COLORED PENCILS

I like colored pencils and it seems I need to have lots and lots of them in my possession for me to feel I have enough of them. Because I had never counted them and had no idea of how many there were in that box where I keep them I was content.  I knew there were a lot of pencils and all was fine in my little corner of the world and life was good.

I have soft leaded pencils that go on smoothly and blend with one another beautifully. I have pencils with harder lead that play nicely with one another and I now have a fair number of water color pencils that I can use with or without water with great results either way.

I have pencils that were very inexpensive and pencils that I bought one at a time because they were that expensive. Some of my pencils have been with me for a very long time and some were purchased only recently. The ones I like best are my Faber Castell Design Spectracolor pencils. They go on so smoothly and shading and blending with these pencils makes working with them a pleasure. Those may be my favorites but I like all of my other pencils too.

One day last week I decided to make color charts of my pencils. This is the type of project that a person does when she is bored or is having a problem with a project and needs to take a break and do something that doesn’t require any brain work so an idea for solving said problem might formulate in those little gray cells.

Anyway, back to the pencils and the color charts. Once the charts were filled in I went a step further and for some reason I cannot explain I counted the pencils. Big mistake!!

I shouldn’t have done that because once counted they had a number and now I have to decide if I really need that set of 72 pencils that I have been thinking about buying. How do you know if what you have is enough? Right now I have 254 colored pencils. Is that enough? Maybe there are colors out there that I could really use and if I had them perhaps my drawings would look so much better than they do now. Perhaps I’ll find some pencils that I like even better than my beloved Faber Castell Design Spectracolor pencils. 254 pencils don’t sound like all that many pencils now, does it?  Have I been deluding myself into thinking I have a lot of pencils? I’ll bet everyone else who works in colored pencil has twice that many. I really do need to buy that set of 72 pencils.....don’t I?

When the color charts and the counting was finished and I still hadn’t come up with a solution to the problem with the other thing I was working on I devised another way to waste spend my time. I decided to do a drawing using only one type of colored pencil for the whole drawing rather than mixing different types together the way I usually do. I decided that I’d do this with each type of pencils. That should keep my mind of the weather and give it time to work out that solution to the aforementioned problem with the project that is at a dead end and needs to be completed for a very important event that is coming up on the 15th of this month.

So……………………. here’s the first drawing. I had to take photos because the scanner doesn’t work well with the drawings still in the tablet. It might help if you click on the photos to enlarge them. Then again it may be no help at all.

I used my Martha Stewart colored pencils for this one and it’s the first time I’ve used these pencils. I really enjoyed working with these pencils and can see myself using them often. I love the names of some of the colors. Leave it to Martha to come up with a color called rhubarb. The photo does not do justice to the colors.

For this one I used my Prismacolor or Eagle Verithins. The paper I’m working on is a vellum surface mixed media paper and not the paper I would normally use when working with these pencils but the results are okay if not spectacular. Again I must apologise for the photography and  tell you that the colors are not this washed out on the actual drawing.

 This last one was done using my favorite Faber Castell Design Spectracolor pencils. The one problem I see with using them alone is they have a softer lead that does not come to a fine point when sharpened so fine line detail is a bit of a problem and again, I would normally use these pencils on another type of paper.

I still have 5 more pencil brands or types and the solution to the problem with that dumb project still hasn’t resolved itself so I may make this into a series of mother and child mermaids. If I buy those other pencils I may end up with a series of 9 drawings….or not.

I do hope you are having a good day and as always, thanks for stopping by.