This was a delightful test drive of these Derwent brand Drawing Pencils!
They’re a limited palette of 24 earth tones, very soft and waxy, decently opaque, and, it turns out, pretty erasable! So they were a very friendly and low stakes material to play with at length.
I did find some useful tips on youtube over time! One video explained that when they waxed out the paper – when you’ve added enough pigment that the grain of the paper has gone completely smooth, and there’s a milky film forming over your marks and dulling your colours – they had success wiping off that top layer with a paper towel, and it boggled my mind but this worked really well! That’s what made me try the white gum erasers, and they also worked well! Though the smaller, drier ones were certainly more effective than the bigger, more stretchy kind.
This exercise was done in a MUJI sketchbook, a very cheap option that I’m quickly getting very attached to! These things take gouache, marker, pencil, and ink very well, and have a nice tooth that lets me lay down a fair amount of waxy pigment before any consequences. Since discovering how much I loved them, I have gone and picked up a few extras, which hopefully will quiet any scarcity-mindedness that might haunt me.
I worked on this in the evenings, mostly as a wind down before bed, over two weeks or so. I’d been meaning to do a thorough test run of these pencils and found it really rewarding to let this piece build up slowly over days of short sessions – it let me test a lot of the properties of these pencils fully, and draw some of my favourite things!
You probably saw this piece in progress, but if not, I did take a decent amount of shots, and shared them here as casual process posts. Please let me know if this ended up being annoying, especially those of you on the RSS feed! I can probably gate it off into its own tag better in future if that helps.
Here’s process shots from my time working on this piece:
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