Return to Pencil

I want to return to pencil. My most recent endeavors have been in oil. It’s not where I started. My favorite medium is pencil.

I have never had much luck with static color. When I say static color, I refer to color that is not fluid – like paint; but rather still such as colored pencils and markers. I abandoned the thought of using pen and/or markers a long time ago. The ink consistently dries out before I can complete the project.

I abandoned colored pencils because, as some may see in the above drawings, I like to make the color ‘move’, so to speak. I use a wide range of tools to lighten, highlight, darken, and, well, to build.

This is not a thing I can achieve with colored pencils; hence my move to pastel or paint.

Influencers

What influenced me to forgo my current preferences in favor of colored pencil is the following:

1. Paint-Doku – I enjoy working these paint-doku style problems more so than Sudoku. There is something about building a picture from a logic problem that makes me smile. These types of puzzles require a pigment that you can erase, though. I do not know how to erase anything. Even pencil. I wanted to invite some color into the hobby, so I thought to introduce colored pencils. I have still, yet, to find the correct mix of media for a good paint-doku problem.
2. My Primsa Color Premier pencil set would not erase properly when resolving my mistakes.
3. Paint-Doku led me to the art store to purchase some ‘easily erasable’ colored pencils. So that I could, you know, created a colorful picture in my logic problem solving. This resulted in the purchase of two different brands of colored pencils and one coloring book.
4. The purchased colored pencils did not result in a successful paint-doku puzzle. I am restricted to HB2 pencils on this one. I might want to go with an F.
5. Fumes from paint and oils don’t always bode well in the apartment.
6. I have artist block on three oil paintings I’m working on. I don’t know where I want to take them next.

In short, I feel like coloring and don’t have the facilities to work with paint right now; but I clearly have a strong urge to work with color. Marker will never be an answer for me. They die too soon – so my options are pastel, colored pencil, watercolor (but barely), oil water color pastel, crayon (which I also call oil pastel), and colored pencil.

I just don’t understand why I have such a hard time with colored pencil.

Exploration

And so the exploration begins.

In 2015, I was staring at a wall of water color paints at Jerry’s Artarama. As I stood there, contemplating the brands and varieties; another artist leaned over and said with a gentle sigh, “So. I know what you’re going through. I’ve been there and I can tell by the way that you’re glancing what you’re looking at. I’ve pretty much made my decisions in what brands I’m choosing. I know what goes where, but I had to do a lot of experimenting and what I’ve found is that I could get away with just about every color I want with a CMYK color pallete and that I need just a hint of chinese white on occasion. Paints can get quite expensive.”

So more than a few of my oil works feature Charvin and they’ve not been treated well, but when it comes to colored pencil???

At Blick, I found a different version of Prisma Color – supposedly it is super duper extra easy to erase and Caran d’Ache. Needless to say much, Prisma Color lost the battle in a comparison of colored pencil techniques with an artist who fails at erasure.

Unfortunately, regardless of what level of technique that I made use off, I could not get a desirable blend or whatever we like to call that thing we do to get green out o fa version of yellow and blue.

Caran d’Ache came close. And so I bought about $90 worth.

Results

Do I have to share the results? I’m a little ashamed.

I am not pleased with the skin tone here. I might need to invoke more colors or something, but the decision to expand my pencil collection to include these pencils was a good one. The pencils give a nice texture on the surface and a good blend. I’m happy to work with them.

I am pretty sure that I could use a small art course, as a next step.