New Work Wins Best of Show!

My newest piece was selected as Best of Show winner in the annual Members Show of the Professional Association of Visual Artists. The show at the Clearwater (FL) Main Library runs through November 29.

Normally, I work with multiple brands of colored pencils in a large range of colors, but for this piece, I chose to limit myself to a basic 24-color set of the most commonly recognized brand. The paper is white Stonehenge, a terrific 100% cotton heavyweight paper that seems to love colored pencil. I generally use colored papers like Stonehenge’s cream and light gray, but the white was well-suited for the reflective highlights of the plastic containers and their labels, and it maintained the purity of the crayon-like colors of the frosting. Limiting my palette (I did not even use all 24 colors in the set), I was able to maintain color harmony in the piece, but using complimentary colors allowed me to develop a lively and broad range of colors and values. Using one slightly harder pencil from a related product line, I was even able to make most of the ingredient lists readable – try that with any other medium! It was especially gratifying that this modestly-sized piece (9 x 8″) was selected as Best of Show in PAVA’s annual Members Show where it competed with work that was much larger and in all media. I believe it was the ability of colored pencil to mimic the slickness of the plastic and the lusciousness of the frosting that won over the two judges.