It being winter, I had moved in to the house to draw my green men. Coloured pencil is a fairly innocuous medium, with the possible exception of the pencil shavings. But the only drawing board that I have that is big enough for a sheet of 50 x 50 cm paper is an A1 board. Which is rather big. I decided that maybe I would do some smaller drawings, on different coloured paper. I had four Fabriano toned papers, all in A3 (a much easier to handle size): Clay (a paler grey), Moss (green), Sand (beige) and Sea (blue). And so I drew four new, small green men.
I added purple into the mix for the first of these, and gave some thought to those elaborate long leaves that you see in Islamic and classical designs (acanthus leaves). I used the purple pencil (a solitary Derwent Lightfast that was a free sample from somewhere; it’s actually Violet) to render a pair of these leaves as if they were carved in purple stone. The fellow turned out to be wearing a mitre (an accident of design), so I called him Bishop.
Green paper somehow produced an autumnal green man, Hunter: his large branches/antlers bearing a few fluttering orange leaves and his beard a flamboyant mix of seasonal leaf colour. The leaf shape is a sort of hybrid between oak and hawthorn; he wasn’t meant to represent any specific tree. He does have some big, wavy acanthus leaves outside of his perimeter, though, and lots of shadows.
I decided to just use shades of brown (a very wide-ranging category) for the green man on beige paper. Which meant that he wasn’t very green at all. Derwent’s Drawing range is very rich in browns especially in red-browns, so that is what I used. Somehow he turned into a genial-looking young Victorian sort of fellow (something to do with his straight moustache, perhaps) and so he was called Albert for a bit until I decided on Parlour Games as a title. The acanthus leaves and colour scheme seemed to indicate a similar era. Albert is the only one of my green men so far whose face emerges directly from the wall. It’s slightly unsettling. He is also the only one where acanthus is the only leaf represented.
Blue pencils on blue paper: Green Man got the Blues. I went back to the church carvings for the way that this fellow’s face sprouts leaves. He seems quite happy about that, and to be chewing on a couple of acanthus leaves. In fact, I’m not sure that he has got the blues at all. Maybe he’s just enjoying the music.
All of these drawings are 29.7 x 29.7 cm before framing.
