Nancy Culmone
Serafina, NM

B12 — Chroma Maxima
Four-Day Class, Monday, July 27 – Friday, July 31
All Levels
Lettering, Drawing

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Discover the humble colored pencil as a medium to create delicacy and drama in images glowing with color and subtle transitions. You will work with time-honored artists’ methods and modern techniques. Our work includes linear, layering, rendering, hatching, and drawing with this versatile tool by itself and with other media.

Your pencil repertoire will continue to expand via demonstrations and exercises in color blending and transitions, shading, textures, fine details, and bold applications, while working on a variety of paper surfaces, textures, and colors. You will work on black papers exploring illusions of light shining in the darkness, later creating letters and words using your new skills. Additionally, you will experiment using colored pencil in combination with ink, pen, and other media. The translucency of colored pencils allows the light to shine through creating a glow of color on the page, and offers endless variations of line quality and illusions of volume. These pencils can be used to augment, enhance, and enliven your work or as an end in itself. You will leave our class with a sample book of techniques, a portfolio of your images and excellent methods to work with this humble, expressive tool long after our class ends.

Chroma is the purity of a color, intensity of a distinctive hue, the saturation of a color, as defined by Webster’s College Dictionary.

Supply List

  • Basic Calligraphy Supply List plus:
  • 72 or more Prismacolor pencils (120 is is even better) Artists Quality! Sharpened before class. Be sure to get the pencils in the black box, not the scholar grade. Please note: you do not need watercolor pencils
  • Small palette
  • Mixing brush
  • Olfa or other small snap off knife (or X-acto)
  • A smooth firm work surface: no bumps or texture, approximately 12″ x 14″ (I use plexiglass)
  • Manual pencil sharpener: the kind with replaceable blades. (You do not need extra blades.)
  • A stylus, small knitting needle, or dead ball point pen
  • 1 white Prismacolor pencil #938.
  • Any other pencils you already own if space allows (especially Verithin, also Lyra, Polychromos, etc.)
  • Speedball C0 or B0 pen point
  • One full sheet black Canson Mi-Teintes
  • 3 other nice papers of your choice 8″ x 10″ or larger.
  • Optional: only if you already have on hand and can easily bring, any other wide pens, bone folder, Electric pencil sharpener, split pen, and these prismacolor pencils, if they are not in your pencil set: true blue #903, process red #994, light aqua #992, yellow #915 or #916.

Supply fee: $5 – $10

Nancy Culmone lives and works in a remote area of New Mexico, where the vast sky and landscape offer endless inspiration. Her childhood loves of lettering and drawing were pursued at The Cooper Union School of Art studying painting, printmaking, calligraphy and later as a graduate student at Syracuse University. She has taught workshops all over the U.S. and Canada and several times in England and Europe. Nancy taught year long calligraphy courses at Massachusetts College of Art (3 years) and The DeCordova Museum School (15 years). An important focus of her work is in book form. Her unique, one-of-a kind manuscript books are held in private collections and public institutions such as Harvard and Duke Universities, Reed College, The Rochester Institute of Technology, and The University of Utah. Nancy’s work has been exhibited in North and South America, Europe, and Russia.

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