Winter's Foal completed!

"Winter's Foal" 8”x10” Colored Pencils on Canson paper.

Here is “Winter’s Foal,” completed at last. You can see the rest of the progression of this piece by looking here. I have intentions of making this piece into an art card and will post the card design here when it’s completed. :-)

Knowing I am a colored pencil artist, a clerk at the art supply store asked me yesterday whether I preferred Prismacolor or Polychromos colored pencils. I told him quite honestly that I was experimenting with the oil-based Polychromos pencils and hadn’t yet formulated an opinion.

“Winter’s Foal” is my first colored pencil piece using only Polychromos pencils. I must say that I love the colors in the Faber-Castell color-matching system. They’re actually more rich and lovely than the Prismacolor pigments. I also like the way you can exactly mix and match the Albrecht Durer watercolor pencils to the Polychromos and the brush pens. But for me the jury’s still out on my preference for the oil-based pencils (Polychromos). True you don’t need to fix them after completion, and that is a plus. But Prismacolors look pretty amazing when laid on heavily and burnished. They can make a piece look like it's an oil painting and that is quite beautiful. I am about to start a commission that will be done in Prismacolors. I’m curious to see what I think about them after having used the Polychromos for a while.