TIM BAKER

Sarita is a regular on this site, I’ve drawn here at least three times now, and she always brings the A-game as a model. This time no Posca work as was tradtional but more of the Woody 3-in-1 pencils, a nice quick charcoal/chalk/graphite drawing and some watercolour work. Really loving those XL blocks I got free, I think I might order some more because I see Derwent do more colours – also they are water soluble? No-one told me that!

You can see below the difference between the ‘plain’ Woody’s and with water above. No idea what the third option is in the 3-in-1, eating them? I tried to replicate the previous week’s amazing Rorschach portrait of Izi but this week doesn’t really work in the same way. I like how you can see the drawing of eyes and the mouth, that is probably the end of a brush. I quite often do that scribbling on watercolours to inscribe some detail.

Loving the drips from the Woody’s work – yes just piled on the water. Have to be careful though, even the 170gsm cartridge paper starts to fall apart if I try to draw on it too hard while wet. I might try my wallpaper.

But the star has to be the reclining watercolour ‘Yellow Nude (Rorshach) – a quill drawing with brush and ink and watercolour.

Still love how the indian ink granulated, and you can see the different yellows again, transparent yellow, cadmium yellow, winsor red, permanent rose with ultramarine for the shadow, a touch of winsor blue green shade and a lot burnt sienna. I scrubbed off a lot of the phthalo green because it was too much, but it’s highly staining, so you get that sort of ghostly gloom…I love that.

I’ve almost run out of the Daniel Smith’s Burnt Sienna, so back to the Winsor & Newton, we’ll see if that’s a shock(ing orange) but have to say apart from being less orange IMO the Daniel Smith wasn’t worth the premium. Really don’t get why people wax lyrical about them, I guess they just don’t bother to look up which of the W&N pigments granulates? Or indeed, just mix ink with your watercolour – granulation city!