WATER SOLUBLE PENCILS

I tried out a water soluble pencil this morning. I didn’t know they existed. I was looking thru the Dick Blick pages, and then realized something like this was made. So I ordered a couple to see what their effect might be. The pencils are called Derwent Sketching, and they come in various solubilities.

They are really kind of amazing.  When you put lines down on dry paper, they feel just like a normal pencil.  The line goes on easily.  The line does not smudge.

When you add a water wash, the lines dissolve to some extent.  They to not dissolve entirely though.  As you might guess, the harder you press to make your line, the more wash resistant it will be.

As the line dissolves, the pencil tone is then brought into the wash.  So your wash or color tone is darkened slightly.

And I was amazed to learn that the pencils work on wet paper.  If you draw over a wet part of your paper, the pencil more or less dissolves as you draw, making a darker line.  So I want to try wetting the paper entirely, and then making a drawing, and then applying wash tones, to see what that effect will be.

The bottom line is that the drawing remains transparent.  It does not turn to mud.  Three dimensional forms are still identifiable.  These pencils give a new way to approach our transparent drawings.