I’d like to show you a clean and easy technique I stumbled across for laying out an image on canvas before you start to do any painting. The cost is minimal and the fuss is almost non-existent.

So, the other night you were sitting around, doodling in your sketchbook and you came up with a killer image of a menacing looking pumpkin headed fellow (who’s actually training to be a sensitivity councillor) and now you want to put paint to canvas and bring him to colourful life.

With an expanse of clean primed canvas sitting in front of you, you grab the first thing handy to trace the image onto it, a pencil. As you’re roughing  in the shapes that will eventually produce the finished piece and start finalizing some of the smaller details, you realize that you made a mistake and pencilled in one of the lines all wrong. Grabbing your trusty eraser you go to town rubbing out the offending linework… but wait! What’s this? The line won’t erase! All it does is smear around, leaving a large grubby blob on your pristine canvas and the original line still in position, silently mocking your efforts to remove its unwanted presence.

Your pencil drawing	Your attempts to erase it

Unbeknownst to you, pencil has the tenacity of a bulldog when it has been placed on acrylic. Scowling your disappointment, you realize you have two choices left: draw around the line you now detest so passionately with a heavier pencil line, or break out the white paint and start again. Your decision made, you open your tub of titanium white, reach for your primer brush and…WHOA! Hang on just one minute!

There’s an easier way to accomplish your canvas layout, and you can do this before you even begin…

Meet my friends:

“Pencil crayons,” you say. “How are those supposed to help me?” Well, they’re not just pencil crayons, they’re watercolour pencil crayons and unlike pencil crayons and regular drawing media, watercolour pencil crayons are erasable. Fully.

All you need is a damp rag, one that you can wrap around a fingertip, and you can erase any line you lay down with a watercolour pencil crayon. If you wish to be a brute about it, soak that rag and wipe off the entire picture. Now you’re fresh to start again without smudges, smears or the ghosts of unwanted lines. When you’ve completed your design grab your paints and go to town.

What if you thought the lid of your characters head needed a change or two?You could:

Change this…	into this…	or this…	or even this…

The options for play are limitless. In the end there’s just about nothing you can’t plan out and then change, using watercolour pencil crayons. They’re even good for making changes to existing paintings. Use a white crayon to draw over dark colours; use a dark crayon to draw over light colours. You can draw right on the surface of your most recent ‘piece de resistance’ with confidence that any marks you make can be removed. When you’re satisfied with the changes, paint away.

Watercolour pencil crayons have made my design life simple and easy. Now they can help simplify your life too. They can be found at any well stocked art store under many different brand names such as Staedtler or Prismacolor. They’re cheap, usually sold individually, easy to use and if you care for them they’ll last a long time as well.

For now, that is all. Goodnight.

** A few words of caution:

Watercolour pencil crayons are very soft. Be careful when sharpening them to a point. The ‘lead’ cracks easily and you’ll lose that sought after point if you’re not gentle.

Watercolour pencil crayons work very well on acrylic paint. When I start a new painting I always put down a couple layers of gesso (primer) and then a few layers of titanium white acrylic. That is the ground I work on. I have no idea how they work straight on gesso or on oils or any other painting medium. If you intend to draw on something other than acrylic, you’ll have to experiment to see what works best for you.

Also, the lines that these pencils give are fairly light but they are still coloured. When you go to paint over them you may find they’ll blend in with the colour you’re covering them with a tiny bit. The darker the watercolour pencil crayon and the lighter the paint, the more apparent the blending will appear.

Last but not least, purchase a white crayon and a dark brown crayon. DO NOT buy a black one. Even though it’s still a watercolour pencil crayon black has a tendency to leave marks behind on acrylic just like a regular pencil. Don’t ask me why. The universe is just full of inconsistencies.

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 15th, 2009 at 6:27 pm and is filed under Tips and Tricks . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.