle, making the puzzle pieces as I went.

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