Saturday, December 20, 2025

Charlotte’s Door (Plus Opacity Comparison)

 

12/15/25 Maple Leaf neighborhood

This neighbor’s door has an undecorated wreath. It faces perpendicular to the street, so I have a good view of it from an upstairs side window. Just as I was finishing up, Charlotte came home and turned off the porch light! Whew, just made it!

Material and process notes: After I published my review of the Derwent Drawing Pencils with new colors, I was thinking about how opaque the white pencils are and wondered how opaque the rest of the colors are (I’ve updated the review post with swatches on black paper). Since my mind is so much on nocturnes lately (or faux nocturnes), I thought it would be interesting to make a few sample swatches of the pencils I think of as among the most opaque and compare them to Drawing.

I picked out a few colors from Drawing, then tried to find close matches in each of the other lines. (Strangely, it was difficult to find exact matches between Drawing and Lightfast, both made by Derwent.) I have a small set of Holbein, so my matches were not close in some cases. Each swatch was two layers applied with heavy pressure.

Swatches made in Uglybook sketchbook. The whites sampled here are all a warmish off-white except Holbein, which is the basic white.

Making swatches simultaneously with these five pencil lines, all among my softest, made me realize that Drawing is the least dusty of the five, and also the most “moist and creamy” (at the risk of sounding like a cake). It also confirmed that Caran d’Ache Luminance is the “driest,” despite being soft.   

The sketch was made with Derwent Drawing. Effortlessly opaque, and they blend like a dream.



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