Fueled by Clouds & Coffee: Pencilvember Finale: Museum Aquarelle

Wednesday, December 3, 2025

Pencilvember Finale: Museum Aquarelle

Slightly exaggerated smiles for Bug and the first cat below.

As with all art challenges, it was rewarding to participate in Pencilvember again, but I’m happy and relieved to be done! For my final week, I used my favorite watercolor pencils, Caran d’Ache Museum Aquarelles. Even in their dry state, their ultra-softness and thick cores were ideal for the fast and loose quality I was going for with these 20-minute sketches. I thought adding light washes to intensify values would help me in my quest for speed. However, as much as I like using watercolor pencils for foliage and urban scenes, I don’t like the way applying water takes away the texture of fur when I’m drawing animals (unless I have time to wait for the water to dry so that additional dry layers can be added on top). I ended up using water very sparingly.

This is a good time to talk about the Bee mixed media sketchbook I used throughout Pencilvember. It has a lovely tooth that takes colored pencils beautifully. Although I didn’t use enough water to really test it, the paper had no problem taking the light washes that I did apply. I also appreciated the 8-by-8-inch square format, which was ideal for pet portraits.

It’s too bad the paper seems to come only with a wire binding, which is my least favorite to use (this book was given to me by ArtSpot of Edmonds when I participated in the store’s benefit for PAWS last summer). At my desk, it was fine, but I don’t like carrying a wire binding on location or the way the pages rub against each other (especially with pencil usage).

On the other hand, a wirebound sketchbook has one benefit that I hadn’t thought of when Pencilvember began: Several of my subjects were pets of friends. If I had made the portraits in my usual hardbound sketchbooks (or even a staplebound Uglybook), I would have been reluctant to tear pages out. The spiral binding made it easy to pull sketches out and send them to those friends as a surprise (and it always makes me happy to imagine the recipient’s delight).

Mona Lisa smile for Whiski

See notes below on how I experimented with color to help me sketch the raccoon's black fur.

Here are a few more things I learned toward the end of Pencilvember and in my final week:

While still using photos as my main references, I tried giving imaginary touches to some of these. I used to think drawing from imagination meant that I had to pull everything directly out of my head; I now know that’s nonsense. Pros use lots of reference images, and so can I.
One of the challenges of mixing imagination with realism is maintaining light logic. When I used multiple reference photos with varying light sources, I had to choose a single light source and imagine how it would light the imagined part so that it would be consistent with the rest of the image.
The raccoon (my own reference photo of a visitor to our back deck a couple of years ago) gave me an opportunity to try an experiment on the fly. One of my challenges with black fur is showing the distinction between the local dark color and shading on that fur. As a quick shorthand, both in execution and in helping me identify the distinctions quickly, I used green first to quickly indicate the local color. Then I used dark blue to shade the black fur. I like both the effect and the ease of thinking this through in a limited time. I know I could also do this by varying the values of plain ol’ black, but somehow that requires more thinking! (Besides, a green and blue raccoon is just more fun, don’t you think?)

I deliberately used unnatural colors for this challenge to keep myself from getting
fixated on trying to "match" reality, but in Mookie's case, she really did have pink ears!

I can always use more practice, but these two solid months of drawing animals during InkTober and Pencilvember have given me the confidence to get back into commissioned pet portraiture much more quickly and efficiently – and that was my ultimate goal with both challenges. Win!

Although my intention was to show the pencils I used each week, I kept forgetting. So here they all are. It always feels so good to have pencils in hand! Thank you, colored pencils, for an enjoyable and instructive Pencilvember!