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:
- 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.
- My Primsa Color Premier pencil set would not erase properly when resolving my mistakes.
- 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.
- 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.
- Fumes from paint and oils don’t always bode well in the apartment.
- 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.
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