High Drama: Colored Pencil on Dark Paper with Rhonda Nass

Though colored pencil was once thought of as a grade school medium, professional artists today have chosen it as their preferred medium and are exhibiting in galleries, museums, and publishing internationally, along with illustrating for advertising and magazines. The specific technique you will learn is a layering of pencil applied with light pressure, creating color intensity and a means to add minute detail. With intense color on a dark background the image (of your choice) punches and acts as a magnet for a viewer. We’ll review contemporary pencil artists and what good composition is, you’ll do an exercise sheet with multiple stroke application techniques, and begin a customized artwork of your own subject in your own composition, and you’ll be able to work at your own pace in class, finishing the piece on your own beyond the class timeframe.

Instructor Bio: Nass’ drawings and paintings are internationally published (including Biology of Plants by Evert, Eichhorn, Raven/W.H. Freeman Publishers; Today’s Botanical Artists/Schiffer Publishing; Vanishing Circles /Arizona Sonora Desert Museum Press, Following in the Bartram’s Footsteps/American Society of Botanical Artists, self-published books, Gifts from the Earth and Scratchings of a Madwoman [www.rnass.com] and more recently through the United Nations Postal Administration who commissioned paintings for stamps highlighting endangered species). Work appears in museum (e.g. Museum of Natural History in Zhejiang, China), corporate and private collections. Nass co-curates, along with Mary Dickey and Kel Mur, River Arts on Water Gallery in Prairie du Sac, Wisconsin.