Return of the Warm/Cool Pairing

 

4/7/26 Maple Leaf neighborhood (facing south)

Years ago I made a series of urban sketches using a bicolor vermillion/blue pencil. Working with just two high-contrast hues, a warm and a cool, helped me to see and develop values more clearly. (I became so intrigued by this method that I even started thinking about developing an urban sketching workshop on the topic – and then 2020 happened.) Using a bicolor pencil also appealed to the pencil geek in me (and it turns out that the traditional Japanese Prussian Blue/Vermillion pencil has an interesting history).

Although it’s not as geeky-cool as a bicolor, I’ve lately been taking two Derwent Drawing pencils in my daily-carry using the same warm/cool principle. All the monochrome (or nearly monochrome) sketches I made as a doomscrolling prevention tactic led to a huge ulterior benefit far beyond avoiding doomscrolling: I started feeling more confident that I could make sketches like these easily while standing, as long as I stayed relatively small.

4/8/26 Maple Leaf neighborhood (facing north) 

For these sketches, which are of the same Maple Leaf intersection facing north and south, I used Terracotta and Delft Blue. Instead of focusing on values, I'm using the two hues to help push the background further from the foreground. I’ll change out the color pairings regularly, which will be fun to explore.

Sketchbook notes: It’s already starting to annoy me. Although the pocket-size Stillman & Birn Zeta sketchbook is a handy size and weight while taking fitness walks, its landscape format is limiting. I saw a squarish composition that I liked better for each of these, but I can’t open up a landscape book to sketch across the gutter to accommodate a square, so I was stuck with this rectangle (and it’s unlikely that I’ll sketch a panorama on fitness walks). Given my current mission to fill sketchbooks, even if they have shortcomings, I’ll probably begrudgingly continue to use it, but not without complaints. (This post contains other mutterings about it.)