Maisy and Sammy

 

4/6/26 Sammy (reference photo by Tom Constantini)

3/21/26 Maisy (reference photo by Natalie Taylor)

Although I haven’t been doing as many commissioned pet portraits lately, I’m happy for the opportunities to practice that keep coming up. Last month when I was an ArtSpot featured artist during Art Walk Edmonds, I demo’d a few pet portraits for visitors who had photos on their phones. I started Maisy on the spot, but then more people came by to chat, and I felt too distracted to finish. I told Maisy’s mom that I’d finish at home and give it to her later. Drawing Maisy with a brush pen gave me a good opportunity to include a stepped-out example in my workshop handout. (My brush pen workshop is tomorrow! I’ll report back soon on how that went.)

The calico was a sadder event. A friend posted on Facebook that his beloved Sammy had just passed away at a ripe old age. It’s always a joy to sketch a beautiful animal, and I hope the gift brings some comfort.

Unexpected: Caran d’Ache + Germanier Colour Set

 

Now that's a tin worth having!

Even as the Caran d’Ache Alpine Frost Bicolors set disappointed me, another newish Caran d’Ache product inspired and interested me more than I expected: the Caran d’Ache + Germanier Colour set (available at Blick). While I don’t go after every celebrity special edition (which Cd’A puts out fairly often), this one called to me because of the unusual color selection and especially the brightly colored metal tin.

A collaboration with Swiss fashion designer Kévin Germanier, the set includes Supracolors in standard colors, Supracolors in metallic colors and four neon colors. Although the metallic colors do not have the water-soluble icon, they are, indeed, water-soluble (as seen in my swatches). 

None of the colors are new or “special” to the Germanier set; they have just been branded as a “special edition,” and some pencils include Germanier’s bubbly icon (symbolizing his over-the-top, bead-laden fashions that he is known for).

Swatched in Hahnemuhle student-grade watercolor sketchbook (as usual, my scanner is not able to show neon colors well)

The four neons are not part of the Supracolor line, as seen by the uncapped ends.

Although the metallics are part of the Supracolor line, their cores are slightly thinner than standard Supracolors.

As with most of these artist/designer collaboration sets, purchasing the set gives free access to an online Creative Class by the celebrity. Whenever I’ve purchased these special editions, I’ve viewed the videos to see what they are about, and some are more inspiring than others. For example, a few years ago when I bought the Beya Rebaï Neocolor II sets, I was intrigued enough by her unusual palette (which was very not-me) that I carried it around for a while to shake up my urban sketching. I even found equivalents in Museum Aquarelle pencils so that I could further experiment with the palette without having to use crayons. It was an informative exercise in color temperature and using colors picked out by someone else (which is always a weird but eye-opening experience).

Since Germanier is a fashion designer, I wasn’t interested in his subject matter, but his unexpected mix of neon and metal was intriguing enough. Although I wouldn’t call the video a “class” or even a tutorial, he gave a spontaneous demo of his approach to sketching an initial design concept.

Kevin Germanier

He “loves” making gradients by blending unexpected hues, like neon green with dark green or neon yellow with metallic gold. Although he didn’t talk much about values directly, it was clear to me as I watched him work that he was applying basic value principles to his wacky palette. For example, he used gold to shade the model’s neon yellow hair. He reserved the darkest standard colors – Ultramarine, Dark Carmine, Grass Green and Black – for the darkest values. (As we’ve all heard, even if grass is red and trees are purple, the work will still “read” correctly if you get the values right.)

His sketch was nearly done here. He pointed out that in this type of sketch, he doesn't bother with trying to convey human proportions, as it's just an initial concept. In fact, he kept referring to her as an "alien" to prevent viewers, I suppose, from thinking this could be an actual model.

What’s that Cream doing in his palette? He said he likes to use off-white on black paper – but then didn’t demo that (Booo – I really wanted to see that!). He also uses Cream for his initial contour drawing (which I thought was the weakest part of the demo, since Cream on white paper is basically invisible on video).

Using the same reference photo of Jaxon, the pup I sketched with a brush pen last week, I used Germanier’s palette and tried to apply his principles. Since I rarely use neon or metallic pencils, his colors are fun to use, and his approach to blending them is a brain shaker-upper.

12/25/25 Caran d'Ache + Germanier Colour set in Bee mixed media sketchbook

In fact, I started thinking . . . what if I pulled a palette of my own unexpected, unrealistic hues and tried them while urban sketching? Not necessarily metallic or neon, but simply colors that I wouldn’t consider using in an urban landscape. It would be similar to phases I’ve gone through of sketching with only red/blue or only a secondary triad, but I’d have to get crazier than that. Hmmm . . . intriguing to consider.

Roku

 

12/4/25 Roku (reference photo by Cristina Corpuz-Martens)

I sketched this handsome Akita, Roku, as a gift for a friend. I’m pleased that Pencilvember helped me learn how to make colored pencil sketches faster (this took less than 30 minutes) while still capturing a reasonable resemblance. It makes a gift like this (not to mention commissions) less burdensome. It’s not often that a drawing challenge helps me in such a practical way. Thirty days well spent!

During the challenge, I used fun, unnatural colors to keep me from spending too much time trying to “match” reality. I have found, though, that the practice had another benefit that came out unexpectedly with Roku. Instead of using straight-up black for the nose and eyes (as I used to with most dogs before the challenge), I impulsively used Indanthrene Blue and mixed it with a little dark brown. I think the result is more interesting than black.

Pencilvember Finale: Museum Aquarelle

Slightly exaggerated smiles for Bug and the first cat below.

As with all art challenges, it was rewarding to participate in Pencilvember again, but I’m happy and relieved to be done! For my final week, I used my favorite watercolor pencils, Caran d’Ache Museum Aquarelles. Even in their dry state, their ultra-softness and thick cores were ideal for the fast and loose quality I was going for with these 20-minute sketches. I thought adding light washes to intensify values would help me in my quest for speed. However, as much as I like using watercolor pencils for foliage and urban scenes, I don’t like the way applying water takes away the texture of fur when I’m drawing animals (unless I have time to wait for the water to dry so that additional dry layers can be added on top). I ended up using water very sparingly.

This is a good time to talk about the Bee mixed media sketchbook I used throughout Pencilvember. It has a lovely tooth that takes colored pencils beautifully. Although I didn’t use enough water to really test it, the paper had no problem taking the light washes that I did apply. I also appreciated the 8-by-8-inch square format, which was ideal for pet portraits.

It’s too bad the paper seems to come only with a wire binding, which is my least favorite to use (this book was given to me by ArtSpot of Edmonds when I participated in the store’s benefit for PAWS last summer). At my desk, it was fine, but I don’t like carrying a wire binding on location or the way the pages rub against each other (especially with pencil usage).

On the other hand, a wirebound sketchbook has one benefit that I hadn’t thought of when Pencilvember began: Several of my subjects were pets of friends. If I had made the portraits in my usual hardbound sketchbooks (or even a staplebound Uglybook), I would have been reluctant to tear pages out. The spiral binding made it easy to pull sketches out and send them to those friends as a surprise (and it always makes me happy to imagine the recipient’s delight).

Mona Lisa smile for Whiski

See notes below on how I experimented with color to help me sketch the raccoon's black fur. 

Here are a few more things I learned toward the end of Pencilvember and in my final week:

• While still using photos as my main references, I tried giving imaginary touches to some of these. I used to think drawing from imagination meant that I had to pull everything directly out of my head; I now know that’s nonsense. Pros use lots of reference images, and so can I.
•  One of the challenges of mixing imagination with realism is maintaining light logic. When I used multiple reference photos with varying light sources, I had to choose a single light source and imagine how it would light the imagined part so that it would be consistent with the rest of the image.
•  The raccoon (my own reference photo of a visitor to our back deck a couple of years ago) gave me an opportunity to try an experiment on the fly. One of my challenges with black fur is showing the distinction between the local dark color and shading on that fur. As a quick shorthand, both in execution and in helping me identify the distinctions quickly, I used green first to quickly indicate the local color. Then I used dark blue to shade the black fur. I like both the effect and the ease of thinking this through in a limited time. I know I could also do this by varying the values of plain ol’ black, but somehow that requires more thinking! (Besides, a green and blue raccoon is just more fun, don’t you think?)

I deliberately used unnatural colors for this challenge to keep myself from getting
fixated on trying to "match" reality, but in Mookie's case, she really did have pink ears!

I can always use more practice, but these two solid months of drawing animals during InkTober and Pencilvember have given me the confidence to get back into commissioned pet portraiture much more quickly and efficiently – and that was my ultimate goal with both challenges. Win!

 Although my intention was to show the pencils I used each week, I kept forgetting. So here they all are. It always feels so good to have pencils in hand! Thank you, colored pencils, for an enjoyable and instructive Pencilvember!

Derwent Lightfast

Caran d'Ache Luminance

Caran d'Ache Museum Aquarelle

Faber-Castell Polychromos

Vintage and contemporary Prismacolor

Pencilvember: Small Breakthrough (and Luminance Illumination)

 

In every challenge in which I have given myself a specific drawing goal (not just the use of a specific medium all month), I usually hit a creative breakthrough point. In a month-long challenge, it often happens around the third week. I think it just takes a couple of weeks to warm up and push past any resistance before a breakthrough can happen. Last week I finally hit that point in Pencilvember: I pushed past being descriptive and moved more in the direction of caricature or imaginative drawing.

The lioness returns from hunting with hungry, squabbling cubs in tow while
the deadbeat king of the forest has been sleeping all day.

In truth, however, I should probably count all of InkTober before that as part of the warm-up. I had hoped to be more expressive and less descriptive when using a brush pen, too, but I never felt like I got there last month. It took a couple more weeks using colored pencils to finally loosen up my always-challenged imagination.

Awakened from her beauty sleep.

Although the first two dogs probably look fairly realistic without much caricature, I exaggerated some of their features. Those tries gave me permission to push harder with the lioness and the two kitties that followed – and what fun they were! I’m pleased to be hitting my goal while staying within my self-made time limit of 20 minutes.

Full of her own beauty.

The last dog’s (below) reference photo was a bit frowny, so I used a second reference photo to help me with the grin and tongue. I’m starting to learn that I can (and should, if necessary) use multiple reference photos when making imaginary drawings. I know pros do this all the time, but as a “realistic” sketcher all these years, I sometimes forget that I can use reference images in whatever way I want to help me do what I’m trying to do. The challenge with multiple references is that the lighting will not be consistent, so I must rely on my own knowledge of light logic if I want the lighting to make sense. (More on this next week in my Pencilvember finale.)

Material notes: These sketches were all done with Caran d’Ache Luminance. Following nearly a week of using Derwent Lightfast, I immediately noticed significant differences between them. While both are extremely soft, Luminance feels strangely “dry” compared to Lightfast. Although I’ve never thought of Lightfast as being “creamy” or “buttery” the way Derwent Drawing colored pencils are, Lightfast are, indeed, creamy compared to Luminance. Huh! Given how much I usually love Caran d’Ache’s premium products (and how mixed my feelings are about many Derwent products), I daresay I prefer Lightfast!

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.

Pencilvember, Week 2: Truncated

Reference photo by Frank Koyama

After Pencilvember Week 1’s good times with soft Prismacolors, I changed to Faber-Castell Polychromos for Week 2. Although I had been planning weekly updates to align with my plan to use a different pencil brand each week, I’ve ended Week 2 early. Here’s why:

When I made all those colored pencil pet portraits the past couple of years, Polychromos had been my go-to, but that’s because I was going for a detailed, realistic look. The hard but highly pigmented Polychromos is ideal for that. What Polychromos is not good for, however, is speed. It’s best used in a traditional way, which is multiple, lightly applied layers – a time-consuming process. The slam-it-down method I use for speed works best with soft colored pencils.

I knew all that going in, but I wanted to challenge myself anyway, and most of these took more than my 20-minute goal – closer to 25 or 30 minutes. I’m not unhappy with the results, but they confirmed that Polychromos is not the best pencil choice when speed is of the essence. It just takes too long to build up dark values. I decided to end Polychromos week early, and I’ll choose a much softer pencil going forward.

On the upside, I’m pleased with other experiments Pencilvember is enabling me to try. Last week I mentioned in an image cutline that when my reference photos were taken in flat lighting, I used a yellow pencil to remind myself where the light would be, if it were more easily visible. This trick also works with subjects in good lighting, but when I don’t want to take the time to create contrast that would indicate the light.

12/11/23 My original sketch of Tucker on
the cover of a Field Notes notebook. The background was painted with ArtGraf water-soluble graphite.

Tucker turned out to be a fitting example of this. When I first sketched him two years ago (above, right), I painted in a dark background behind the lighted side of his face. This time, instead of trying to hastily scribble in a similar contrasting background with colored pencils, I used yellow as a shorthand to indicate the window light.

Tucker is also an excellent example of a point I brought up several months ago in my post offering tips on pet portraiture. If you have a model in good lighting or a good reference photo, the eyes of animals (as well as humans) will show a shadow of the upper eyelid. The strong, frontal light on Tucker’s face was ideal for indicating these shadows. Catching these shadows is not important if realism is not the goal, but they’re hard to resist when they are so clearly visible, which is rarely the case. (This was one of my favorite pet reference photos to work with – an unusual, challenging, three-quarter pose with beautiful natural lighting. If only all commission reference photos could be like Tucker’s!)

Pencilvember, Week 1

reference photo by Frank Koyama

In my early years of participating in drawing challenges like InkTober (which I’ve been doing annually since 2015) and Pencilvember, it was enough to simply use the challenge medium for a month without a theme. Back then, I tried to do each day’s drawing from life, which was often the most challenging part during wet autumns. Eventually I relented and started drawing from reference photos, and then it became advantageous to have a theme (like mouths or ears) so that I didn’t spend so much time looking for images. But the last few years, I’ve felt vaguely dissatisfied because I wasn’t challenged enough.

As I confirmed during InkTober last month, now I enjoy this type of challenge more when I have a specific learning goal as well as a theme. I’m finding it true this month, too, as I finish up Week 1 of Pencilvember!

I went over my 20-minute limit with Boots, but the result is my favorite tabby cat sketch so far. I often end up feeling like I belabor cat drawings trying to get enough detail to indicate their breed, but Boots came out just right in 25 minutes or so.

In fact, my goal is the same but with a colored pencil instead of a brush pen: Practice making pet portraits efficiently and expressively with less emphasis on resemblance (which had always been the goal with my time-consuming, detailed commissioned portraits). Since pencils are a slower medium than brush pens, I’m trying to finish each sketch in 20 minutes or less (instead of 10 minutes for brush pens). Although my main subject is still pets, I’m also branching out to include wild animals (another stretch, since I’m not familiar with the general proportions of wildebeests as I am with dogs!).

Colored pencils are intrinsically time consuming, so the only way to capture an expression or gesture in 20 minutes is to use the scribbly, messy hatching style I learned a few years ago from France Van Stone. I hadn’t used that method much since that time, so Pencilvember is a great opportunity to practice again.

One thing that has made the challenge especially fun also has an important purpose: I’m deliberately using vivid, unnatural hues to prevent me from falling into the “realistic” trap of trying to match the animal’s colors.

Reference photo by Frank Koyama

To really push this, I got out my favorite Camel rainbow pencil – which turns out to have an unexpected superpower! After drawing a rough contour, I color it lightly all over (except highlights) with the rainbow pencil. Then I use dark individual colored pencils to work on values. The superpower is that the rainbow pencil acts as a subtle, vari-colored “underpainting,” if you will, and I’m digging that slightly shimmery effect.

For Week 1 I used Prismacolors, one of my favorite pencils for their softness (which is ideal for speed). My plan is to use a different colored pencil brand each week.

As much as I love brush pens, it feels so good to have a pencil in my hand again!

(As with InkTober, most of my Pencilvember reference photos are from previous commissions. The exceptions are the wild animals that my brother, Frank Koyama, photographed during an expedition in Kenya last month.)

Among the most challenging reference 
photos is all-white Cuppa Joe photographed
with dim backlighting. With him and the lion
at right, photographed in flat light, I
used a yellow pencil to remind me where the
light would be if I could see it better.

Reference photo by Frank Koyama. It was interesting to
observe the ways in which the features and proportions
of domestic cats differ or are similar to this wild relative.
For example, the lion's pupils are round instead of 
marquise-shaped.