Hi Michele, the one thing I can tell you is that each type of paper takes the pencils differently. As much as anyone, including myself hates to waste "good" paper on a practice piece you will find that what you did on an inexpensive paper will probably be totally different than working on something like Stonehenge. Everyone has their favorite paper or ground to work on from matt board, watercolor paper to even sandpaper. When I got started I purchased one of Ann Kullberg's books and bought the materials she suggested. I have had very good luck by following her suggestions. My suggestion to someone starting out is to pick a subject matter that you really like, whether it be landscape, portrait, still life, etc. and practice the colored pencil techniques like strokes, layering and so forth. It's hard to be a good artist in many subjects because each subject has so many things that relate only to it, for instance if you were doing a landscape like yours you would have to know about skies and clouds, water and reflections, tree shapes, grass colors and many other things. If you stick with just that subject and use reference material to help you than you can spend more time on technique than trying to remember facial proportions in a portrait or reflections on a piece of metal etc. Once you master the basics of using the pencils than you can expand your horizons. I'm by no means a professional artist but I do fairly well in quite a few subjects and that came from learning the basics. Here is a link to some of my work. It's not all colored pencil but most of it is.
http://smg.photobucket.com/albums/v43/gbritnell/Artwork/
gbritnell |