Aquatic Adventures

Recently, color pencils have been frustrating me. They give great control, subtle shades and high precision, and in all of that they’re pretty much the best you can get. But they also carry two significant disadvantages: They’re pale and they’re slow. Pallor first: Color pencils always produce slightly muted tones. You can get denser colors by layered application, but there’s a real limit there. If you press too hard, you’ll only get a waxy streak. Second slowness: Filling larger areas with color pencils takes forever. Especially if you want decent coloring, and therefore work in several incremental layers, with stroke direction distributed so the area looks smooth. Strong coloring needs many layers on top of each other. That was the reason that my hitherto best color pencil work took over nine hours. That’s just way too long for hobby. I don’t really have the patience to split a piece over an entire week; besides, different moods would make the end result rather incoherent.

So, since pencils have some inherent drawbacks, I looked around for alternatives. The significant ones are markers, pastels and painting. I was only looking for color techniques; I still like pencil drawing just fine (although I haven’t made one in a while). So, to check the list:

• Markers produce flat, luminescent color. Their main disadvantages are the tendency to streak and the mediocre color blending. Both pretty much require expensive markers for decent results. Cheap markers will ruin any artwork. Example
• Pastels normally come in chalks (oblong sticks) or pencil shape. They have very strong coverage, and tend to look kind of smeared. Good for violent coloring, poor for precision work.  Example
• Paintings come in different flavours. Watercolor is the simple stuff you know from school, acrylic uses some organic solvent and oil colors ought to be known to everyone – I’ve talked to people who painted oil before, and was told they were completely impractical – noxious fumes, weeks of drying time, etc. For a curious novice like me, watercolors were okay. I still had a school set sitting around, with a few brushes.

So I spent a while with those watercolors. The results were passable, but didn’t really enthuse me. I had trouble with paper crinkling, and the colors were so solid and dull. I went one step further, and decided to try out aquarelle. I managed to borrow a small box from someone (the small, simple ones are not expensive, anyway) and gave it a try. The colors were great: Strong, vibrant and still transparent. I’m good at mixing colors, so I have a very wide palette available. It’s easy to cover large areas and fine details are possible, too, although not easy. The large amount of water gave my paper issues, so I bought a small block of A4 aquarelle paper. A 10€ for 20 sheets, it’s tremendously expensive, but also works much, much better than anything else. I think that if I actually use up the block, I’ll have put at least 40 hours of work into the paintings, and the 10€ will seem rather insignificant. That’s the other nice thing about aquarels: They go fast, at least at the level of care and precision I’m working at. An A4 sheet with concept drawing takes a good 150 minutes. Compare that to 4-5 hours for a color pencil drawing of equal size. Of course, I’m still at the beginning, and I don’t know if I won’t discover problems to put me off aquarelle in the future – I thought color pencils might be very nice, too. They are, but not really in a way that suits my time constraints and temperament.

As a final image, I present to you one of my recent aquarelles.