Still Life With Rocks

This man prefers to work on dark coloured supports with a slight texture (tooth). Smooth surfaces are fine to work on, but they lack the ‘look’ of textured surfaces.

- Richard Klekociuk

STEP ONE

For this drawing I used a 40 x 30 cm piece of Canson pastel board (colour 502); and Havane Clair, Prismacolor, Verithin and Polychromos coloured pencils (these are my preferred pencils as they are of the highest quality and they blend together easily).

This drawing features rocks from the north-west coast of Tasmania. I worked from a series of photographs that I took, as well as rocks from my collection.

I used an eight-tiled grid pattern to block out the shapes of all the rocks, using a Polychromos Warm Grey 10% coloured pencil. This gave me a light line – one that I could see, but one that wasn’t too dominant and was easy to remove or shade over when adding colour.

I almost always use ochre coloured pastel board. After years of experimenting I found that the pencils I work with perform best on coloured backgrounds … due to the palette I often work with (earthy colours and greys).

STEP TWO