Colored Pencils with Woodward

 

5/26/26 Derwent Drawing pencils in Stillman & Birn Zeta sketchbook (Colin Woodward's colored pencil workshop)

As I mentioned a few weeks ago, I’ve been enjoying bingeing on Colin Woodward’s relaxing YouTubes that are part travelogue (with drone videography), part camper van life, and part sketching demos. Although he mostly uses watercolors and water-soluble pencils and crayons, I viewed one demo in which he used non-soluble colored pencils. When he offered a 90-minute mini-workshop on this medium, I knew it would be a good opportunity to ask questions and learn from him live on Zoom.

Almost all his demos, from both reference photos and plein air, are of northern Irish landscapes that are completely foreign to me. Trees, especially, seem like airy, formless hazes of foliage – so different from the strong, sculptural shapes of Pacific Northwest conifers. Regardless of medium, I knew the subject matter would be challenging.

Since Woodward didn’t specify a pencil brand, I decided to use only Derwent Drawing pencils. I know from his videos that he likes to use lots and lots of colors – a far wider range than I would typically use in the limited-palette fashion I tend to favor. He has a sharp eye for seeing tiny bits of color in his subjects that I don’t notice until he calls them out with a fistful of materials, often including some unexpected hues. I even wondered if the muted, nature-based Drawing palette would be too limited for his methods and whatever landscape he chose, so I wanted to put that to the test.

Look at all the colors in this sketch -- way more than I would typically use! But I did need some of them just to mix hues that I found lacking in the Derwent Drawing line.

Indeed, that was my first challenge: None of the greens in the Drawing line were warm enough for the greens I saw in the reference image (a field of bluebells in Killynether woods). It was a good challenge to use the Drawing palette’s inadequate yellows (two are quite similar, and both are warm) to warm up the greens.

This formless mass of "stuff" is the kind of scene I usually run from!
(Reference photo by Colin Woodward) 

In addition, this type of composition, which he tends to favor, is also foreign to me: With no central focal point other than the varying angles of distant trunks, the picture is more about capturing a mass of “stuff” than identifiable forms – the kind of view I usually run away from because it’s so . . . so formless!

The colored pencil Woodward uses most in his demos is Derwent Inktense, which, as we all know, explodes with vibrant, saturated hues with just a drop of water. It’s not difficult to get high contrasts and deep, dark values with those pencils quickly. That made me especially interested in seeing how he would use non-soluble pencils when he couldn’t rely on water to bring out their vibrancy. (I wasn’t the only one with this interest; nearly all my classmates brought it up, too.)

The answer is what I suspected: It just took a lot longer to apply all the dry pencils without the help of water. He makes many tiny marks to create a nearly Impressionistic result that’s unexpected for colored pencils. Instead of solidly blending layers of color, his approach relies more on optical blending (my term, not his) that evokes pointillism.

It was a thoroughly enjoyable, even relaxing workshop working in a way that I’ve not tried before with very different subject matter than I am likely to encounter in these parts. And I actually like my result (not often true of class projects)!

Pencil notes: In my review of the expanded Derwent Drawing line, I wondered out loud whether the muted, natural color range could suffice as someone’s sole pencil set. With this completely natural landscape as the subject, I still found Drawing’s palette lacking. (One of these days, I’ll get to the post I’ve started making notes for: If I had to give up all colored pencils except a certain limited quantity, let’s say 75, which would I keep? It would be convenient to simply keep 72 Derwent Drawing pencils, but I know that wouldn’t do. Which colors would stay, and which other brands and colors would I add in?)