Pencilvember: Derwent Lightfast

 

Reference photo by Frank Koyama

As much as I enjoyed using Derwent Lightfast, I decided to cut the week short because I have at least two more pencil brands I want to use during Pencilvember. I’m having fun using the same brand for several days running, then switching to another brand. The uninterrupted succession teaches me nuances of each brand while they are fresh in my memory.

When I have a self-imposed time limit of 20 minutes, one thing I really appreciate about using super-soft pencils like Lightfast is that I can use the side of the pencil tip to cover a lot of area quickly. The pencils are almost like charcoal (without the dreaded mess, of course). You can especially see this in Charli and Kuzya (below). In each case, I spent half the time on the eyes to nail the expression. That done, I could get the rest down efficiently by scribbling with the core’s broad side.

Insight: I’m starting to see that my degree of accuracy (or lack thereof) isn’t determined much by the length of time I take. I can get proportions right or wrong, regardless, which means most of my time is used in applying many layers of color. This is an unexpected outcome of my Pencilvember practice, but it’s not a bad thing to discover. It means that once I establish the proportions (right or wrong), I can give a drawing as much or as little time as I want, and the outcome will just be more finished looking, the longer I work on it. I don’t have to decide at the beginning whether a piece will be more “finished” or not.

The part I’m not happy about is this: Despite the short time I’m taking with these, they still look nearly as tight as the drawings I used to take hours to make. For the rest of Pencilvember, I’m going to challenge myself to loosen up in terms of expression as well as color application. This is always a tough one for me, but I want to push in the direction of caricature. I tried it a few years ago when I was heavily into human portraiture, and it felt way more challenging than it should have been. Maybe animals will be easier.