Going Dark – and Darker

 

10/26/26 Cd'A Museum Aquarelle pencils, Neocolor II crayons and F-C Pitt Artist Brush Pens (photo reference)

With water-soluble pencils (and more recently crayons) as my primary color medium for many years now, I sometimes think I’ve gotten the darkest values dark enough while I’m on location. Then when I get home and put my sketchbook on the scanner, I realize that I could have pushed them even darker. The single biggest (and probably most important) lesson that markers have taught me this InkTober is that it never hurts (and often helps) for the darks to go even darker – and markers make that easier and faster than my usual water-soluble materials.

For this sketch, I used a photo reference so that I could focus on experimenting. First I used water-soluble pencils and crayons in my usual way. Then I leaned in hard with Faber-Castell Pitt Artist Brush Pens for the darkest areas under and behind the foreground tree. I didn’t like the abrupt, hard edges of the marker against the softness of the other media, so I tried to fuzz the transitions with more pencil and crayon (with mixed results).

I wanted to retain the paper's tooth showing through as bits of reflected light,
so I used an Indigo Necolor II.

For the background trees (detail at left), I wanted to avoid the solidity of markers, so I used a crayon in the same color as the Indigo marker. Using markers for trees will probably never appeal to me because I’d lose the tiny sparkles of white from the paper’s tooth that impart the look of foliage reflecting light.

To check this out, for the reddish-orange foreground bushes (detail below), I used a dark magenta marker in the deepest shadow area. I couldn’t get rid of that pasted-on look, and I think it would have been better to stay with crayons only.

I’m looking forward to experimenting further – and very happy now that I took the plunge to devote InkTober to markers!

The dark magenta shadow looks pasted on.