colored pencil on colored paper, 6″ x 4″

“Sketchy” is a style in Harmony that I like the most. Besides being imprecise and somewhat unpredictable by nature, it does not take kindly to thinking as you draw. The result is always a disaster, and the later in the process it happens the worse it looks. Since this is my first attempt to draw a horse in Harmony, disasters happened more than once. Luckily, I only use black and white, so for the most part when black gets out of control I managed to offset it with white. It’s not exactly erasing, but I think it works.

Other things I learned:

- colors in the color wheel come out anything but what I select and what shows in the preview square. Grays always have some odd tint, so I had to drop the idea of using them, or this would be one psychedelic horse head. I was not in the mood for psychedelic at all.

- apparently just because you can draw on the sides of the toolbox that is centered at the top of the page, it does not mean that you can draw behind it too; that’s how the horse lost nice pointy ears that I was going to give her

Why do your own tests? Because sometimes it’s not clear which technical standards manufacturers use, how much their ratings differ from other brands, and depending on the type of pencils the available information may not be clear. Case in point: watercolor pencils. Often, you can’t tell if the information applies to the dry or diluted state of the pencil.

Some manufacturers like Caran d’Ache thoughtfully indicate resistance to light right on their pencils, Lyra puts it in a slip inside their pencil boxes, so if you are married to one of those brands and don’t use any others, choosing your pencils by those marks is all you have to do to insure that your work will stay vibrant for decades to come. That is, until you run into a situation where you really want to use this particular color, but its resistance to light is so low that you have to look at other manufacturers for something similar and more durable.

The next best thing a manufacturer can do after marking their pencils is to put lightfastness information into one document.

Manon did a wonderful job researching documents related to lightfastness of Derwent, Prismacolor, and seven other brands of colored pencils, gathering results in one article, and posting links for each brand.

Derwent makes charts for all their lines easy to find. The article mentiones some of them but the links changed since the article was published, so here are updated ones: Artists, Studio, Coloursoft, Drawing, Graphitint, Aquatone, Inktense, Watercolour. The full list of documents for pencils and blocks can be found here: http://www.pencils.co.uk/search.aspx?s=lightfastness.

My dear Prismacolor only makes this information readily available for Premier Watercolor Colored Pencils, Premier Soft Core Colored Pencils and Premier Art Stix, and Premier Verithin Colored Pencils. Their web site does not offer search, and I lack time and determination to hunt down the rest of their lines. Some day. Maybe.

Referencing the charts is a little more of leg work but still convenient. These two brands are the ones I use the most, so links to their charts go here as much for my own convenience as to benefit another fellow artist.

Still, nothing beats your own testing that allows you to see real results, not some printed or online images. Manor guides you through such testing and discusses the results that can be quite surprising.

Tamara Lee – Thoughtful

Her entire shop there is full of wonderful, delicate items. Pleasure to see and surely even more pleasure to own.

I haven’t visited Harmony for a long time, not even sure why. It’s a great place to get unstuck (and I am stuck thoroughly with an abstract piece right now), to unwind after a stressful day, and to doodle away no matter what your circumstances are.

Harmony is perfectly capable of helping you make realistic art, but that I could do on my own, right? So for the most part me and Harmony create strange things like this one.

Miniature – graphite pencil on canvas, 3.5″ x 2.5″

Things learned with this one:

- only soft graphite works, harder grades scrape the priming off the canvas without leaving noticeable marks
- for blending, small sponge makeup applicators and bristle brushes work best
- common erasers are of little help when you need a highlight or to scrape off a mistake, but kneaded eraser works wonderfully (I am using a Koh-i-Noor Hardtmuth eraser that comes with its own case and like it better than other brands I had before)
- an x-acto knife can be good for small bright highlights, but using it requires care because it easily gets deep into priming and scrapes it off
- areas treates with a x-acto knife are still good for blending tools, but pencil marks behave unpredictably, so better be avoided

My other canvas experiment that is yet to be finished is a mix of the black India ink and graphite. I am not sure how I like the result so far, but we’ll see.

The Distorted Street Faces of Andre Muniz Gonzaga