A Sunny 11th Anniversary in Greenwood

 

5/19/23 Sakya Tibetan Monastery, Greenwood neighborhood

With traditional architecture on quiet streets, the Greenwood neighborhood has a lot to offer sketchers, not the least of which is at least a few houses of worship to choose from. USk Seattle met Friday in front of the bright yellow and orange Sakya Tibetan Buddhist Monastery, which we last sketched in 2018. The first time I sketched it was in 2014. Another time I sketched one of the entryway-guarding lions in winter from my car. This time I chose a corner with a large white bell and spinning prayer wheels (and a couple of sketchers). I think almost everyone chose the monastery for at least one of their sketches.

On this morning, a service was being held inside, so those of us nearby were treated to soft chanting drifting out to the street. At some point, a thoughtful monastery member came out and offered us tea!

St. John the Evangelist Catholic Church

A short walk away is St. John the Evangelist Parish, another church that I’ve sketched before but never seem to tire of. I can see the “bishop’s hat” from my house, which is a couple miles due east. Its proportions and elegant shape challenge me every time, but when the light hits it just right, it’s beautiful to render.

One of the sketchers mentioned yet another church within walking distance, but I didn’t have time for that one. I’m sure we’ll be back in Greenwood again, but I doubt it will be as perfect a morning as this one was – 68 degrees and sunny!

I meant to mention it during the outing but forgot: My first USk outing was May 20, 2012, so Greenwood was only a day off from my 11^th anniversary as an Urban Sketchers member. As I am at every outing, I was delighted by all the new members who have joined lately. I wish them as much fun and camaraderie as I have experienced the past 11 years and intend to continue having for years to come.

11 years with my tribe!

Review: Derwent Inktense Pencils (and New Colors)

 

Inktense: My complicated relationship. (An unfortunate consequence of buying all my Inktense open stock is the barcode sticker on each one. At least the adhesive allows easy peel-off.)

Derwent Inktense Pencils and I have a “complicated” relationship. We always have. Despite their being possibly my oldest water-soluble colored pencils – I’ve had most of them since my mixed-media collage days long before I began sketching – I have never reviewed them. I kept wanting to, or maybe I just felt like I “should” review them in the same way that I felt like I “should” love them. Whenever I thought about a review, I would use them for a while to refamiliarize myself with them, and then I would get annoyed or frustrated and put them away – and put off the review yet again. The last time that happened was a couple of years ago, and before that, in 2017 when I cataloged some complaints (but never got around to the review that time, either). And yet I could never reject them completely – and so the cycle would repeat at some point.

You see how complicated our relationship is?

Inktense end caps are a crap shoot.

My biggest problem is that I keep wanting Inktense to change. I keep wanting them to be soft without being waxy or crayony, and I don’t want them to be crumbly. I want the pigment to be strong and intense without being too strong and intense. I want them to have useful end caps that indicate the actual pigment color (or even hint at it). In short, I want them to be more like Caran d’Ache Museum Aquarelles. I know that’s unfair as well as pointless – why not just use Museum Aquarelles and forget about Inktense? Why keep going back?

Because there’s always something about Inktense that lures me back. To find out what that is, I decided to give Inktense a full, fair review (as fair as possible, anyway, from a reviewer who never claims to be objective). And to do that, I removed all Museum Aquarelles from my bag about a month ago and replaced them with a selection of Inktense. That way, I wouldn’t be tempted to reach for a Museum instead and constantly compare. My intention was to treat Inktense as if it were totally new to me (ha!).

First, a little more history: I have only ever purchased Inktense as open-stock singles in small batches. Many were purchased more than 12 years ago, and I’ve learned that some colors have deteriorated over time. I’ve also noticed that some feel softer than others, but softness can be affected by specific pigments as well as age.

When I compared my oldest pencils to my newest, I couldn’t detect a consistent trend. Sometimes I thought newer pencils felt softer and less dry, but not consistently. Other than the fugitive issues brought up in the post linked in the previous paragraph, they seem to have held up reasonably well over time.

The first thing I did to begin my review process was to use my color journal to audition some hues for a limited palette – a CYMK primary triad and a secondary triad. Right off the bat, I was happy to have several dark purples to choose from, even among my less-than-complete set (but I tended to favor purples, pinks, reds and greens in my mixed-media collage days, so that’s not surprising). In addition to being important to my secondary triads, dark purple is a great basic shadow color. As has been well-documented by other reviewers, Inktense pencils are known to be fugitive, especially purples, pinks and reds (hues that tend to be fugitive in many media). If lightfastness is not a primary concern, however, then Inktense offers an excellent range.

My color journal page auditioning Inktense palette colors

My current palette of secondary, primary and special-purpose colors. Dark Purple (750) is especially useful. (The two pencils at the bottom show how the Derwent branding has changed over the years. Pink Flamingo is the current branding; Sun Yellow is the former.)

In fact, one reason I keep going back to Inktense, despite our “complications,” is its distinctive color range that is unfound in sets from other manufacturers. Back when I was looking for pinks and purples for cherry blossoms and their shadows, it didn’t occur to me to look in Inktense, but I should have – I would have had many more options. And now that Derwent has released 28 new colors (more on that later), bringing the total range to 100, Inktense’s range has far surpassed a certain Caran d’Ache collection that I’m not comparing Inktense to.

Now that those seductive colors are out of the way, I’ll get to pencil performance. To refamiliarize myself with them, I made a portrait in an odd mix of two reds and a dark green (inspired by both the Earthsworld model and Inktense’s vivid palette). I daresay they felt softer than I remembered (and also crumbly, which I do remember with annoyance). Activation with a relatively dry waterbrush made the already vibrant colors even more intense (downright garish, but the hues I achieved aren’t too far off from the model’s actual hair color).

4/20/23 Inktense pencils in Hahnemuhle sketchbook
(Earthsworld reference photo)

Next I did a sketch out the studio window to test a curious attribute that seems to be Derwent’s primary marketing angle: Unlike watercolor paints and most watercolor pencils, “Colour becomes permanent once dry leaving an ink-like stain. Inktense can be layered and keep colours vivid.”

4/23/23 Inktense in Hahnemuhle sketchbook. The foreground foliage has not yet been activated. I used a waterbrush to activate only the houses.

With my constant use of a spritzer, I have sometimes unintentionally reactivated some areas and ended up with a blurry mess. Inktense’s “permanent” attribute could be useful in this application. My intention here was to activate the rooftops and let them dry so that when I spritzed the foliage at the bottom of the composition, the previously activated areas would remain undisturbed. As you can see from the closeup below, the dark rooftop did reactivate and blur a bit.

Closeup of rooftop where previously unactivated particles have blurred with spritzing.

Finished sketch fully activated

While it’s true that Inktense moves much less than other watercolor pencils after drying completely, I would be hard-pressed to call it fully “permanent” (as in waterproof). To achieve as much permanence as possible, every particle of pigment must be activated and fully dissolved. If any unactivated particles remain, then when the second application of water hits it, it will dissolve (which I think was the case in my rooftop example).

This unique attribute could be useful, for example, if one were to carefully and fully activate an entire area of color, then glaze a transparent color over it, the previous color would likely remain intact and reasonably permanent.

But is this a truly unique attribute? In the test below, I first made a swatch of blue and activated it loosely (so that I knew some pigment particles would be unactivated). When dry, I drew a yellow swatch over it and activated that. The fully activated part of the blue swatch is clearly visible with a hard edge under the yellow glaze – a nice effect if desired. Some previously unactivated blue particles dissolved a bit into the yellow mix, making a green (also a nice effect, if desired).

Inktense 

But look what happens when I do the same test with Museum Aquarelles, below (oopsy, I’m comparing… oh, well). That’s a hard edge on the blue, too. So with a simple glaze without scrubbing, my guess is that most watercolor pencils can be somewhat “permanent.”

Museum Aquarelle

I pushed it further. After the yellow glaze had dried completely, I scrubbed the glazed area hard to see if I could make the blue Inktense layer budge. I couldn’t. When I did the same with the Museum Aquarelle swatches, both the blue and the yellow continued to redissolve, and the hard line softened significantly.

Museum Aquarelle

Inktense

In general, with my usual street methods, I don’t notice much difference in Inktense’s solubility. It only surprises me when I try to continue blending some previously activated colors on the page, which I occasionally do, and some colors no longer move as much as others. If I used Inktense regularly and consistently, I could probably learn to anticipate this feature and change the way I work to take advantage of it instead of fight it. The glazing aspect definitely has potential.

On location, for the most part, Inktense has been behaving and performing acceptably with my typical methods. When spritzing tree blossoms and foliage, it doesn’t dissolve and disperse as fully and vibrantly as, ahem, “other pencils” I use (which, admittedly, are hard to beat in that regard), so I have to use more water. Used dry-in-wet, however, Inktense performs superbly (in other words, just as well as the “other pencils”).

4/25/23 Green Lake. Spritzing dry pigment is accetable, but it takes more spritzes to activate.

I like the dry-into-wet effect I get with Inktense when using Hahnemuhle 100% cotton paper.

Inktense also performed well with the “licked” sky technique, which I had talked about in a previous post.

After a month of testing, I am surprised to find myself saying that I would be OK with including Inktense in my overall range of pencils that I select from to take to the streets (along with “other pencils”). Expanding the color range beyond my usual Caran d’Ache palette is exciting to consider (though with the caveat about Inktense’s fugitive nature). Summer is coming (already here, according to our early heat wave) . . . it will be fun to explore some new primary triads that include Inktense (maybe even mix Inktense with Museum Aquarelles!). Ultimately, I think it’s the range of unusual, unique colors that lures me back every time.

I don’t expect to ever love Inktense the way I love Museum Aquarelles, but at least now we can be friends. Heck, we’re more than friends: I decided that we are certainly friendly enough for me to go all-in on those 28 new colors I mentioned. In fact, Pink Flamingo (405), which I used for pink dogwood trees, is one of the new colors.

28 new Inktense colors from Derwent

I bought the new colors from CultPens in the UK. Yes, I could have waited an indefinite number of months for Blick to stock them, but who’s got patience for that? Despite being across the pond (and despite its name), CultPens is a great shop for colored pencils and certain products that are difficult to get in the US (like the Tombow Urban Sketching Kit I reviewed a while back). The shop makes it (overly) easy for customers like me by offering all the new Inktense colors contained in a free Derwent pencil roll. (Apparently the roll was a limited offer, because it doesn’t seem to be included anymore.)

CultPens made it so easy for me to hit "add to cart"!

I also appreciate CultPens’ customer service and nice touches like the cute paper clip on my packing slip. (A piece of candy was also included with my order, but it mysteriously disappeared before I could take this photo.)

Great customer service from across the pond.

Edited 6/3/23: (I have been meaning to amend this review with an annoyance about Inktense pencils that I was aware of at the time of the review but didn't mention. It has annoyed me enough times that it was worth updating with images.) When I’m applying heavy color to large, rough areas such as foliage, I often use the side of the pencil’s core. When I do this with Inktense pencils, the paint on the dark blue barrel rubs off on the paper. I have not encountered this issue with any other colored pencil. I can avoid the marks by keeping the point at a slightly more acute angle, but anything about a pencil that makes me have to be conscious of its angle is a drawback.

Inktense's blue barrel leaves tell-tale marks where I applied color aggressively with the side of the core.

Cloud City Marquee

 

5/13/23 Cloud City Coffee in Maple Leaf

As my favorite neighborhood coffee place, Cloud City Coffee has appeared in my sketchbooks many times over the years – both inside and out. If I counted right, this sketch is my fifth one of Cloud City’s cool art deco sign. The first time was when I had been sketching only a few months (by coincidence, it was 11 years ago almost to the day). Of course I sketched it again in 2016 when it was repainted with a new logo. The best part about the sign is the marquee-like chasing lights that form the arrow.

On the morning of the first day of what we were told would be our “first” (that’s ominous) record-breaking heatwave of the year, it was still early and cool when I stopped on my walk across the street from Cloud City. I’ve sketched the sign in full color so often that I took a different approach this time: Just a quick snapshot of the sign leading lots of locals to their morning caffeine fix.

Hillman City

5/12/23 The Flour Box, Hillman CIty neighborhood

 Just south of Columbia City, the Hillman City neighborhood is not yet gentrified as is its up-and-coming sister to the north. Hillman is still full of modest, traditional homes, and the businesses seem less trendy and more ethnic. It’s probably still a bit more affordable, so a few newer businesses seem to be thriving there.

One of them is The Flour Box: Making “handmade filled brioche donuts,” it is known for having an hour-long wait in a line that stretches far out the door. Having lunch at Onda Origins Café and Roastery next door, I realized why there was no line at all when I had arrived: It had already sold out long before closing time. As I sketched, an employee brought out a sandwich board to give potential customers the sad news. Next time, I’ll plan my strategy better and go earlier.

Savory croissant and Cortado at Onda's sunny sidwalk seating.

Though I missed out on a donut, my lunch at Onda was none too shabby: A savory Swiss and sweet onion croissant (sorry, no sketch of it – I devoured it way too quickly) and a Cortado. At their sunny sidewalk seating, I had fun watching a staff member styling some fancy coffee drinks for photography (which I did want to sketch, but he was too fast for me).

After lunch, I walked down Rainier Avenue South, the main thoroughfare, to look for my next sketch. I hardly walked a few feet when I noticed the lovely dappled light on the sidewalk in front of Onda and the adjacent businesses. (I usually avoid scenes that are mostly in shade, but when you have a colored sketchbook in hand, it’s fun to catch the small bits of light.)

Hillman City

My plan was to walk the half mile or so to Columbia City to sketch the library, but somewhere along the way, I found much better action: A cement mixer, an excavator and another excavator with maybe an auger on the business end, all busily tearing up the earth in front of a church.

5/12/23 Columbia City

It was a fun afternoon exploring a neighborhood I rarely visit.

Green Lake United Methodist Church

 

5/15/23 Green Lake United Methodist Church (graphite)

On my walks around the Green Lake neighborhood, I occasionally pass Green Lake United Methodist Church, which is one of Seattle’s most interesting church buildings. More than a century old, it’s a stone “castle” (says the church website) with a turret and battlements!

The first time I sketched it 10 years ago, it had been on a rainy afternoon, and that sketch took more than an hour. Last week on a lovely sunny morning, it would have been comfortable to take more time, but I had only 15 minutes. I was happy to make a small value study (below) just to take advantage of the sunlight, but I didn’t feel like I was done with the church. I wanted to do a closer study of the rounded front, which I knew would be an interesting challenge of both form and rugged stone texture.

On the second morning of our record-breaking heatwave, I returned to the church, where I knew a nice tree across the street would keep me comfortable. It was 73 degrees when I began the sketch. By the time I finished more than an hour later, it was 80, but I stayed cool in the shade (the walk home, however, was a different story).

5/10/23

Although I always enjoy the much faster, smaller snapshot sketches I’ve been making on my walks, it’s fun to occasionally sink my teeth into a challenging subject with a slower medium. Sketching the church on that hot morning, I felt like I was visiting another country. An old stone building is certainly something I’m more likely to see in Europe than in Green Lake, but it wasn’t just the subject that made me feel that way. When sketching on my summer travels, I’ve usually walked a long way to get there, and I’m warmer than I want to be. On foreign land, it somehow feels more worthwhile to be hot and uncomfortable if it means taking the time to observe thoroughly. Sometimes it’s worthwhile even in my own neighborhood.

Sketchbook notes: I knew I wanted something larger than A6 for this sketch, so I took along a Field Notes Streetscapes sketchbook, which has paper that is a joy to use with graphite. Not only that, but it’s also an ideal form factor for portability: It’s thin and fits perfectly in my “mini” size Rickshaw Zero messenger bag. Too bad its paper isn’t great with watercolor pencils . . . it could easily be an everyday-carry if it were.

Streetscapes: A dream with graphite and a nice fit.

My Bad Midtone Day

 

5/10/23 Green Lake. I think this brown is too dark to
serve as a midtone.)

After trying light-on-dark drawings with colored paper as the darkest tone, which was especially challenging on location, I tried a different tactic. I’ve been using colored paper as the midtone with black and white for a long time, an approach I really love. I thought I’d use colored paper as the midtone, but instead of black and white, use warm and cool colors to interpret the lightest and darkest values.

On a beautifully warm and sunny day that encouraged lots of walking and sketching, I took Uglybooks in medium blue and brown out with me. Maybe I just chose the wrong colors of both papers and pencils, but my experiments were not successful. None of these “read” clearly as values. The brown, especially, is too dark for a midtone, but it’s not dark enough to be a dark, either.

Regardless, when it’s 69 degrees and sunny, it’s hard to call that a bad day!

I kind of gave up on this one.

5/10/23 Maple Leaf. I worked hard on this one, but
it still "reads" poorly.

Another one I gave up on.

Inheritance

 

An opportunity to honor an artist I didn't know.

A friend gave me a pile of art supplies. They had belonged to a friend of hers who had recently passed away, and she was helping Anne’s husband dispose of her belongings.

The large mix of colored pencils included mostly Eagle and Berol Prismacolors and Cumberland Derwent with a few Eberhard Faber Colorama – all several decades old. Although the brands were not new to me or my collection, one of the Berol imprints was one I hadn’t seen, and I didn’t have many Eagles with the italicized logo. I’m happy to have them.

The inherited pencils include vintage Eagle and Berol Prismacolors, Cumberland Derwents and Eberhard-Faber Coloramas. 

Going through the mix one by one, I thought about Anne (as much as it’s possible to think about someone I didn’t know at all). A ceramic artist, abstract painter and art teacher of young children, Anne had used the pencils well. Based on the colors that were shorter, I surmised that she had favored warmer hues. I hadn’t heard that she made drawings, so maybe the colored pencils were for studies. Or maybe she had let her young students use them (though they were in excellent condition, so I doubt it).

I didn’t check the Derwents individually, but all of the Prismacolors are duplicates of colors I have, so my initial intention was to pass these along to someone else. But I found myself sharpening several colors from the heap to use.

Since almost everything in my vintage collection came from eBay sellers who buy at estate sales, it’s likely that most of those art supplies once belonged to now-deceased artists. I have often wondered who those original owners were and what kinds of artists they were. Knowing just a bit about Anne has made me feel a stronger kinship through her pencils. Since she didn’t bequest these pencils to me, I suppose it’s not technically an inheritance, but she can rest knowing that her pencils won’t go to waste. I’ll honor her memory by using these pencils and thanking her for all the art she had made and encouraged in young people.

Below are a couple of sketches I made with Anne’s pencils.