Alice’s Plums

8/11/20 Alice's plums

My friend Alice has the greenest thumb of anyone I know. (She’s the same gardener who gave us some delicious heirloom tomatoes a couple of years ago.) She dropped off a bagful of gorgeous Santa Rosa plums from her tree. I was tempted to pop one into my mouth as soon as I saw them, but she said they still needed a few days to ripen, which gave me plenty of time to sketch a few.

Second of Three Volvos

8/10/20 Maple Leaf neighborhood

Last week I showed you an old Volvo I see frequently on my walks around the ‘hood. Shown here is the second of three I’ve seen in the same area. Parked against the freeway wall across the street from the first, this is the one the owner drove off in last time, so I was nervous that he might do the same while I was in the middle of sketching it. Luckily, he didn’t.

Perhaps the not-quite rectangular license plate and the uneven line of the back door look like the result of my sloppy line work. Indeed, I worked carefully to show the bent plate and the dings in the door. One of the windshield wipers stuck out at an awkward angle. The car has seen better days, and yet it also seems to have many more ahead.

International Left Handers Day

First observed in 1976, Aug. 13 was International Left Handers Day. (Who knew, right? Well, of course, I did!) I took a break from my ongoing right-hand drawing practice to draw with my left that day, and what a relief! The ease and swiftness, the agility and motion: Left hand – how I missed you!

A change of hands for International Left Handers Day!

I took a writing sample the other day – not much improvement compared to the week prior.

Any improvement compared to 8/6 (below)? Not much.

Tow Truck

7/27/20 Maple Leaf neighborhood

I heard the kind of noises a heavy truck makes when it’s trying to maneuver into a tight space. From the upstairs bedroom window, I saw a tow truck moving slowly into position to impound an SUV across the street. I’d never seen a flat-bed tow truck from above before! Sketching as fast as I could, I caught the car on the bed, and then the whole bed was moved into place closer to the cab. The whole operation took only a few minutes. So much drama in the ‘hood if you happen to be in the right place!

The Tree to Our West

8/7/20 From our upstairs deck

Our neighbors a few doors to the west have a huge tree that has been an easy victim of my sketchbook many times. It’s visible from our front porch, the upstairs deck and all the west-facing windows. I’ve probably sketched it with every medium I’ve ever tried, simply because it’s convenient. A couple of my favorites were done on snowy days using toned paper, which made it easier to see the branches coming forward, which is the hardest part to show in any tree drawing. It’s easy enough to show a tree’s sides and top in silhouette against the sky, but then it turns into a flat cut-out instead of a conically or spherically formed tree. It’s one of the most challenging lessons I studied in Suzanne Brooker’s landscape-drawing class a few years ago, and it’s still a struggle.

With the afternoon sun highlighting some branches, including the forward-facing ones, the tree once again became an easy victim. I went out onto our upstairs deck with a couple of high-contrast colored pencils. The sunlit branches were harder to see than snow-covered ones, and harder still to convey the foreshortening. But with the temperature at 68 degrees and the sun at my back, a soft breeze blowing now and then, it was a joy to try.

Vintage Colored Pencils: Caran d’Ache Supracolor with Erasers

Vintage Caran d'Ache Supracolors with attached erasers

While Americans think of graphite pencils with attached erasers as the norm, they are not commonplace in other parts of the world. And while colored pencils with attached erasers are certainly not typical, I’ve seen enough of them, especially vintage ones, to realize that they are apparently valued by some. Personally, if I had the need to erase a work done in colored pencil, I’d know it was a delicate operation, so I’d probably use a kneadable art eraser or some other separate eraser. Erasers attached to colored pencils seem unnecessary.

 

Mostly vintage colored pencil specimens with attached erasers. The bottom pencil is a contemporary Pilot Frixion.

You can imagine, then, how high my eyebrows lifted when I spotted on eBay a tin of vintage Caran d’Ache Supracolors – with attached erasers! What an anomaly! I’ve seen (and own my share of) quite a few variations of Caran d’Ache colored pencils, vintage and contemporary, but never had I seen any before with attached erasers. They seem so – American! I suppose they were intended for school kids who like an eraser on the other end of their pencil? Even so, all my research indicates that children growing up in Europe have not relied on graphite pencils with erasers attached, neither in the past nor in modern days, so why would they want their colored pencils to have them? So many questions to keep me up at night!

 

Illustrations on the tin's bottom hint that the intended audience is school-age kids. The tin has no barcode.
Curiously, one of the purposes of the eraser is "stumping."

The other question that every colored pencil historian must ask is where these Supracolors fall in the Caran d’Ache product timeline. Based on the Swiss company’s sans serif logo on the tin lid and the appearance of the Bonne-Mine mascot, the set could have been produced any time after 1958, though the “drippy paint” logo inside the tin lid most likely places the set between the ‘70s and ‘90s. No barcode appears on the tin.

Although the tin shows the erasers as being classic pink, the erasers on my pencils are white.

Another clue is the +Suisse+ mark on the pencils, which I’ve seen on one other vintage set I have reviewed – non-watercolor Cd’A pencils. The spelling was later changed to Swiss, as it is on contemporary sets, so my guess is that the set I’m reviewing came from the earlier end of the ‘70s-to-‘90s range.

 

Supracolor with product code 555

Yet another question is the product name: Supracolor. If you’ve kept up with my sometimes-frustrating documentation of Caran d’Ache colored pencil history, you know that Cd’A’s nomenclature is confusing at best. Is this erasered set part of the Supracolor I line? Or Supracolor II? The core’s thickness and softness indicate that they are part of the softer Supracolor II line. But wait – the Supracolor I product number is 3999, and Supracolor II is 3888. The eraser-topped Supracolors have the product code 555!

 

Branding includes the older Caran d'Ache Swiss-made designation +Suisse+

Although this set of Supracolors feels close enough to modern Supracolor II’s, the different product number made me wonder if the eraser-topped ones were formulated differently to make them easier to erase. I tested a couple of vintage colors against their contemporary counterparts by erasing swatches with two of my favorite erasers – a kneadable Faber-Castell and a Tombow Mono Zero – on a smooth Stillman & Birn Epsilon page. (The attached erasers themselves long ago became petrified and useless.) I saw no difference in performance. All swatches, vintage and contemporary, were equally difficult to erase, which didn’t surprise me at all; heavily pigmented colored pencils are characteristically stubborn to remove from paper. So the 555 product code must be only to distinguish the eraser-attached set from the standard.

 

Erasing quality of vintage Supracolors tested against contemporary Supracolors using two erasers.

This is pure speculation, but I would venture to guess that this product was not in production long. Perhaps both the lack of need for an attached eraser and the core’s difficulty in erasing made the set obsolete quickly. However many decades later, I’m pleased as punch that I was able to grab one (for a relative song).

Old Volvo

8/5/20 old Volvo in the 'hood

We’ve walked by this old Volvo many times: Someone on First Avenue Northeast must be a collector/restorer. Though dinged and battered on the side I sketched, it’s still looking good for its age – I think it’s from the ‘70s. The one behind it isn’t looking quite as good; it’s missing some parts, including a grill and headlights. (I’ll certainly go back there again to sketch it sometime.) As I sketched from across the street, the owner came out of the house and gave me a nod. Then he climbed into yet a third old Volvo and drove off. I wonder how many more he has?

Cobalt Green, where were you when I needed you?

Technical note: I’ve talked a few times about Caran d’Ache Museum Aquarelle Cobalt Green (182), which is essential whenever I go to Europe or any old city. I think if of it as verdigris, a difficult color to mix, and it’s the ideal cool, minty green of statuary and architectural details. Of course, I haven’t been carrying that color in my pandemic edition bag; I never thought I’d need it in Maple Leaf! But it was exactly the color I needed for this Volvo.