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: 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.

Pencilvember Finale

11-27/24 Faber-Castell 9000 8B
(all studies made in Field Notes Streetscapes
sketchbook)

 

Without a plan or much intention other than to use pencils every day, my Pencilvember challenge began with low commitment at best. I didn’t even finish using the tan-colored Uglybook I started with, even though I vowed to. That was a disappointment because I’ve otherwise been consistent about filling every daily-carry Uglybook before moving on to the next. Something about that color just didn’t do it for me, though, with graphite.

I did, however, use a pencil of one kind or another almost every day of November (I think I forgot one day), which did remind me why I love them so much. Compared to the speed of markers, both colored and graphite pencils require a bit more time, so I tend to reach for efficiency when on the go. Nothing is quite as satisfying, however, as building tones gradually and modulating them delicately with a pencil. I enjoyed being “forced” by the challenge to take the time.

11/29/24 vintage Dixon Typhonite Eldorado 3B

My serendipitous breakthrough came when I viewed the new Ken Burns documentary about Leonardo DaVinci. A small mention of his studies of draped fabric set my brain on fire, and the remaining days were easy to fill with similar studies – all in graphite. I was a bit sorry I didn’t think of the idea earlier – I enjoyed them so much that I could have done a whole month of them (it’s safe to say that now, since November is over!).

I’ve posted all the other Pencilvember sketches throughout the month within the context of wherever I sketched. Here are the last three days of my draped scarf studies. (I took a break from the series on Thanksgiving to sketch the fog.)

For such an unambitious start, I’m happy with the way it went, and especially the way it ended.

11/30/24 Caran d'Ache Grafwood 4B

Foggy Thanksgiving

 

11/28/24 About 7:15 a.m., Maple Leaf

Just like two years ago, Thanksgiving day began with a thick fog. Around 7:15 a.m., the sun was still below the horizon, but the sky was beginning to lighten. From an upstairs window, I could barely see the driveway; the cone of light from this street light dissipated before it hit the ground.

A couple of hours later, the sun was fully up, but the fog was still deep. I sketched the same street light, this time with some context I could see across the street.

11/28/24 About 9:30 a.m.

Like Trees

 

11/24/24 Caran d'Ache Grafwood HB and Tombow Mono R 6B
in Field Notes Streetscapes sketchbook

Although it would be hubris to think I have anything in common with a genius like Leonardo DaVinci, I would like to believe that he and I share the same love of pure rendering – not drawing a “something” but finding appreciation and joy in simply observing and recording.

Making this study brought back all the Gage Academy classes I’ve taken over the years in the fundamentals of drawing – the cast shadow, the core shadow, the light rolling gently over a curved surface, the reflected light on the far side. The soft folds of a scarf are not very different from tree trunks and branches, for example, that I drew in classes with Suzanne Brooker, Kathleen Moore and Kristin Frost. These principles of rendering light on form are such a basic part of learning classical drawing skills that it’s hard to imagine DaVinci’s time when this kind of thinking was new. And yet, when I sit down to do this, it is new because even when I know it, I hardly ever think it.

Process note: One thing that’s super fun about these draped fabric studies is that they are, in fact, a lot like trees or other forms in nature: There’s no pressure related to achieving resemblance (as with portraiture), perspective (as with buildings or interiors), exact proportions, or other “hard stuff.” Of course, I still want the drawing to be realistic enough to be convincing. For example, gravity gives hanging fabric a certain weight that shows in the way the folds lie. But being able to focus only on light and shadow to achieve this realism is so enjoyable. I’m not sure I can think of any subject that is more relaxing to render than this.

Central Library is Cozy Before the Storm

 

11/22/24 Seattle Central Library

Can this possibly be comfortable?

The downtown Central Library was one of the first outings USk Seattle had after the pandemic lockdown opened up in 2021. That September day was warm enough that I stayed outdoors to take on the library’s daunting architecture. Last Friday, the weather wasn’t quite so hospitable. With the wind picking up for another “bomb cyclone” expected that afternoon, most sketchers opted for cozy indoor sketching, myself included.

While I waited for other sketchers outside the library entrance, I began with a small sketch of the Henry Moore sculpture “Vertebrae” across the street at the Safeco building (above, upper left). The rest of my page spread (below) includes vignettes of library patrons studying, reading, browsing and sleeping. For sketchers who like to sketch people, the library is a treasure trove of human studies.

After an enjoyable lunch with Allan (no sketch of my sandwich; I must have been hungry), Roy and I continued on to Gelatiamo for affogato. It was good to get fortified for my light rail ride and breezy walk home from the station.

11/22/24 Gelatiamo, Third & Union

Planar Head in Positive and Negative

 

11/13/24 Gekkoso 8B graphite in Stillman & Birn Alpha sketchbook

Ching gave me a 3D-printed planar head. With all the facial and skull planes structurally delineated in plastic, it seems like it should be relatively easy to draw. On a recent wet morning, I found it to be surprisingly difficult to draw with graphite. As usual, proportions are the trickiest part.

Instead of measuring as I would with a human model, I decided to correct or adjust as needed on the fly. I resisted erasing restated lines so that I could see my mistakes and learn from them, but in some areas, it got so messy that I could barely distinguish the good lines from the bad, so I erased a bit for clarity.

11/14/24 Prismacolor in Uglybook

On the next wet morning, I tried again, this time with a white colored pencil on black paper. I thought this would be even trickier, since drawing in negative is usually a brain twister, but in fact, I found it easier. Maybe it was just that it was my second time, so my proportions were more accurate before corrections. Drawing white on black also made it easier to abstract the whole thing, which somehow helped.

Anyway, I found the exercise great practice, and I’ll likely draw Mr. Planar again with different lighting and different media. (You can see that I’m gearing up for the long, wet winter ahead.)

Building Character

 

11/10/24 Japanese maple

How’s this for a test of one’s resolve: Take a walk and spot a spectacularly red Japanese maple, then sketch it in graphite only (at left)? It’s the kind of thing that people say “builds character.”

11/10/24 Maple Leaf neighborhood

On the other hand, some sketches are purely satisfying because the scenes seem to be made for monochrome: This beautifully backlit street.

Beauty Remains

 

11/6/24 Japanese maple

Wednesday, another day focused on self-care, called for taking multiple walks in the neighborhood, and it was an amazing day for that. Under a constantly changing mix of clouds and sunshine, colors seemed especially brilliant, even as most trees were on the far side of their peaks. The red Japanese maple outside Macrina Bakery (at right), for example, had already lost most if its leaves, yet it reminded me of how much beauty remains.

Paper notes: Not wanting to carry too much bulk, I had left my Hahnemühle sketchbook at home, so I made do with the tan Uglybook I’ve been using for Pencilvember. Although I love the glimmers of light I can make with white ink or pencil on toned paper (see below), other colors always look dull. Uglybooks paper can’t take much water, so the light activation couldn’t bring out the intensity that’s so easily achieved with good paper.

So now that’s at least two reasons why this tan paper isn’t working for me right now: It’s harder to achieve strong value contrasts with graphite when the paper is already a midtone, and colors look dull. At least while the trees are still glowing, I need to go back to white paper.

11/6/24 Kwanzan cherries