More Adventures with Aquarelle Watercolor Pencil @DesignMemCraft

I did some more noodling around with the Art GRIP® Aquarelle Watercolor Pencils that I won during one of Design Memories' twitter parties, along with the yellow & blue Aquarelles I already had. (Check out Design Memory Craft's Blog for lots of cool projects!)

I like to jump in and just play with a new medium, knowing I may well end up lining the garbage can.

A 'zentangle' in watercolor seemed interesting. I started with a wash by wetting the paper, and then stroking a wet brush across the pencil tip to pick up color and transfer it to the paper.

I 'lifted' the color to block out the Pokeroote. A tortillon didn't lift enough, so I switched to a tissue to pick up the color. Then I drew the Pokeroot tangle with magenta. With less water on the brush, I picked up more color from the pencils, applying a very thin wash of pink for the highlights and working up to a dryer wash of purple for the shading.

I moved on to Pokeleaf, still using the brush but switching to a blue where there was yellow in the background, and to yellow where there was blue in background.

The Cubine was drawn directly with the pencil over the now dry wash. For a finish, just cause, I flicked a wet brush across the blue pencil to splatter a little random color across the page.

Not a fantastic piece, but I learned a lot about how the pencils work.

The thing I felt most lacking was an intensity of color. I was also curious about about how the pencils would do on colored paper, so I decided my next experiment would focus on those things. I used a warm gray Strathmore paper, not because I felt it was the best color background for red, but because I wanted to see much red would survive.

My palette was limited this time. I roughed out the out line of my cat with red and filled it in with yellow, except for the nose. Then I covered all the yellow except for the eyes, with light Carmine Lake varying the pressure and how many layers of color. While laying down the color, I took care with the direction of my pencil strokes, trying to follow the direction a cat's hair would lie.

When I felt I had enough color down, I ran a medium wet brush over the color, following the direction of the pencil strokes. Except for the eyes, I didn't try to keep any section of color separate, but I kept the amount of water low enough that the color spread a bit, but didn't run.

For the finishes touches I added some white (white watercolor pencil of another brand) to the ears and wet it to try and get the impression of light shining through the cartilage. Then I blended a bit of white to lighten the orange around the muzzle and feet, and to lighten the eyes. I used a fineliner to shadow the eyes.

I was pleased with the intensity of the color. The pencil lines show up a bit more in the scan than they do in real life and the color of the paper shows through in places that it doesn't when actually looking at it. Overall the pencil colors stayed true. I had worried that the yellow would turn too green, and the red would be muddy. The white over red did get pink, but that's pretty normal, and the pink in question does have a nice glow.

I think I'm ready to try something more serious. I just have to decide what I'll do!