Color Temperature with Sarah Bixler

 

Prismacolor and Polychromos palettes recommended by Sarah Bixler

Although I’ve taken quite a few classes and workshops in the past decade with colored pencils and watercolor pencils as the primary medium, none has intrigued me as much as the ones I’ve had with Sarah Bixler. My introduction in 2021 was a weekend workshop with portraiture as the focus. Still reassembling my brain after having it blown open with new concepts, I took another workshop a few weeks later that was similar but used the full figure as our subject.

In both cases, it wasn’t necessarily life drawing that interested me; it was her focus on color temperature and her application of colored pencils with a strong painterly approach.

Polychromos

For quite a while afterwards, I worked on trying to apply her principles and approach to urban sketching, but I realized I still had so much more to learn to think like a painter. When I saw that she was offering another class, I jumped on it. Instead of in-studio weekend workshops like the previous two were, this course is five weeks, which I’ve found to be the most effective format for me when I want to get a solid handle on complex concepts.

 “Interpreting the Portrait” again focuses on the portrait, and this one is online. Typically I wouldn’t be interested in taking a life-drawing course online, but since the subject is less important to me than the concepts, I decided that learning from photos would be OK. After nearly a year of trying something entirely different with a comics approach using mostly markers, I’m super excited to get my brain back into color, color temperature and especially colored pencils!

To begin with, Sarah recommended a specific palette of Faber-Castell Polychromos pencils based on color temperature (a cool and a warm of each hue, plus some grays, black and white), which I was already familiar with from her previous workshops. A former user of Prismacolors, she now prefers Polychromos, but not because of expected reasons such as hardness or color range; she just got tired of contemporary Prismacolors breaking all the time!

For the kind of application technique she uses, I prefer a softer core than Polychromos. Hearing her reason for favoring them, I used the Polychromos palette she had specified as a guide and pulled out comparable hues from my Prismacolors (vintage, of course, to avoid the breakage issue). I plan to try both as the course goes on.

Prismacolor (mostly vintage plus a few contemporary)

In an online course from home, I would normally have my full sets easily accessible. But my studio has been in a transitional mess for the past several months, and I’m starting to pack my drawing desk (poor timing with this class, I know!). With the hope of avoiding constantly digging through packing boxes, I’m acting like I’m taking an in-person class and filled a pencil case with the two limited palettes. It’s a stretch of the imagination, I know, but I’m pretending these are the only colored pencils I own! (Ha-ha, I can hear you chuckling!)

For today’s post, which is already long, I’ll just show you the palettes. When I finish the first week’s assignment, I’ll write a separate post.