Ronnie Tucker – Pet, Wildlife & Portrait Artist.

Watercolour pencils – the best of both worlds

Dec 30, 2009 art, pencil, watercolour

Derwent Aquatone watercolour pencils

Yes, I know ‘watercolour pencils’ seems impossible, but so did ‘drawing with an eraser‘ and it worked!

If you use watercolour, you’ll know that when it comes from a tube it will harden to a solid state but still be reusable when made wet. Watercolour pencils work in the same way, instead of using graphite, they use a solid core of watercolour which can be used, in this case, like you would with a normal coloured pencil. The main difference here is that when you wet the pencil drawing, the ‘graphite’ will dissolve leaving you with watercolour.

Here’s a quick example I sketched this up just last night using my Aquatone pencils (click here for a quick report on them and the Derwent Inktense pencils), it’s part landscape, part abstract (hence the odd colours):

Here's the coloured pencil sketch, dry...

For all intents and purposes, it looks like a pencil/crayon sketch right? Well, when I drag my wet brush across it (one colour at a time):

.. and here's the same sketch when water has been brushed over it.

Now, obviously, you don’t have to wet the drawing, you can just use them as coloured pencil and leave it at that, but you can, again like coloured pencil, cross-hatch colours to create new colours which will merge when you wet that area, or while your brush still has some colour on it, drop it over another colour. You can even wet the brush and grab the colour straight from the stick and paint it on.

Watercolour pencils are great for quick sketches. I quite often use them to jot down ideas and thumbnails as I don’t have to mix paint, I can just grab a stick of whatever colour I want and start scribbling. Then, if I want, I can wet the sketch, or just keep the sketch as it is but use it as the basis for a full, larger, painting.

Tags: aquatone, derwent, drawing, inktense, painting, pencil, pencils, sketch, thumbnail, watercolor, watercolour