About My Colored Pencil Technique

Artist Marie Brozova answers your most frequent questions…

• Why have you chosen colored pencils as your art medium? What makes them so attractive to you?

  Working with colored pencils. I am not only able to draw in elaborate detail, but I can also create an expanse of rich color in the background. Various colors in colored pencils can be mixed together, creating new shades of colors. Besides, my pencils are always within reach, I can easily carry them anywhere, I don´t have to make any elaborate preparations when I feel like drawing. When the drawing is done, it´s done, I don´t have to clean anything and there's no problem when I'm interrupted in my work. These are the reasons why I took to coloured pencils as a small child, when I felt immense urge to keep record of everything I had seen around me. I still am driven by that urge.

• Have you experimented with other techniques?

  I was able to experiment with all the usual art media when studying at art school, including print technique. But I held on to colored pencils, because I created my own style with them and they served me best in actualizing my fantasy world.

• How is it possible that people continue to question that your drawings are actually drawn with colored pencils?

  I try to fill the whole paper with pencilwork and try to make colors so rich that you cannot see the separate lines and up-strokes. Probably because of this, people often think that my drawings are drawings, painted in acrylic.

• Where have you learnt to draw?

  I am nobody´s student, nobody’s follower. I have learnt the most from my mother, who is a very skilled painter, she never had any problems with drawing all the things I had seen or imagined. She encouraged me in drawing, but she never corrected me. She started to advise me in technique and proportions only when I wanted to learn to draw correctly – not until I was 12 years old.

• When did you begin to make drawings?

  I can’t remember a time in my life when I didn't draw. It seems as if I were born with colored pencils in my hand. The earliest drawing my parents kept for me I drew when I was two years old. You can even recognize that I tried to portray the greatest hero of my childhood – the one-eyed Czech warrior, Jan Zizka.

• Do you teach your colored pencils technique?

  I´m sorry, but I have no time for teaching. I´ve so many ideas, so many visions of uncompleted work, that it is very hard for me to keep up with them before they fade from memory. But all the secrets of my technique I am pleased to share with visitors to my public drawing. Beyond that, my companions in art must find their own way. Moreover I think that it is impossible to teach imagination and creativity. It is very important to develop this potential from early childhood, as if nurturing a rare plant, or else it dies quickly in hostile environments.

• What colored pencils do you prefer?

  I prefer the thick pencils for children of triangular design. Thin pencils usually consist of great amount of bonding agents, and they are too tough. I need soft pencils for mixing the colors.

• How many pencils do you need for the biggest format A0?

  More than 100, sometimes 150.

• You must be very patient…

  Thank God, I don´t suffer while drawing. I am motivated by the vision that is already finished in my head. I want to transfer it onto paper as quickly as possible, but I enjoy the process of creation very much. I must confess to the fact that I´m not equally patient in other aspects of my life.

• You must have had much praise in your art lessons at school?

  You would be surprised. I attended elementary school during the communist era. We were forced to create tendentious political drawings. I remember I was kept in detention when I was nine, because of a drawing we were supposed to depict of the battle-cruiser Aurora, the symbol of the Great Russian Revolution in 1917. Mine looked like a shipwreck, drowning in the sea, and I had to make it again (and presumably better) after-hours. I have another example of my artistic shortcoming – the Triumphal February, the Czech historical event in 1948 that meant the end of democracy in my country. This celebration we were to drawing when we were 8 years old. You can imagine the result. Regardless of the political situation, I always wanted to paint something other than my teachers wanted from me. That´s why I didn´t want to attend the optional art classes after school. I have always had plenty of ideas, but my drawings were not remarkably good, because I tried to draw something more difficult than the others, whose drawings were nice and prettified.

• How do you make the little stars, do you engrave them in paper somehow?

  At first I dot the paper with a blunt point, for example with a penholder (it mustn’t be sharp, or else it would pierce the paper). This way I imprint the little stars into the paper. That creates a small relief, and when I cover the paper with darker color, the dots stay white.

• How do you mix colors? How do you make the transitions from one color into another?

  White color pencil is very useful; it helps to mix the shades of colors together. It can also smooth and hide the separate lines and up-strokes and make a fine layer of color.

• What is your favorite and the least favorite colour?

  I love the best green color of the spring grass; it means the color of life for me. I don´t like white, it means cold, winter, hospitals, death. But black I regard as a positive color. Even the sun makes black warmer, it is the colour of rich, fertile soil.

Read more frequently asked questions in the sections:

About The Defense of Colored Pencils and Public Drawing | About the Art Subjects | About Life, Universe and All…