Watercolor Pencils (But Will It Blend...)

(Hint: The title is referencing an internet meme about a blender that can supposedly blend anything.)

I bought some watercolor pencils about a year back and haven't had time to try them out. I have used watercolor pencils once before in high school and thought they were very fun to work with, but at the time I didn't have good watercolor paper to try them out on.

You can use various techniques with watercolor pencils. You can use them dry or you can wet the tip. You can use them on wet paper or dry paper. You can blend them with various liquids- most people use alcohol or water. You can suspend the colors in various solutions by using an X-acto knife to snip off a tiny piece of the tip and mix it in with a motar and pestle.

I wanted to try using dry paper and then I wanted to wet the design with a brush and plain water and blend them. I decided to try a simple color wheel to see the "blendability"of the colors.

The first picture is the pencils alone on the dry paper. The colors do not blend like a normal colored pencil would. You can see the individual colors that were used. Its also difficult to fill in all of the white space on textured water color paper that isn't wet.

The second picture is the same color wheel that was blended with plain water. It has a much crisper and uniform color. The colors blend really easily by using the brush in an up and down stroke as well as a circular stroke. I like the edge you can get with the watercolor pencils that you can't always get with watercolors by themselves.

 

My next adventure with the watercolor pencils will be using pre-moistened and stretched watercolor paper.