Adding Bright Colors to Black and White Drawings

I'm teaching a class called "Drawing in the Museum" for Osher at Carnegie Mellon University.  We meet in the Carnegie Museums of Art and Natural History in Pittsburgh.

We've been drawing with graphite pencils on white paper. 

But the winter has been gray, and I wanted to jazz up our drawings a bit.

 I created a stack of colorful papers and brought black and white Prismacolor colored pencils.

We still drew with only black and white, but the brightly painted papers added another layer of pattern, color and interest.

Here is Anita, one of my students, and her drawing of some crystals from the Hall of Minerals. The painted paper allowed her to show white crystals well, including the direction of the grain within them.

Below is a photo I took of two types of Quartz crystals in the Hall of Minerals...

...and my own drawing.

Fossils from Lyme Regis, England.

Fig leaves from my potted fig tree.

I painted a variety of colors and designs on Canson 140# watercolor paper with Dr. P.H. Martin's Liquid Watercolors.  

I let the first side dry, then flipped it and painted the other side.

It was uplifting just to paint with highly saturated, colorful paints.

One of my students said that the papers looked like Northern Lights!

After the paint was dry, I folded each sheet in half to make a 9" X 12" booklet for my students to draw on.

This is a great way to make sketching more of a game. 

 You can also paint splotches of color on sketchbook pages and let them dry.  When you take the sketchbook out, the colorful pathces help to reduce the fear of the blank page -- because it's not blank anymore.  

All you need is a black and a white colored pencil.

Happy Creating!