My sister had this big stack of Color-aid paper. If you've never seen it, the color is rich, incredibly even, and has a very fine tooth. We were going to try some collaborative exercises, but we've both got a lot on our plates and it hasn't really worked out. What did happen, is that I found out I LOVE to draw on it with colored pencil!
I've always really enjoyed drawing on toned and colored paper, but this stuff is fantastic. It's small, so I don't usually spend more than a couple of hours on a drawing. It's a lot of fun to let the colors come through in the drawing. This is made extra challenging by the fact that it doesn't erase well. In fact, you'll probably lift the color off the page before you lift the marks you want to remove.
The best way I've found to work on it, is to start with a low-contrast pencil, and draw lightly. For these bird drawings, I've been lightly blocking in the whole bird, and slowly building the colors. It was initially developed as a backdrop for photographs, but since when did artists ever use things the way they were intended?
