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Skies are the reason I started using other mediums in my Colored Pencil art. There is just no way to make a sky as smooth, or as bright, with pencils. I have used pastel, watercolor, and acrylic, for skies. On colored paper I use an opaque medium (pastel, or acrylic paint) to completely cover the paper color. This sky is watercolor wash (a transparent medium) on white paper. I masked off the butterfly and the line of trees before I started. They were masked with friskit film,

I'm working on the landscape behind Casey. The artwork is really starting to come together now! The crop marks show where I’ll trim it down to the 12 x 13 size Doug requested. As you can see, I work past the edges of those 12 x 13 margins when I’m doing the landscape. This is the whole sheet of paper, scanned. I always work on larger paper and trim it down at the end. Sometimes I give the client the option to leave it as is, a bigger artwork than they paid for, if I think it

I haven't posted in a while. Sadly, I lost my sweet Doberman, Sara, to cancer over the past month. I was sharing this portrait of Casey, a Papillon, before Sara became ill. This is where I left off. I chose to work on white paper because Casey is mostly pure white. In this pic I’m outlining the white area of his body with green colored pencils to enclose him with the green surrounding him. That leaves the white of the paper for his coat, with a few strokes of pale-grey pencil

I rarely work on white paper. I decided to use white paper to capture Casey's pure white coat. Sometimes I choose a paper color that makes the background color, and create the figure on that paper color with colored pencils. In this case I am creating the background with colored pencils and leaving the white paper to create Casey's body. You can see where I’ve outlined Casey’s chest with green pencil to create the edge where green grass will make Casey’s white coat stand out.

Working on the portrait of “Casey”, a Papillon. “Papillon” is French for “butterfly”. The ears resemble butterfly wings. 1 This is a portion of the Photoshop layout I created, a composite of Doug’s photos, when Doug and I were working together to create a layout he would like. Casey’s portrait will have 5 butterflies. I deliberately placed a butterfly directly above his head that exactly mimics the shape of Casey’s ears. I made a black line outline of the butterfly in the sky