Robert Liberace's workshop

Well what is there to say about Robert Liberace other than he is one of the finest artists and teachers today. I was blessed to have a workshop from him and drank in as much as I could. Here is the result. The works were done on Lanaquarelle watercolor paper with a wash of yellow ocre and then some extra sizing put on after that. The sizing was one part amber shellac to five parts denatured alcohol. This isn't the paper Rob uses, but it is what I had laying around. He uses Twinrocker calligraphy cream. That paper is laid, like the various Ingres papers and it is also very hard. The wash treatments are what he does. The reason for the extra sizing is to make the paper even harder still. The drawings were done with Prismacolor Verithin colored pencils using colors terra cota and black. For highlights, you could erase out some of the wash. It created an affect very much like the old masters of past when they used red and black chalks. For the future, I'm going to be using the harder laid papers like Rob did as I found the watercolor paper to have too much padding and thus the colored pencils tended to sink into the paper too much. Rob used a text weight paper so there was no cushion. The thin paper coupled with so much sizing created a very hard surface so as to abrade the colored pencils, which created that beautiful frayed look the old masters had in their drawings. And the Verithin pencils had such a sharp point that you could get those delicate thin lines. These were all about 3 hour studies.