Letting the Pencil Choose the Colors

What happens when you surrender creative control?

As I was reorganizing my colored pencils, I found a Koh-I-Noor Tri-Tone pencil labeled Ember. I don’t even remember buying it. Orange, red, black all mingled together in one instrument. I felt a surge of excitement and immediately sat down to try it.

Marabou Stork

For my first sketch, I chose a Marabou Stork. I did a quick lay in with ordinary pencil and then picked up the Tri-Tone to begin add color. Immediately, I got a startling result: the pupil came out as red! After I got over my momentary surprise, I found myself laughing. I sketched with abandon, enjoying the line quality and the unexpected expressions of color. I scribbled and new textures appeared. The combination of colors felt effortless and intoxicating. When I got to the fuzzy hair-like feathers on the back of the bird’s head, I was filled with delight. Every movement of the pencil produced a new color. I stepped away from the sketch and marveled at how expressive it was.

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Maybe our best creative moments come not from imposing our will on a drawing, but from paying attention to what it offers back.

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Yellow-crowned Night Heron

A few days later, I did my second sketch with the Tri-Tone. Right away, I noticed that I was trying to control the colors. All the spontaneity and delight of my first sketch drained way. The more I tried to make decisions, the worse it got. While I found that I was able to produce the dark values of the facial pattern by rotating the pencil and pressing harder, my enjoyment of the process was completely absent. While the sketch is objectively ok, my experience of it was not. I came away feeling disappointed with the result.

Shoebill

As I began my third sketch, I felt a bit anxious. I wanted so much to recapture the delight of my first experience! As I did the lay-in (again in ordinary pencil), I began to get frustrated. I fussed over proportions and drew and erased over and over. By the time I got something I felt satisfied with, I was feeling very pessimistic about color. I normally start with the eye and when I did, I got that jolt of surprise again: red. That burst of adrenaline turned out to be just what I needed. I lost my self-consciousness and let the pencil take the lead. Instead of forcing the pencil to do things I wanted it to do, I let it do its thing and then responded to that. My adult-artist self never scribbles but somehow the multicolored lines invited me to let go and simply enjoy the ride.

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What using the Tri-Tone pencil showed me was how much delight I miss while I’m trying to control the outcome of my work.

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This experience revealed my inner landscape to me in a new way. Feeling tight or pressured can ruin a sketch but when the pencil surprised me, it bumped me out of my clenched attitude. The pencil also taught me that I can’t make certain experiences happen but I can be open to what’s there. Looking back on the Night Heron, I wonder how the sketch would have turned out if I had caught myself trying to control the colors and relaxed into letting the pencil decide instead.

Maybe our best creative moments come not from imposing our will on a drawing, but from paying attention to what it offers back.