Tuesday, March 22, 2011

Col-Erase pencil is awesome. How did I forget about it?

Col-Erase or short for the erasable colored pencil, is great for animation, colored layouts, and design — it makes it so easy to erase a color or a whole color scheme. As far as I know it has more than 24 color now. There are Vermilion, Brown, Terra Cotta, Tuscan Red, Blue, Carmine Red, Green, Yellow, Black, Purple, Light Blue, Light Green, White, Flesh, Pink, Violet, Light Gray, Indigo Blue, Grass Green, Lavender, Canary Yellow, Orange, Rose, and Scarlet Red. My most favorite color to draw with is Tuscan Red, then Blue. They are amazing pencil and I have not used them in over 3-4 years.
The reason I write about this is bacause of what happened this morning. As I am making more of traditional pencil drawing video tutorials, I am looking for more pencils. On my desk, I have three mechanical pencils, three ballpoint pens and five 3B Faber-Castell pencils. I was looking at all my Faber-Castall wooden pencils and they all look very very short. So I got up and diggin into my art tool box. I have about 50 pencils or more for my back up, then I found about ten of Col-Erase blue and tuscan red pencils. It reminds me of way back in the day that I animated Disney Characters at the Interactive studio with Bobby Pontillas. He is now at Blue Sky Studio (Ice Age anyone?)


Below is one of Bobby's short film:

You can also visit his channel http://www.youtube.com/AnimationMentor


Anyway, the point I want to make is that I forgot how much I love these Col-Erase! Because of it waxy texture and it doesn't smear like graphite or chacoal. The type of paper we use in animation house is kinda slick so graphite/pencil would smear thus easily loosing its solidity of line (which is really important to the clean up artist to pick up on.) and would not stick to it very well to the animation paper. Stack and stacks of paper and touching/moving/ fliping it around will smear your work so the waxy medium helps BIG time. Also variety of colors help when you have to animate different part of body...such as hair+body. So when you pencil test you know what to look for and what/where to fix if there is anything to be fixed. On the flip side, it is hard to erase col-erase completely from the paper compare to graphite. And we used to have an endless supply when I was animating Piglet at the old studio.
WOW! Flash back. So my next video I am going to use my blue Col-Erase, now off to find my Tuscan Red.

Free Download 30 mins of Video tutorialsFree Drawing Tutorial video download



0 Responses to “Col-Erase pencil is awesome. How did I forget about it?”

Post a Comment