I don’t remember much about this session apart from my excitement in trying a new medium: Stabilo Woody pencils. They are apparently ‘multi-talented’ and so am I! 😛 Intended for kids, they actually are a lot of fun as they are like large ‘unbreakable’ pencils so good for a large clumsy child like myself. They are also water-soluble a bit like the watercolour/NeoColor II crayons I used to use but in sets a bit cheaper and of course you can sharpen them!
I might combine the old NeoColors with these as they of course lack a few essential colours (there are only 18). This became obvious for the model, Izi – namely there is one brown, orange, and a gold that doesn’t really work that well with her skin tones. I had to a do a lot of overlaying and cross-hatching, thankfully the Woody’s have a variety of purples and blues where they lack on dark reds and browns.
Hugh, the life model from the previous week suggested them as he said he loved drawing with them. They are a blast, if a little difficult to get out of the ‘kids scribble’ mode and into something more artistic like the NeoColors. This is where my lashings and lashings of water technique comes into play – I might be using 170gsm cartridge paper but it does struggle with my tornado of water. I love the drips though, and using my big Daler Graduate brushes. They do edge onto my Posca/Graff series in style and attitude, hence I added them there.
I also did a good Rorschach series watercolour called ‘Cosmos’ – here you can see the azo metal pigment ‘Transparent Yellow’ come into the fore, with those clouds, mixing with granulation and bloom from Cadmium Yellow, French Ultramarine, Winsor Blue G/S (essentially Phthalo Blue) Permanent Rose and Winsor Red. Also a nice angular spiky 5 minute charcoal.
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