Stepping out of my comfort zone...briefly.

I decided to participate in Sketchbook Skool. It's been a very long time since I was in any sort of school and I thought it might inspire me to try something new or different or try a different approach. Coloured pencil was the theme for this week. Not a favourite, though I have done a few. I put it off for a while but eventually settled down and did a study with a feather. I started in coloured pencil but it is so slow! So I added a watercolour wash.

A page from my sketchbook - Cockatoo feather in S&B Alpha landscape sketchbook

Next I decided I had better do a 'pure' coloured pencil drawing as I haven't done that since I did a huge drawing of sandstone rocks in about about 1992! I did a cherry tomato. I found the one Van Gogh brand pencil I had was more responsive than the Derwents that have been with  me since grade 3! Once again, it's so slow....

Coloured Pencil.

...and I much prefer the tomatoes I've done before in watercolour...(You can see them here)

So I decided to compare watercolour pencils with watercolour and see if that made me happier. I usually incorporate water colour pencils into mixed media works though I have done a couple of pure watercolour pencil works. 

The first is a watercolour wash in the top one and the beginning of a pencil drawing below. The wash was very quick. The pencil takes time.

Step 1 

Next I added the colour to the stems and used clean water to wash over the watercolour pencil eggplant.

Step two 

 The top one now has another deeper wash and a little more work on its stem.

Step three

I like the slightly random effects that happen with the water soluble pencils but i think you need a pretty large range to get the right colour, whereas in the watercolour version it only took three colours to get all I needed.

Below are the pencils, paints and brushes I used in my A4 Moleskine watercolour notebook.

My materials.