Monochrome at Grateful Bread

 

2/3/26 Grateful Bread, Wedgwood neighborhood

Ching and I had a long-overdue sketchy catch-up. Grateful Bread’s relaxing ambiance was a good opportunity to express my newly reignited love for monochrome colored pencil sketching. I don’t know why I don’t do this more often on location. The material – a single Derwent Drawing pencil – is as simple as can be, and that simplicity makes it easy to talk and listen without distraction.

Actually, I do know why I don’t do it more often. In the past, I have occasionally used non-soluble colored pencils in the field, most often with soft Prismacolors. (Here are some I did a few years ago – in the rain! I’d forgotten that secret superpower of non-soluble pencils.) Soft is the operative word here; I can’t imagine enjoying trying to sketch in the field with a hard pencil (which requires time for the more slowly layered approach of traditional colored pencils). Yet even with soft Prismacolors, I have felt impatient; they still take too long to build darker values.

It’s different with Derwent Drawing pencils. Now I would choose them for on-location use any time over Prismacolors or other soft pencils in my possession. It’s not just that they’re soft; it’s the combination of softness plus incomparably thick cores. For the first time, a non-soluble pencil seems like it could keep up with my field demands for an efficient dry tool.

My next challenge, then, will be to sketch outdoors with one Drawing pencil. Would I be able to do something like I did below with a photo? 

2/2/26 photo reference