My new Derwent Inktense pencils arrived yesterday but I didn't have time to unpack them. Over breakfast this morning - I'm no use to anyone before coffee - I unpacked them and had a little play.
I had heard good things about the Inktense pencils from friends, easy to use, vibrant colours, easy and clean to travel with. I used a waterbrush to wet the pencil marks after colouring in the squares and the colours were indeed bright and vibrant. My only wish was that I had ordered a bigger box than the 12 crayons! This led me to try mixing the colours on the page before adding the water and that seemed to work out OK. As these are ink pencils, once dry the colours are permanent. They can also be used on fabrics (oops don't get on clothes unintentionally!). While drinking my coffee I drew a shell and added a light touch of Inktense pencil. I told Ian I was doing my morning meditation drawing... I wasn't that happy with the drawing it was the wrong shape so I will return to the same shell in a few weeks and see if my skills have improved - I quite like the idea of re-visiting the same objects and seeing how i've progressed.
Shell
The "Day 4" on the page indicates that this is one of the drawings towards the sketch challenge Brenda set us in this week's Sketchbook Skool, it's "75 Days of Sketching with Pen." The rules are simple do a drawing, in any type of pen every day for 75 days. I just noticed that it says blue or black ink only and I used some brown on this one but I did the outline in black Uni Pin so hopefully that counts. As for drawing technique and subject - anything goes but NO pencil under-drawings! Brenda suggests using a separate sketchbook purely for the challenge sketches. The one I started using (a Derwent one) was pretty awful for anything other than the Uni Pin pens - with fountain pen or dip pen the ink instantly "bleeds" into the paper. I searched around the cupboards and shelves for another sketchbook and found an A5 size Winsor & Newton one that was, so far, unused. I chopped out the three pages that i'd already done and stuck them into the new book. My only problem with the new sketchbook is that the very edges of some of the sheets were stuck together, where it is ring-bound. I think it must have got damp either in storage (in the warehouse not here!) or in transit. Oh, and before I transferred I checked I would have enough pages! Right ho, now I need to go and make myself a schedule of work for the OCA Drawing 1 course as i've heard from my tutor...
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