Last night, I had a bout of creativity at around midnight... And I decided to play around with some Derwent loot. Before you ask, Derwent Art Bars, Aquatone, and Inktense (both the blocks and the pencils) can be bought from Art Friend.
I wanted to do background washes with the products so that I could tangle on them. I used Fabriano postcards as my support (the paper). It's 300gsm, cold-pressed paper; and it takes watercolours and ink beautifully. I also love these postcard papers because they marry the awesome quality of Fabriano paper with just the right size of a postcard. Plus they even print a few lines and a space to stick your stamps on the back of each postcard. How cute. ^-^
First up was the Art Bars. Basically, Art Bars are triangular bars of solid, highly pigmented wax-based colours. Their entire Art Bar line is split into four categories- Brights, Pales, Earths, and Darks. I only have the set of 12, which contained;
Brights:
Process Yellow, Tertiary Orange, Primary Red, Process Magenta, Tertiary Purple, Primary Blue, Process Cyan, and Tertiary Green
Earths:
Raw Umber
Darks: Paynes Grey, Black, and Opaque White
I'm actually quite intrigued by what the "Mixing Bar" would be like. I imagine it to be like a colourless blender for coloured pencils. But anyways, I laid on some colour onto the paper. The sticks did stain my hand and fingers, so I had to be careful of where I placed my hand in order to not get transfers of colours onto places I didn't want them to be. The colours washed off my hand with soap and water, though.
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| You can see the tooth of the paper really clearly. |
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| The Art Bars felt almost like oil pastels. Really creamy. Beautiful vivid colour, even when dry. And then I added water. |
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| Gorgeous bright colours. The red looked warmer in real life. In the picture it almost looks orange... |
Whilst I let that dry, I did another, this time using the Aquatone. Aquatones are pure sticks of watercolour. (Think "watercolour pencils minus the wood casing on the outside".) I don't have a "before adding water" picture for this piece... But what I can tell you is that the Aquatones felt almost like pastel pencils on the paper- a sort of scratchy, really dry feel to them. The colours they put out are also no where near as vivid as the Art Bars. However, I can imagine building up colour with multiple washes, or making sure that your paper is saturated with colour before adding water to ensure a more solid fill.
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| This is how the Aquatone looks like with just one layer of colour. The yellow looks really delicate and beautiful. However, I wanted the purples to look darker. |
I was, however, too lazy to build-up the colours. So instead, I switched to my Derwent Inktense blocks. I have the 72 sets of both pencils and blocks from the Inktense range, so you can tell that I really REALLY love them. The Inktense blocks look like pastels. They're drier than the Art Bars but produce equally vivid colours and they're permanent once dry.
I liked the softness of the yellow, so I left it alone. Added purple and pink tones, and...
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| Ahhh~ So so much better. Look at that contrast!I might do a side-by-side comparison of Art Bars and Inktense blocks some time in the future, maybe. |
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| Note to self: Don't use Inktense blocks on your white study table without laying some newspaper/scrap paper on the table first.. Otherwise you get ink stains that don't wash off afterwards. *sighs lightly* |
So that's about it for this post. I'll show you how the final art works look like when I'm done. And if I do more of such projects, you'll be sure to see them on here at everythingis-art.com. :)
