Was this email forwarded to you?
​Subscribe here for more

Welcome to the Drawing Board #6!

Welcome to our first newsletter of February! Lots of fun things are happening here on the Open Sketchbook- and I'm looking forward to sharing some fun news with you this month (podcast, print sale, and more!) We'll be taking a look at limitations this month- a fitting continuation from our productivity ideas from January. Interested in working with a limited palette? Check out the colored pencil demo below!

"The world is full of so many ideas, and when you have limitations, you learn what to focus on." - David Lynch

Christopher Nixon on the Blog:

Christopher Nixon shared what's on his easel with us this week- stop by the blog and check out the full drawing-in-progress of his son in red pencil!

​

​

Creativity Through Limitations

Limitations are everywhere in our practice, and often discussed as a negative component of the art making process: Our space isn't big enough, my budget is too limited, there's not enough time, etc...

Over the month of February we'll explore creativity through limitations in various ways that I think you'll find both interesting and helpful. First up, the limitation we hear about all the time in the classroom studio:

The Limited Palette
​Limited palettes have been around forever- look at the beautiful and dynamic drawings in Lascaux Cave (over 20,000 years old), the Apelles palette (the palette Zorn was looking at), the iconic Bauhaus Primaries palette, Mary Cassatt’s complementary palette, all the way up to the contemporary limited palette based on CMYK color printing.

A limited palette isn’t just a way to simplify your materials and focus, it’s an organizational tool for unlocking stronger, more intentional choices. Utilizing a limited palette, no matter the medium, fosters harmony in your work, keeps your values/hues/chromas/temperatures in check, and encourages creative problem-solving. It also streamlines your process, reducing overwhelm and allowing you to focus on design, form, and mark-making.

I've been using limited palettes in my Strategic Painting I online course, where we start from the foundations of oils and painting concepts and gradually move into more complicated painting concepts, like navigating chroma and temperature in our compositions. Below is my demo-in-progress for the course, using a limited palette of Ivory Black, Titanium White, Raw Umber, Burnt Sienna, and Terre Verte - a palette I came up with to explore the foundations of painting.

There are no right or wrong ways to use a limited palette as long as your designing yours with intention. By limiting your focus you're curating certain priorities that you want to underline within your creative efforts.

​

Limited Palette Colored Pencil Sketch Demo
​Our prompt for this week's session of my online Sketchbook Development course lead us to explore Gerhard Richter a bit. I'm a really big fan of his work, especially the blurry representational paintings, and wanted to use him as my aesthetic inspiration for a sketch study of some of the Peppers from this month's Still-Life Club references. This demonstration was drawn over about an hour and half during my Virtual Studio Hangout this week. It's great to have dedicated time set aside to work on fun explorations like this.

Why colored pencils? They work really well in the sketchbook, and allow you to move quickly and make choices that keep the sketch going at a nice pace. While I have painted in my sketchbooks with oils, I usually don't like to do that. I find watercolor, gouache, and even acrylic paints to be a better fit if I want to use wet media. I thought for this sketch the waxy qualities of the colored pencils would fit my aims well- and it was a lot of fun!

My palette was chosen on the fly right before I started. I didn't have a white or black colored pencil, so I chose the main color in my composition first: a warm, chromatic yellow ("sunburst yellow"). I paired that with a punchy blue, my favorite: Peacock Blue, and I needed a red that would work well with the yellow, but also expand into a deeper tonality. I went with Tuscan Red, which worked really well. It happens to be on the cooler side of red, so it opened up the temperature range a bit. Since I didn't have any white, and my reference had two different temperatures of light (warm and cool), I grabbed "Cloud Blue" and "Cream". For my black stand-in (a deep, full value), I went with a harder Verithin pencil from Prismacolor, Indigo Blue.

Some key steps from the demo: notes in the captions.

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

I wanted to push the blurriness of the image, sort of like Richter, which wasn't hard to do with all the wax on the surface! I also really enjoyed the process of building up the optical color (like the greens), and wanted the blurriness to be offset by the grainy passes of the earlier moments in the sketch. So this study has a lot of color development, and a lot of different textures that color pencil can offer. I kept telling myself to not "render", but rather to rely on color ideas to get the point across, and I think it worked out. If this were a studio drawing, I'd spend a lot more time developing the form in conjunction with the color, but as a limited palette sketch, I'm quite happy with it.

I've also been studying chromatic aberration lately, so it was fun to be able to put that into the piece (the color bleed on the top of the yellow pepper.)

If you haven't worked with colored pencils in a limited palette, I strongly encourage you to try them out! It's a perfect sketchbook activity (maybe use them to take on the weekly Sketch Starter below?) Share what you sketch with the community over on our Discord.

Want to see more? Be on the lookout for a colored pencil demo like this one on the blog later today (Friday, 2/7/25)

Weekly Sketch Starter:
​Something big, Something medium, and something small

​

Thanks for reading! It's great to have you be a part of our community. What'd you think of the second "Sketch Starter"? I have an affinity for prompts that are more open-ended. And, looking over the newsletter as I write this, I bet a fun copy could be made of Hokusai's The Great Wave Off Kanagawa in the limited palette I set up with the colored pencils for the demo.

Next week, we’ll build on our discussion of limitations by exploring how it connects to this week's Sketch Starter prompt!

​

Happy drawing,
Evan​​

​​https://learn.theopensketchbook.com/​

​
Join our Discord:
​https://discord.gg/9r8x4k2YPk​

​

​View this email in your browser. Feedback on The Drawing Board Newsletter is always welcome! Reply and let me know your thoughts!