New Year, New Gear

A belated Happy 2017 to all! May good ideas and happy moments come swift and fast this year.

I was lucky to be given some Inktense pencils for Christmas, and gave them a dry run on a little sketch of our fab yoga instructor, Amy. I’ll use this as a preliminary study for an acrylic painting sometime. Now, I didn’t spend enough time or focus on the actual drawing before getting stuck into the colours, being just too excited to wait. But forgive me – we all know what it’s like wanting to play with a new toy.

It was a fun session, and for all its faults, thanks to this sketch I now know that:

• Making ‘realistic’ flesh colours from the selection I have isn’t entirely straightforward, but then, necessity is the mother of colour mixing.
• The colours really are quite intense when the water hits them. That’s why I’ve used Indian ink over the background, to balance out and damp down the colour a little and allow the portrait to take centre stage. The curtains were overwhelming at first!
• Getting real darks in just using the pencils is going to be a challenge – a lot more dark pigment needs to be laid on the paper than I was expecting.
• You can’t easily add more pencil over wet pencil, without waiting for the paper to dry – the pigment just won’t either stick, or run properly.
• A watercolour paper would be worth a try (this sketch was on 160gsm cartridge).

I really like these Inktense pencils; my job now is to understand their behaviour so I can get the best from them. Definitely more experimentation required!

(PS: for anyone who’s interested, Viv likes her portrait and is going to buy it! I’m totally chuffed.)