I love music and musical instruments. Sometimes I'd rather draw them than play them (and while I can only play a few I can try to draw them all). So I began with a trumpet. I had seen a call for poster art for our local jazz festival and had been listening to some "Satchmo" Armstrong so it seemed like a logical place to begin.
I've already mentioned that I enjoy colored grounds so I decided to try this piece on a black Canson matboard (which, you will notice, does not photograph well).
With the initial sketch in place, I began by putting a tonal layer under the highlights of the trumpet with a cool grey.
From there, I moved on to what I considered the darker colors of the trumpet - the brassy browns and golds.
The color palette was actually quite limited. I think I used a total of 7 colors in all. The reflections from a trumpet actually form quite distinct zones that can be filled in in almost a paint-by-number method.
The final step for the trumpet was to fill in the highlights and then burnish the entire piece with a colored pencil. It helped to blend the color edges just slightly and to add some extra polish. Matboard has a fairly shallow tooth so complete coverage (I learned earlier) takes repeated layers with workable fixative. Since I with dark grounds I never want to take the risk of clouding the background so I did not use any fixative on this piece and just left those small gaps in the coverage for added texture. In a reflective surface, it's surprising what will translate as something just being reflected. (I will add that I have used workable fixative on dark matboard but never more than two very lightly applied layers.)
The final stage was to add the music ribbon. Remember this piece was to be a poster so I left room for text, although I probably would have left the design fairly similar regardless. The music was done with white but the backsides of the spirals with a cool grey 20% to give a little dimension.
The final piece eventually was titled "Where Will the Music Take You?" and can be seen in my Etsy store here.
Where does music carry you?
