Carolers

12/11/25 Carolers from Fairview Elementary

 

12/4/25 Holiday Harmony Pop

Holiday music has been the focus of Happy Hour at Aegis this month. The best carolers were the first graders from neighboring Fairview School (the group was larger than I sketched above, but their performance was short). As you might imagine, they were a squirmy bunch, but their festive hats (many too large for their small heads!) and earnest performance made them a joy to watch. A few older kids also read the poem “The Night Before Christmas” impressively. Looking around at the residents, I could see that almost everyone was engaged and enjoying their performance, especially Greg.

An adult group, a quartet called Holiday Harmony Pop, sang festive favorites wearing fun head gear. I sketched them twice: My usual way and then as blind contours. Can you guess which is which? 😉

Three Pups, Three Materials

 

12/19/25 Jaxon (Pentel Pocket)

12/19/25 Roxy (Holbein) (all drawings on Lenox Cotton)

12/21/25 Sammy (Derwent Drawing)

I made these pup portraits as a gift for a friend. Although they won’t look very cohesive displayed together, I felt like making each dog with a different material. Jaxon was made with my favorite Pentel Pocket brush pen. I used Derwent Drawing pencils on Sammy because I’m currently having a lovefest with that set. Holbein is not a pencil I ever think to reach for, but since I had them out for the opacity comparison I did recently, I used them on Roxy. I could hardly remember the last time I used them to sketch anything.

I don’t know what it is about Holbein: They blend beautifully; they are deliciously soft; they feel as close to graphite as any colored pencil can (which is a good thing). Yet I’ve never purchased more than the 50 colors I originally bought. Exorbitant price notwithstanding, I have never felt compelled to. I want to love them, and yet I don’t. Especially now that Derwent Drawing comes in a full palette.

Chilly: Caran d’Ache Alpine Frost Bicolors

 

Chilly!

Multi-colored lights? Decorated cookies? Greeting cards exchanged with friends? What’s the holiday thing you look forward to most? Me? It’s the Caran d’Ache winter-themed bicolors set, of course!

Caran d’Ache has thrown me for a loop at least a couple of times with this limited-edition series. The most exciting release was certainly the first one in 2019, which fulfilled a long-standing wish for bicolor pencils with water-soluble cores – it seemed an ideal, compact solution for urban sketching. Although it wasn’t winter-themed, its release right before the holidays made it obvious that it was intended as a gifty item.

Two years later, Cd’A released the Wonder Forest set, again, just in time for the holidays and clearly winter themed. This set remains my favorite of the series, both for its bright red tin and the selection of colors included. Its release set off new expectations: Now that there were two such sets, would there be more? Would a new one each holiday season be too much to hope for?

No, it would not! Only one year later, the gold-tinned Color Treasure set was released. Now things were really getting exciting: Surely we could reasonably expect another set the following holiday season!

Sadly, the 2023 holiday season came and went, with no bicolors to be seen. Last year, however, brought a different surprise – and not a good one. In August, timed for back-to-school, it seems, the Claim Your Style set appeared – not in a tin to match its predecessors but in a flimsy cardboard box.

I had hoped that was an anomaly and that this winter would bring us a nice tin again. Alas, those days seem to be over. Caran d’Ache’s 2025 holiday theme, Alpine Frost, is an attractive, albeit seasonably chilly, collection of gifty items again. Of course, I was thrilled to see that the collection included a bicolors set – but contained in cardboard again.

Cardboard box

Slide-out drawer reveals the bicolor pencils (a second layer is concealed below the first).

Compared to last year’s flimsy back-to-school edition, Alpine Frost’s box is sturdier, and the slide-out drawer gives it a nice presentation. Still, as a limited-edition “collectible,” a metal tin like the previous silver, red and gold editions would have expressed quality, lasting durability, and the esthetics of a cohesive series – a series that would inspire completionism and FOMO! For heaven’s sake, Cd’A marketing people: Are you all asleep? (Yes, I used to work in marketing; so shoot me.)

The set includes nine bicolor pencils (18 colors) and a small brush.

The other quality that’s lost with cardboard is the implied travel potential. Say you have a friend who has sighed longingly with the desire to be a travel sketcher “someday.” If you gave them a sturdy, metal tin filled with a compact set of water-soluble pencils, you are telling them that you believe in their dream. The set encourages being popped impulsively into a bag for the next weekend getaway. Cardboard? Hmmm, its corners might get munched in a backpack, or it might not recover from a drop in wet sand.

As usual with the bicolors, no color numbers or names are indicated on the barrels.

My much greater quibble, however, is with Alpine Frost’s color selection. First, I’ll acknowledge that it’s a delicate, visually appealing palette for a winter-themed set. The barrels look beautiful together – if the pencils were tableware for a casual holiday open house serving eggnog and bite-sized Costco quiches. But as my swatches below will show, half the colors are too pale to use in a water-dissolved state; they become invisible washes. All the previous sets included enough of a color range that each could possibly stand alone for casual sketching. Not so for Alpine Frost (another reason it’s not a practical gift for that travel sketcher wannabe). These tints leave me cold, and most of the other colors have already appeared in previous bicolors sets.

Swatches made in Hahnamuhle student-grade watercolor sketchbook. A small dot below the color number indicates that it's the color's first appearance in bicolor form.

Although I typically don’t swatch water-soluble colored pencils on black paper because I know their washed states will mostly disappear, a reader requested it, so I made swatches below. For geeky kicks, I included swatches of white in Supracolor and Museum Aquarelle, too. The water-soluble cores in Caran d’Ache bicolors are the same as Prismalo; these swatches show the relative opacity of the three Caran d’Ache pencil lines.

Swatches made in Stillman & Birn Nova sketchbook

By the way, you may be wondering how acquisition of this set fits in with my commitment to downsizing. When I began the process last year, I considered carefully how to manage all my pencil collections and micro-collections. For example, within the vast category of vintage colored pencils, I was fairly indiscriminate early on (as many collectors are when they begin), specialized later, and eventually pared down to the micro-collections I most enjoy.

I gave the same thought to my various collections of contemporary products that were limited in production or otherwise “special.” FOMO can be a powerful driver, and I know I’m susceptible to it, regardless of my downsizing status. I try to be vigilant by asking myself before every purchase: Will this really bring me joy? Or am I on FOMO autopilot?

The Caran d’Ache bicolors sets used to bring me great joy, both in terms of my lifelong fondness for bicolors and their potential for urban sketching. But after two years of disappointments, this might be the last I buy.

The holidays are the right time for a family portrait.

A Trip to Winslow

 

12/18/25 Light rail and ferry riders

Once my life settled again after I knew Greg was safe and well taken care of, one of my priorities was to get back in touch with people. I have certain friends whom I have stayed in contact with through holiday cards or occasional emails, but it had been years and sometimes decades since I had last seen them, even though they lived locally. If there is one lesson I have learned over the past several difficult years, it is that life is short and unpredictable. If I want to see people, I can’t wait for “someday” when I’m – what, “less busy”? When would that ever be? It must be now.

One of those people was my fourth grade teacher at John Muir Elementary. Amazingly, I have kept in touch with Nan ever since. Truthfully, though, I must thank my mom for doing the heavy lifting. Always a prolific letter writer, my mother and Nan had made a connection and corresponded regularly all through my busy early adult life. I was more sporadic with my communication, but our connection was never lost.

I had seen Nan in person a couple of times as an adult – first at my wedding in 1989, and then again about 20 years ago. She lived on the peninsula – only a ferry ride and a drive away. On Thursday we got together on Bainbridge Island about halfway between us. We spent a lovely few hours catching up and becoming reacquainted in a way that we never had time for during our working (and, for her, child-rearing) years. We vowed to get together again soon.

These sketches I made around my ferry rides are not about that lifelong friendship directly, but I thought about her as I made them, both coming and going. I know they will always remind me of her and the day we reconnected over a leisurely lunch.

Charlotte’s Door (Plus Opacity Comparison)

 

12/15/25 Maple Leaf neighborhood

This neighbor’s door has an undecorated wreath. It faces perpendicular to the street, so I have a good view of it from an upstairs side window. Just as I was finishing up, Charlotte came home and turned off the porch light! Whew, just made it!

Material and process notes: After I published my review of the Derwent Drawing Pencils with new colors, I was thinking about how opaque the white pencils are and wondered how opaque the rest of the colors are (I’ve updated the review post with swatches on black paper). Since my mind is so much on nocturnes lately (or faux nocturnes), I thought it would be interesting to make a few sample swatches of the pencils I think of as among the most opaque and compare them to Drawing.

I picked out a few colors from Drawing, then tried to find close matches in each of the other lines. (Strangely, it was difficult to find exact matches between Drawing and Lightfast, both made by Derwent.) I have a small set of Holbein, so my matches were not close in some cases. Each swatch was two layers applied with heavy pressure.

Swatches made in Uglybook sketchbook. The whites sampled here are all a warmish off-white except Holbein, which is the basic white.

Making swatches simultaneously with these five pencil lines, all among my softest, made me realize that Drawing is the least dusty of the five, and also the most “moist and creamy” (at the risk of sounding like a cake). It also confirmed that Caran d’Ache Luminance is the “driest,” despite being soft.   

The sketch was made with Derwent Drawing. Effortlessly opaque, and they blend like a dream.

Formidable Dome Room at Arctic Club

 

12/17/25 Arctic Club Hotel Dome Room (full panorama)

Decades ago, I attended a work-related event in the Arctic Club Hotel’s majestic Dome Room. Although I hadn’t been back there since, I clearly remembered how spectacular the space was. Of course, I wasn’t a sketcher back then, so I wouldn’t have considered how formidable the Dome is as a sketch subject. Now I know.

While a few stayed in the lobby, most USk Seattle sketchers bravely took on the Dome, which was worthy of our attention. Seeing it as a study of black and white contrasts kept me from thinking about perspective and other such fussing.

To complete the landscape panorama page spread, I went outside to sketch one of the many walrus gargoyles on the historic building, which was built in 1916. Originally called the Arctic Building, it’s a City of Seattle landmark on the National Register of Historic Places.

After the hard work inside the Dome, it was a welcome relief to join other sketchers at a drink & draw at the hotel’s Polar Bar, where the bear himself was a much easier subject. What a fun afternoon!

Polar Bar inside the Arctic Club Hotel (I thought the bar napkin would be a perfect piece of collage to add to my sketch journal page, but the glue I dotted onto the back stayed looking wet even after it had dried, which is not the look I wanted. Not sure what kind of glue would have dried more transparently on that thin, absorbent paper.)

The formidable Dome!

The Opposite Bush

 

12/14/25 Maple Leaf neighborhood

The house on the corner lights up later in the season than the rest of my neighbors. It’s always a simple strand of lights on the bushes near the porch. When I compared this to last year’s sketch, I could see that the owner had put the lights on the bush on the opposite side this time. I can’t see much, of course, but I can tell where the lights are relative to the pale illumination from the porchlight in the grass.

Update: After I made this sketch, she added a string of lights on the other side, too.