Art Supplies Arrived!
Lauren's side of the Great Australian Art Trade just arrived today, while I was sleeping. I am so happy! They're all spread out now between the other chair and my table. I got too excited and unpacked it all at once. Now I have to sit down or my back will go on strike.
So I sat down by the computer with some of the stack in reach and all of it in sight, sitting on top of the other large package that just arrived, from Michigan, addressed to me. I am confused about the big package from Michigan. I don't think I bought anything that big on eBay, in fact I know I didn't because the last thing I bought on eBay was two books that arrived.
So I'll need to open that one when my spine quits spanging around and I can get up again. The rests get annoying. But I'll put a cut in the rest of this entry since some readers really enjoy this sort of thing and others will be yawning but skimming anyway to see if I change topic and say something Deep About Life or bits of news or something funny or just change topic.
Hoo ya! If you are an Australian reader, know that this American who has access to Blick and Jerry's and ASW and loads of art supplies from all over the world respects your local company, Mont Marte! Seriously. Mont Marte stuff rocks. OX maybe I should put this general comment above the cut rather than just under it. Details below.
Much Blather About Art Supplies (And Silly Cat Stuff) Follows
I'm looking at the A5 Visual Art Diary, which looks sturdy enough to survie y'all's Aussies' natural environment of being Outdoors Heading For Something Beautiful with less people and more Critters That Can Kill you than most people run into -- all right, Lawrence, KS is a little like that too. We got another opossum so we even have marsupials and a cougar made it to Main Street recently, like that was right around when I moved in. Okay... I wandered away from the topic and haven't taken any pills yet. What's this dryed frorg pills? Must be the right ones.
Back to the A5 Visual Art Diary. The corners are slightly rounded and the paper's a nice bright white, brighter than a lot of sketchbooks I've had. I like this because I like true color. Occasionally I like a warm white or a tinted color sketchbook but it helps me to know that's what it is instead of thinking it'll be white and getting cream. Nice sturdy heavy paper, lots of pages, screaming at me in its innocent virginity practically palpitating in my hands here. Demanding the invasion of Earth Tone Pencils and watercolour pencils and colour pencils and maybe a pen line or two, swishy washes with the Squirrel Mop (which would probably drown sketchbook pages, let's get sensible, the washes in sketchbooks work better from the water handle brush)...
If you read the Comments threads to my entries you've seen photos of this trove along with the small gray cat, Toby, who shedded his own Cat Hairs of Inspiration into the package. Ari Cat is now sniffing the new supplies wondering Who is this Toby and is he moving here by plane this afternoon? He sent his stuff... maybe he'll be my new housemate... young, male, playful, sounds like fun! I think he's disappointed Toby didn't buy a first class ticket to visit. But he had to sniff everything just to figure out who Toby is. I'll put a packet of Ari's Cat Hairs of Inspiration into Lauren's package of artworks just so she can be inspired and share some of them with Toby to pass on Ari Cat's side of the correspondence.
The Mont Marte Easy Clean Palette did not come in Right and Left-Handed versions because... it does. The same finish is on both sides. If you're left handed, turn it over. I'm not left handed, but I always wanted to be, or dreamed of being ambidextrous. I spent a year as a kid stubbornly trying to learn to use my left hand for right hand things because the teachers were making the two lefties in the class do that with their right hands. I wound up with bad handwriting just like they did.
This palette is bigger than I thought. It's clean, it's white, it's very lightweight -- another pleasant surprise, since my usual problem with palettes this size is that lifting them makes my left hand start shaking and wibbling and complaining you're not Mister Universe, you know, and not going to get there in one painting session either! I could actually hold this up with a lot of paint on it if I got so engrossed in painting that I forgot to put an extra chair next to me to hold it. Which would be outdoors. Where two large doggies protect me from all the dangerous things except the little bitey stinging ones.
The label just says "warp resistant hardwood" on it. But this was manufactured in Australia and there's an entire line of "Lyptus" hardwood easels coming out now bragging on how eucalyptus trees grow fast as pines but give hardwood and are an extremely renewable hardwood compared to things like oaks and mahogany. So my guess is that Mont Marte may be sensible and going for locally grown wood that comes cheaper and gets easily replanted. I'll know how well it resists stains the first time I put Alizarin Crimson on it, and thereafter know where to put the Alizarin Crimson every time. If it resists that, they've invented portable porcelain.
There's a little Made in China on all these things though. So maybe the thin tough hardwood that can be cut to 1/8" thick is a Chinese hardwood that doesn't even have an English name but has that same category as oaks and eucalyptus and so on, leaves drop off it seasonally. As opposed to conifers, that keep their needles on all year round and shed them all at once one week after Yule when they stop getting watered to look nice after being cut off. The prices are very low and the quality high -- and that reminds me of Marie's, another company that does high quality supplies at very low prices with a good variety of art supplies.
The size 12 Squirrel Mop is beautiful. It's soft. Its bristles are as soft as Ari's tail hair. The packaging also explains how to keep from ruining it if you abuse it by using it with acrylics or oils, an important point. I've just put it on the rack with all my watercolor brushes where it will never be so abused, because I love the texture of those hairs and don't want to see it become the funny gunked up jabbing brush for oils. I'll save that treatment for something that came in the pack of mixed-fiber seconds, preferably bristle -- one of my oils books suggested that there are specific uses for old ruined bristle brushes to get fur textures that has me watching my bristle brushes carefully for which one gets ragged soonest. I keep oils brushes in the oils tub and watercolor brushes on the rack, and using acrylics with watercolor brushes just means never letting the paint dry on them. Which I don't with watercolor either.
Mostly because I don't want Alizarin Surprise when I dip into the Pthalo Blue and have been using the brush long enough that the fibers are dark from staining. The Squirrel Mop starts with very dark hairs, it almost must have been a black squirrel to be that color unless they dye them. I don't think so though. It's a very natural dark brown color a lot like the top of Ari Cat's feet.
Finding places for everything in my supply-stacked small corner around the cushy armchair is its own three dimensional jigsaw puzzle to put everything handy in reach without being in the way when I get out something else. Ah. The palette has no sticking-out bits like clips so it can slide down the left side of my armchair next to the table and the stack under it that has the alkyds box, easy to get at the next time I paint with oils. Using it with oils will take moving a coffee cup, ashtray, some small things out of the way to free up the table, but it's not so huge it won't fit sitting there. I can clip the mediums cups to the side of it that sticks over easily enough.
Now that my back's rested I'll go get the bigger stack from the other chair!
I opened the other Mystery Package, the one that was huge but didn't weigh much, and found out what it was. Yes. I'm thrilled and happy. A friend on eBay sent me a lot of dried gourds, since she was sorting things out and decided she didn't want to keep all 200+ of them that she'd gotten and dried. Had a big crop. So I now have a large box of interesting still life objects and crafts supplies ranging in size from making a big bowl or water jug out of it to little interesting still life objects to wow, a long handled rattle that still has seeds in and should really get a good paint job as a South American musical instrument. Preferably in wild South American colors.
The big three drawer Mont Marte Pastels Box is Sanity-Inducing.
The top two drawers are quite shallow and have dividers to hold pastels of any kind or color, organized not by brand but chromatically. It's good and sturdy and has rails on the top if I want to put loose supplies up there and not have them roll off.
The bottom drawer has no dividers and is about an inch deep. There are all sorts of small useful things around my art area that currently float around rolling off things. Stuff like the Rolling Ruler. The archival glue stick. A pack of Blue Tack that I hunted for months to find again after I gave a squashed bit of it to Lisa and then couldn't find the package to take out another one. Things like that. Little things I lose and then go nuts trying to find because I do not actually have a desk with a drawer. But the drawer is not so large or deep that I won't see exactly all of what's in it as soon as I pull it open.
This lives right next to me on the right hand table once I move stuff to place it. Two things have to find a new place to make room for it -- the two long sets of Derwent colour pencils that stick out into where it goes.
Ari, disturbed by all these boxes and things, is running around playing Drop Things and pawing stuff and trying to get my attention. Daddy, Play with me! I'm cooler than all those art supplies! Me! Your cat! Remember?
Time out for cat dangle fishing session.
Temporary arrangement: unsatisfactory. I can't reach past the stack that's on the Pastels Box to use the leather pencil cases as a mouse pad with the mouse. The mouse is now in my lap along with the electric pencil sharpener. This needs more rearranging, and the two big pencils sets are sitting on top of the Pastels Box with too much stuff on top of them to actually use. The addition of a new object to that table is an intricate trial and error proposition that will eventually result in everything I need being handily in my reach with no more than two objects needing to be moved to get at anything on it, and places to bring the things behind the things forward if I'm using that medium.
Not Optimal.
Yet.
Okay. The two manikins are on top of the Prismacolors cases but aren't that hard to move if I need to use the Prismacolors, which I will in order to finish Pink Lilacs for Peachfuzz. But when the table's clear they can sit in front of the printer. The two large colour pencil tins on top of the Pastels Box isn't necessarily a bad idea. The main thing is that Loew-Cornell Brush Washer with its rows of handy brush holder holes. That needs to be set somewhere it's not going to move much at all or get picked up, because three or four skinny handled brushes jump ship and get lost in everything else fast when I move it.
Could that permanently live on the table with the printer? Not up in the tray where it gets moved every time I scan something, but down in front of it... maybe. It'd depend on exactly where I put it so that the bomb bay door of the printer doesn't hit it. It's not skinny enough to put on the far side of the table... or is it? So that the printer door slides in front of it and opens fine and all the brushes are in easy reach over there. Hmm. That may work. But in the meantime I need to organize and find places for the stack of lovely supplies that is occupying most of that table.
I've gotten the Three Drawer Pastels Box into place where it's going to live, and rearranging things around it (including making sure some leather pencil case doing duty as mousepad is on top of the stack) isn't as much trouble as getting it up there was. It's wonderful. I love it. When I finish rearranging everything it'll make a lot of those little things findable and usable and also mean I can do pastel painting without having to cross the room to hunt down the right pastels box.
Ooooh coolness! I didn't realize the set of palette knives comes in a travel wallet! That means it can be folded neatly and set with everything else that has its own carrycase, that nice stack of small black or dark blue zippered and snapped things that I know what each of them is at a glance. And live right on top of the oils sterilite tub. A bit big to go in it, but handy right on top of it and easier to just grab and take outdoors when I finally pick a warm bright day and drag myself out there with all of it.
Looking close at the points on the smallest, I can do knife work on ACEOs with these... oooo neat! I didn't realize how pointy the little curved point got on the smallest. Wow. Purr!
They're all also that bent-stem kind that you can use the flat of it on the painting without dragging your knuckles in the part you already painted.
They are sealed, for the ages, inside the tough type of clear plastic containment that resists attack from shoplifters or, for that matter, the new rightful owner. Aha, the Try Me hole on the front is a breach in its considerable defenses, enough to get scissors into. Ari! No! I don't want to cut your whiskers off while I'm doing this, I like your whiskers as much as you do!
Short break for petting the cat.
And here he comes again. I forgot. That's what it was. Cellophane addiction. If there is clear crackly packaging on anything, Ari has to chew on it. This is like Kitty Gum or something. Well, this packaging is so tough I'm not worried about his swallowing long bits and strangling his intestines. I finally managed to separate the part of it Ari wanted (the tough packaging) from the part I wanted (the nice set of palette knives in zippered wallet) and we're both very very happy with the results! He's now sitting on the floor merrily chewing on something that's fighting him as much as it fought me, and I'm not worried about his managing to swallow any of it.
Mont Marte has just beat Blick not only for price but the little extras of Not Having To Hunt Down Where Are The Palette Knives? Containment with loops helps me with any and all art supplies. I've never lost anything that came in a zippered travel wallet or container. Once zipped it became very compact too, fits nicely right on top of the oils box. Yet is narrow enough it could get slid down into the easel's carrybag if I'm going out, weighs nothing. Easy to put a tie through the end of the zipper pull too if I want to clip a bunch of things like that to the side of say, that messenger bag. I love containment like this.
Mont Marte Graphite Earth Tones pencils... do look a whole lot like Derwent Graphitint in new colours!!! I need to make a colour chart. Immediately. Maybe scan it and share it with you.
They're not quite as soft. Which may be a good thing. They're still soft pencils, the first one I tried responded more like a 4B than an 8B. The ends are enameled in colour to show what colour it is, but there's no number or colour name to guide the colour-blind which one to choose or the used-up stubs list to reorder just one in open stock. Ooooh the colours are wonderful! Even dry, I haven't washed the samples yet, that darker blue isn't quite the Graphitints Indigo and is a rich dark blue-graphite tone.
Now to get out a water handle brush and wash the right side of each shading bar to see how they look washed lightly. Yep! Just like Derwent Graphitints, the Mont Marte Earth Tones do brighten when washed. There's no yellow as such but a cold brown does a decent pale cold brown and the yellow-green could be used for a yellow at its very lightest tint if you weren't fussy and didn't want a warm yellow. Must be something about what happens when you mix yellow and black -- you get green. So both companies went with it and went for yellow-green instead of warm yellow that'd unexpectedly turn green anyway.
I rearranged my small Blick order that's coming up next -- Tinted Charcoal Pencils and more of the cheap watercolor palettes with lids so that I can try more watercolor colors later on and always have an empty one. I dropped the Museum Cups with Lids and put in a 24 pencil leather case at last, because these Mont Marte graphite Earth Tones pencils deserve a good home and elastic-band protection, plus I'll have room on the other side to put a dozen random other Good Pencils like Ebony pencils, carbon pencils, et many cetera. Or mix those up with a dozen of the Lyra Pro Natura that are currently occupying a pill bottle on top of my desk. Right now they can live open in their tray and I'll coddle the packaging till I get permanent leather case packaging for them.
Now that it's dried I'm happy to report the A5 Art Diary pages stand up very well to a light wash! Which makes it perfect for wandering about with something like the Earth Tones pencils and a water handle brush for outdoor sketching of whatever, everything beautiful around you.
I am getting so cleaned up and organized as I put these things away that it's great!
There's the colour chart. Despite some fiddling in Gimp, it's a little off. The second band looks faintly greenish to me, a nice gray-green in life. Third up from the bottom is a bluish green rather than just blue, it's very obviously more teal in life. But that's something between me and Gimp and my patience, I otherwise got most of them very close to how they actually look. That dark blue is a nicely balanced blue, not leaning strongly toward either green or purple. This is important when it has to carry the duty of both in a composition, and it can mix easily with either without getting muddy. I really love that blue. The black isn't as deep-dark black as Graphitints Black but it's a nuce hue, and if I wanted a deep-dark black the violet mixing with a brown would probably give it to me.
I really like the A5 size too. That's just handy. Big enough to do more than one sketch on the page and small enough if I did just one I could get fairly detailed without spending all day at it. That size is very comfortable for all sorts of things. The back cardboard is nice and thick too, easy to draw on without bending. I wind up with sketches on the backs of sketchbooks too. They used to get festooned with doodles, phone numbers, notes and various drawings all at different angles, it's odd finding old ones and seeing numbers with initials and not remembering whose those were!
Sascha's Bath Art Crayons are cute and I know I'm going to have a lot of fun with her with them. Need to find a ziplock or net bag to put them in or they'll scatter from the bathroom all over the house as her crayons and things often do.
And now the wonderful last three items, seeing the colours for the first time in 36 Mont Marte Colour Pencils, 36 Mont Marte Watercolour Pencils (With Brush) and 36 Soft Pastels.
Ooooh nice! They include a foam pad to put in over the pastels if you keep them in their original tray. This is important. The tray's styrene but it's in a very sturdy cardboard slide-out tray. They took some care with the packaging, the next step up from this would've been a heavy cardboard lid that pops off.
Pale blue hunter's eyes follow me as I peel off the clear plastic wrapper and Ari doesn't move, but his fur ruffles and his ears swivel like the sonar dishes they are. Waiting to hear the sound of crumpling cellophane and sneak up, pounce and steal it. This is the soft clear plastic wrapper that I don't like giving him bits of because it might bind up his intestines. Hold it very still and quiet, wait till the blue eyes close, lean over, and carefully place it into the bottom of the trash bin without waking him. Ah. Good. The cellophane got away. Lift the foam. (Mine, not his.)
Ooooh that's a lovely range. It looks like a good third to a half of it is Pure Tones. Colours meant for mixing and lightening with a swipe of white and a smudge. Bright clear strong rich colours with the hue degrees that I find really important when, say, painting gardens where getting the pink of that flower distinct from that other flower distinct from the red of that other one and all of them real and vivid is tricky. The flower colours are there. THe basic earth tones needed to do human skin tones are also there in abundance. The yellow ochre is sitting up near the yellows but all the Portraits colours are there, with a few pleasant extras. Bit scant on greens, but they are well chosen strong greens, four in total. Three of the four greens look like Pure Tones greens. They form a progression yellowish, mid-green bright, blue-green and then a lightened blue-green. But there are no less than five yellows counting the yellow ochre they put up there, much more than many sets have. Plenty of blues. Five or six depending on whether you count that last one as a light blue-violet or a violet-leaning blue.
Plenty of pinks and violets. Those are sometimes lacking in some sets. Lots of earth tones, about ten of those counting the black (or counting the yellow ochre that's sitting with the yellows instead). There isn't a really dark red. There are plenty of red earths and a couple of darks that could be used to blend down the two bright reds, one more orangy than the other. Unexpected Neutrals... there's a distinct grey-green sitting with the grays and browns, which is something interesting in itself. I wonder if that reflects either the Australian landscape painter's need for a green-grey or the Chinese landscape painter's view every day. It leaves me wondering who selected the colours that go into the kit... an Australian at Mont Marte or a Chinese person?
Either way these get designed by artists. That's the one thing I've found out when looking through histories of art supply companies. They hire artists. I've seen that grey-green in nature again and again all my life. It's lichen. It's those indeterminate smears of mossy stuff on the bark of trees. It's a certain type of stubborn yet unshowy vegetation that thrives when the grass is turning Yellow Ochre and Burnt Sienna. It's a complement to all the earth reds when you're doing any sort of Grey Thing and want it to be a lively, popping grey.
It is splendid. It's a great colour choice for a set small enough to say, bring outside when it's not raining and do quick sketches off the garden or that interesting bit of weeds in the ditch that I can't walk to yet. Or just flip open one of my photo reference books or go back to LilCrabbyGal's DeviantART account and search her gallery for Keiraville scenes that I've never been in person and love to paint.
I watched a lot of pastels videos recently, just found some online for free or watched the preview episodes of workshops you can buy and started getting new ideas about clouds and skies. I look at this array of colours and I can see them in my mind spreading out into clouds and dramatic treelines and glistening reflective rivers. The intermediate olive and brownish greens aren't there. The set has three bright greens and one light blue-green for highlights and silently suggests "So mix a little orange in and see what happens."
The hue of Peach or A Redhead's Base Skin Tone is perfect for exactly that -- highlights on other light complexions or a redhead's base skin tone or certain flowers or fruit. It's sensibly down with the earth tones and portrait hues. In the blues, there's a deep blue-black that will be wonderful shaded up with white as a monochrome or used into darks to shadow and enrich them. These are all chosen to be good mixing colours. The box has many more than 36 colours in it.
I might put more than one pastel painting into your package, Lauren, since the clouds thing keeps sweeping across my mind, billowing and catching light and being awesome. It'd be hard to do those clouds in the same painting as the close-up flowers and cat and wombat, unless I used velour board and made it skinny and tall going up to the sky. But I think I'll do one that's mostly sky anyway and go searching my references for something cool to bounce off of, or just look outside through my window for one of the more splendid afternoons. Even when it's overcast like now, I look at the grey and see pink and violet and blue bouncing together to make it up, it's been different for a few weeks now. I did some of these colour experiments in watercolour recently and will no doubt do more, but these pastels are firing off my imagination like crazy!
If I close that box I can look at the coloured pencils next and get the same effect... hehehe... and get those onto ACEOs!
I'm getting stoned on colour in a way that every artist reader I've got would understand. :D
The entire set fits neatly into the bottom drawer of the Three Drawer Pastels Box, so if you're Australian and have the trouble I did just now of sliding the foam pad on top of the tray back into the original box, it's easy to just put the whole tray into the unpartitioned bottom drawer. Fits well. I'll start filling the partitioned drawers as I go pulling sticks out of the other sets and organize those by hue rather than brand, dare to take apart things like my Rembrandt set and all.
Looks like there'd be room for all the Rembrandts in both those drawers though... oooh...
Now for reorganizing before I can get at the colour pencils tins and use them. That means the Brush Washer must migrate to the table on the left. It fits! It does not obstruct the printer door, which is vital because the printer door opens whenever I print anything and the prints deliver out onto it. They don't stick out that far, the ashtray can be in front of it and the coffee cup even fits if it's out toward the end of the table. But anything that sits close to the printer has to not stop the door from opening or need to be moved to print anything unless it's the coffee cup.
Hmm... it leaves the pencil sharpener floating and being moved to get at the Inktense set, the big Coloursoft set (though not the small Coloursoft set), the Rolling Ruler safely in the drawer where it won't get broken like my last Rolling Ruler, the Blue Tack in the drawer safely, the Pastels Brushes needing a place to go but still in their original containment.
Earth Tones pencils need something to hold them even if it's just another pill bottle with the top off used as a pencil cup. They popped out of their tray and four of them made a break for freedom running under the chair.
Ahh. Thinning out the pencils in the zippered pencil case with the graphite ones, I managed to pull out some duplicates and accessories to make enough space for 12 more pencils. That's a good safe place for them, one that I often grab for sketching in the other room or outside. I think they can permanently live there. I had some random Prismacolor Lightfast ones in with the graphite selection, and also have the six-packs of Coloursoft and Derwent Drawing Pencils in there -- sketch pencils mainly, and graphite pencils. It's the little one that I take with for things like the life drawing group's meetings I used to go to. Handy. And useful for drawing outdoors, easy to grab with the A5 sketchbook. I usually peel the labels off the fronts of sketchbooks, but this one if I don't, it will be a permanent reminder of the sizes of the British sketchbook-sizes system.
It started out as a Faber-Castell sketch kit, just a handy zippered bag with lots of Faber-Castell graphite pencils in a good range of softness and some other supplies, handy sharpener and eraser and so on. It's since been stuffed with other sketching-things and is still handy for exactly that even if it takes a little longer riffling through the pencils to find the right one than when it wasn't quite full.
The two lovely colour pencils tins have a place to sit. I do need to move the electric pencil sharpener to take out any of the four good pencils sets sitting over there, but then, I've only got so much space to work with.
The comparable American size of sketchbook is a bit taller and narrower than an A5. I just stacked my Bienfang Notesketch with it and they fit together nicely. Convenient, that, the narrower means the spirals on the Notesketch fit right next to the other. The Notesketch is dedicated for dinosaur sketches and notes preparing for next year's actually official Three Day Novel Entry, a tour of Canada in the Mesozoic following the life and loves of an Albertasaurus sarcophagus.
The moment has come. The cat's back is turned, he's eating. The crunch of his food covers the faint sound of the clear plastic covering inside the tin of Mont Marte Colour Pencils as I carefully remove it, fold it down into a small handful and put it down into the bottom of the trash receptacle while crumpling it as little as possible.
Ooooh lovely range.
They really expect you to purchase another set rather than order replacements online though, again there is no colour name or number on the pencils. The ends are colour dipped so it's not hard finding the hue you want, the only difficulty this would create would be choosing to order just say, half a dozen of that orangy red because you're doing a very large colour pencil painting and know that red's going to cover about 3/4 of its area.
Peach or Lazy Artist's Pale Complexion Skin Tone is right up by the white at one end, they're arranged more or less chromatically, and there are seven beautiful useful greens. A fair good variety of earth tones.
Culinary interruption. Karl just came in bearing a big bowl of rice and fried vegetable bits and ground meat that smells yummy and tastes much much better. I'm going to do and post the colour chart next. After I eat this yummy bell peppers and onions and rice and some red vegetable that might be more bell peppers or cunningly disguised carrots or both with meat in dinner, which is excellent. I've been smelling those onions fry for a while now!
These are definitely Artist Grade colour pencils. They're nice and soft, softer than Derwent Artist, with a little bit of the "dry" feel that Derwent Artist has. The white is reasonably strong and opaque. I tested the white on a bit of dark blue Canson Mi-Tientes, any dark colour paper is good for white testing. So is the peach colour. Sometimes with colour pencils, the white will be more opaque than other colours or opacity varies with hue. Softness and opacity are consistent, that tendency to opacity is there in the bright red too and it really didn't let much of the dark blue paper show through. These will work well on dark or tinted art papers.
Strong pigment saturation is up there with all the other good Artist Brands. Australians need not suffer for a good colour pencil for serious works, these will be wonderful for that. They may lend themselves a bit more toward textured than textureless applications by that "dry" feel and I haven't tried the layered-blending Prismacolors technique yet -- but very few brands other than Prismacolor can do the layered-blending Prismacolors technique.
In all my explorations I have discovered that all artist grade colour pencils a) play together nicely within the same painting or drawing, and b) each have their own particular technique that they shine in. I can group them by types for certain techniques but each one with its unique binder, colour range and texture, will also develop its own look as I get used to them and find out what they're best for. Mont Marte will now be included in the Colour Pencil Realism Workbook!
And that itself may be available free online at least in part before I turn it into a book. After all, many books are compilations of articles and I'm doing an entire Art Site after I start the Writing Site this month. It's like anthologies though -- it'll naturally get a few bits that aren't in any other version when I get around to making it a book. Ideally I would create it as a workbook with bound pages of good art paper in between chapters so that you get the book and you can have what you need to try the exercises right there. Heh, turn it into a cross between a book and a kit. Maybe put in a few other incidentals like a page or two of graphite transfer paper for tracing sketches. It also needs to have the blank preprinted colour charts pages in it for filling in the pencils you actually own, like the big $40 pastels colour charts book has.
Speaking of which, sometime I need to spread out in the middle of the floor and take my big sketchbook and start colour charting all the pastels I've got across all the brands, separating Hard and Soft. Nupastels I've got a chart and also the Colour Conte Crayons, those aren't getting mixed into the batch. I'm reaching the point -- and now have the containment -- where if I do that I can also find out where the gaps are and instead of getting sets, watch for sales and get one red from Sennelier and one Schminke red and another from Holbein to fill those gaps. But first I need to see where the gaps are when all the sets are open.
Or do it all on a big piece of student watercolour paper and stick it to the wall in here like a poster, after giving it a good coat of fixative.
I noticed on all the pastels videos that the instructors did not keep neatly arranged sets of pastels but had handmade big trays full of pastels organized without any protection except maybe foam over the lot, usually broken to half length. A reason the half-stick sets are getting more popular. I like full sticks. But I've got something to keep individual pastels in now and it's going to be easier trying these other brands I haven't tried by just looking at what I have, identifying the gaps and picking the colour or two I haven't got as the way to experience what their formula feels like in my hand.
I have a feeling that testing art supplies has become a lifelong hobby now and I need to keep it within reason instead of throwing my entire check into it every other month.
Here's the Mont Marte Colour Chart with some mixing and technique experiments:
They may be a little better for Drawing techniques than Painting techniques, but I'm happy enough with the mixing experiments to know I could do a full-on Colour Pencil Painting with them. If you're in Australia, these are good for most purposes and Derwent Coloursoft will fill in for anything they can't do. Fixative is a plus, unless they're specifically Oil Colour Pencils, fixative helps prevent Wax Bloom. I'm putting some on the colour chart itself to help keep it from smudging the next page as well as protect its hues.
On paper, fixative may make the paper a little more translucent and if you have something on the other side, let it ghost through and show where it hadn't.
I love these pencils and can see they'll be among my favourites. The price still surprises me for the pure quality involved. The tin is nice and sturdy with a snap-off lid and they're not on the list of pencils that desperately need me to purchase another leather case right away soon. They're on the stack of those that live in their tins and get grabbed handily right off the top of that stack.
Now for Mont Marte Watercolour Pencils. That's a pleasant surprise. The tin is hinged-lid, still the same nice heavy tin that the Colour Pencils were in except the lid won't get lost. There's a thin protective foam pad laid over them instead of the clear plastic cover that protected the colour pencils -- both did arrive in their trays neatly without being all jostled toward the end however the box got handled. Colours are laid out chromatically with a couple of exceptions that may have been shifting during transit, a red wound up in the middle of the yellows and a red-orange between them among the lighter oranges.
The brush is a size 4 round, stiffly sized, looks like a natural fiber. I washed out the sizing and pointed it again with my fingers, it did get a better point that way since the tip of the point was a bit frizzed out in the sizing. Feels like pony or camel, it's not as soft as sable or squirrel, but it's a nice pointed round in a useful size. The point has been shaped by clipping so that you can get into small details with it even if it's not like the springy sable or taklon ones where it's the hairs curving in toward the point that do that.
Perfectly good for its main purpose, which is to swipe fast washes over things you've drawn with the pencils. You may want to pick up a better brush if you favour softer ones, or other shapes, like flats. A small flat would fit in its space.
As with their other pencils, this set is not designed to allow reordering individual colours by number or name. They skip the whole trouble of naming colours that way. Given the price, it makes sense -- you may eventually wind up with a bunch of extra pencils in the colours you hardly ever use, but it didn't cost that much to replace the set. Besides, there's always looking at the predominant colours of that stack and thinking "Well, I could do a good winter forest with lots of skinny brown branches or something like that" or more like "Well, it's time to do something with Sunflowers and Dahlias because all the nature colours are running short and the brights are still long."
I haven't met a colour I didn't like. But some colours just tend to be used over large areas more than others, say, sky blue or other blues, various greens. Watercolour pencils are a great bargain when it comes to range, because they do last a good long time and it costs a lot to get 36 tubes of watercolour in a good range of hues.
In the Colour Pencils set, traditional metallic Gold and Silver were included. The Metallic Gold was the usual dull bronzy hue while the Silver was as bright and pretty as it always is. These metallics are not included in the Watercolour Pencils, but there are two greys, not just one. There's also one more blue than in the Colour Pencils set. Let's find out what the hues are, since none of the pigments are labeled.
Ooooh many of the hues don't match. Used dry they have the same pleasant soft texture, a little different from the Colour Pencils but close enough for using in the same colour pencils painting with the same techniques. Like Derwent Artist, they seem to be wonderful for a line and hatching technique, both of them. There seems to be a duplication, a dark bluish green by its dipped end and a strong viridian or malachite green on the page. Of all the colours that could be tucked in as a duplicate that is possibly the most useful one. I think of how much foliage I use in most of my landscapes and an Extra Green for area coverage is NOT a bad thing. As I drift away from sunny blue skies into more creative sky treatments it moved up over Sky Blue as the most-replaced colour. So that may be deliberate on their part, put in when they left out the metallic colours.
I had to lay in some stripes under where the white pencil goes, this time using a waterproof pen so that the wet brush doesn't pick it up and spread it. Letting that dry thoroughly before putting the white on at all and washing it. I've got all the colours marked in, now to wet the brush and start washing half of each sample, light to dark, in one stroke.
Wow. Some of those earth reds are very bright when wet. They do sometimes change with washing. I'm carrying the wash a little farther than the drawn bar to see how it looks just painted on by the other handy watercolour pencil technique of touch the rush to the pencil point and then paint.
The white's not very strong, when wet it nearly vanished. So I tried it again on the bit of dark blue Canson paper and it was about like the white Colour Pencil for opacity -- till I washed it and it just about washed off. I'd recommend getting a tube of white gouache with the watercolour pencils if you want to do much with white over colour or adding body colour to opacify various colours. I can't remember offhand if any watercolour pencil white came out that opaque when washed other than white watersoluble crayons like Stabilo crayons. When this page is dry, I'll post the colour chart with all its many surprises. Some hues change. Some that I thought would be strong come out very faint in wet applications. Others strengthen when wet and become overpowering. It's good to know them from each other when painting so that a delicate pink flower doesn't turn into a vivid red flower or vice versa.
It's hard to tell on the two matching greens if they are an exact match or just two hues so closely related they look like it. I had thought the wash might highlight the differences as it did for some of the blues, making all of them look more distinct. It sort of did. The top one might be a hair bluer than the other -- but the difference is so slight that it may be a matter of which batch they came from. That colour's such a wonderful mixer though, that if I had to wind up with a duplicate of anything I'm happy to get it in that! Extra Yellow or an extra of a pink wouldn't have been nearly as useful.
The peach or Redhead Complexion colour is not in the watercolour set. Instead down in the earth tones is my all time favourite for any skin tone base, dark or light, Burnt Sienna. You have to be very sallow and yellowish not to have any degree of Burnt Sienna in your skin tone. Even then it works better to mix in some Yellow Ochre and Burnt Umber or other dark brown than to leave out the Burnt Sienna altogether.
Thank you so much, Lauren! These supplies are wonderful and I am so inspired now!
So I sat down by the computer with some of the stack in reach and all of it in sight, sitting on top of the other large package that just arrived, from Michigan, addressed to me. I am confused about the big package from Michigan. I don't think I bought anything that big on eBay, in fact I know I didn't because the last thing I bought on eBay was two books that arrived.
So I'll need to open that one when my spine quits spanging around and I can get up again. The rests get annoying. But I'll put a cut in the rest of this entry since some readers really enjoy this sort of thing and others will be yawning but skimming anyway to see if I change topic and say something Deep About Life or bits of news or something funny or just change topic.
Hoo ya! If you are an Australian reader, know that this American who has access to Blick and Jerry's and ASW and loads of art supplies from all over the world respects your local company, Mont Marte! Seriously. Mont Marte stuff rocks. OX maybe I should put this general comment above the cut rather than just under it. Details below.
Much Blather About Art Supplies (And Silly Cat Stuff) Follows
I'm looking at the A5 Visual Art Diary, which looks sturdy enough to survie y'all's Aussies' natural environment of being Outdoors Heading For Something Beautiful with less people and more Critters That Can Kill you than most people run into -- all right, Lawrence, KS is a little like that too. We got another opossum so we even have marsupials and a cougar made it to Main Street recently, like that was right around when I moved in. Okay... I wandered away from the topic and haven't taken any pills yet. What's this dryed frorg pills? Must be the right ones.
Back to the A5 Visual Art Diary. The corners are slightly rounded and the paper's a nice bright white, brighter than a lot of sketchbooks I've had. I like this because I like true color. Occasionally I like a warm white or a tinted color sketchbook but it helps me to know that's what it is instead of thinking it'll be white and getting cream. Nice sturdy heavy paper, lots of pages, screaming at me in its innocent virginity practically palpitating in my hands here. Demanding the invasion of Earth Tone Pencils and watercolour pencils and colour pencils and maybe a pen line or two, swishy washes with the Squirrel Mop (which would probably drown sketchbook pages, let's get sensible, the washes in sketchbooks work better from the water handle brush)...
If you read the Comments threads to my entries you've seen photos of this trove along with the small gray cat, Toby, who shedded his own Cat Hairs of Inspiration into the package. Ari Cat is now sniffing the new supplies wondering Who is this Toby and is he moving here by plane this afternoon? He sent his stuff... maybe he'll be my new housemate... young, male, playful, sounds like fun! I think he's disappointed Toby didn't buy a first class ticket to visit. But he had to sniff everything just to figure out who Toby is. I'll put a packet of Ari's Cat Hairs of Inspiration into Lauren's package of artworks just so she can be inspired and share some of them with Toby to pass on Ari Cat's side of the correspondence.
The Mont Marte Easy Clean Palette did not come in Right and Left-Handed versions because... it does. The same finish is on both sides. If you're left handed, turn it over. I'm not left handed, but I always wanted to be, or dreamed of being ambidextrous. I spent a year as a kid stubbornly trying to learn to use my left hand for right hand things because the teachers were making the two lefties in the class do that with their right hands. I wound up with bad handwriting just like they did.
This palette is bigger than I thought. It's clean, it's white, it's very lightweight -- another pleasant surprise, since my usual problem with palettes this size is that lifting them makes my left hand start shaking and wibbling and complaining you're not Mister Universe, you know, and not going to get there in one painting session either! I could actually hold this up with a lot of paint on it if I got so engrossed in painting that I forgot to put an extra chair next to me to hold it. Which would be outdoors. Where two large doggies protect me from all the dangerous things except the little bitey stinging ones.
The label just says "warp resistant hardwood" on it. But this was manufactured in Australia and there's an entire line of "Lyptus" hardwood easels coming out now bragging on how eucalyptus trees grow fast as pines but give hardwood and are an extremely renewable hardwood compared to things like oaks and mahogany. So my guess is that Mont Marte may be sensible and going for locally grown wood that comes cheaper and gets easily replanted. I'll know how well it resists stains the first time I put Alizarin Crimson on it, and thereafter know where to put the Alizarin Crimson every time. If it resists that, they've invented portable porcelain.
There's a little Made in China on all these things though. So maybe the thin tough hardwood that can be cut to 1/8" thick is a Chinese hardwood that doesn't even have an English name but has that same category as oaks and eucalyptus and so on, leaves drop off it seasonally. As opposed to conifers, that keep their needles on all year round and shed them all at once one week after Yule when they stop getting watered to look nice after being cut off. The prices are very low and the quality high -- and that reminds me of Marie's, another company that does high quality supplies at very low prices with a good variety of art supplies.
The size 12 Squirrel Mop is beautiful. It's soft. Its bristles are as soft as Ari's tail hair. The packaging also explains how to keep from ruining it if you abuse it by using it with acrylics or oils, an important point. I've just put it on the rack with all my watercolor brushes where it will never be so abused, because I love the texture of those hairs and don't want to see it become the funny gunked up jabbing brush for oils. I'll save that treatment for something that came in the pack of mixed-fiber seconds, preferably bristle -- one of my oils books suggested that there are specific uses for old ruined bristle brushes to get fur textures that has me watching my bristle brushes carefully for which one gets ragged soonest. I keep oils brushes in the oils tub and watercolor brushes on the rack, and using acrylics with watercolor brushes just means never letting the paint dry on them. Which I don't with watercolor either.
Mostly because I don't want Alizarin Surprise when I dip into the Pthalo Blue and have been using the brush long enough that the fibers are dark from staining. The Squirrel Mop starts with very dark hairs, it almost must have been a black squirrel to be that color unless they dye them. I don't think so though. It's a very natural dark brown color a lot like the top of Ari Cat's feet.
Finding places for everything in my supply-stacked small corner around the cushy armchair is its own three dimensional jigsaw puzzle to put everything handy in reach without being in the way when I get out something else. Ah. The palette has no sticking-out bits like clips so it can slide down the left side of my armchair next to the table and the stack under it that has the alkyds box, easy to get at the next time I paint with oils. Using it with oils will take moving a coffee cup, ashtray, some small things out of the way to free up the table, but it's not so huge it won't fit sitting there. I can clip the mediums cups to the side of it that sticks over easily enough.
Now that my back's rested I'll go get the bigger stack from the other chair!
I opened the other Mystery Package, the one that was huge but didn't weigh much, and found out what it was. Yes. I'm thrilled and happy. A friend on eBay sent me a lot of dried gourds, since she was sorting things out and decided she didn't want to keep all 200+ of them that she'd gotten and dried. Had a big crop. So I now have a large box of interesting still life objects and crafts supplies ranging in size from making a big bowl or water jug out of it to little interesting still life objects to wow, a long handled rattle that still has seeds in and should really get a good paint job as a South American musical instrument. Preferably in wild South American colors.
The big three drawer Mont Marte Pastels Box is Sanity-Inducing.
The top two drawers are quite shallow and have dividers to hold pastels of any kind or color, organized not by brand but chromatically. It's good and sturdy and has rails on the top if I want to put loose supplies up there and not have them roll off.
The bottom drawer has no dividers and is about an inch deep. There are all sorts of small useful things around my art area that currently float around rolling off things. Stuff like the Rolling Ruler. The archival glue stick. A pack of Blue Tack that I hunted for months to find again after I gave a squashed bit of it to Lisa and then couldn't find the package to take out another one. Things like that. Little things I lose and then go nuts trying to find because I do not actually have a desk with a drawer. But the drawer is not so large or deep that I won't see exactly all of what's in it as soon as I pull it open.
This lives right next to me on the right hand table once I move stuff to place it. Two things have to find a new place to make room for it -- the two long sets of Derwent colour pencils that stick out into where it goes.
Ari, disturbed by all these boxes and things, is running around playing Drop Things and pawing stuff and trying to get my attention. Daddy, Play with me! I'm cooler than all those art supplies! Me! Your cat! Remember?
Time out for cat dangle fishing session.
Temporary arrangement: unsatisfactory. I can't reach past the stack that's on the Pastels Box to use the leather pencil cases as a mouse pad with the mouse. The mouse is now in my lap along with the electric pencil sharpener. This needs more rearranging, and the two big pencils sets are sitting on top of the Pastels Box with too much stuff on top of them to actually use. The addition of a new object to that table is an intricate trial and error proposition that will eventually result in everything I need being handily in my reach with no more than two objects needing to be moved to get at anything on it, and places to bring the things behind the things forward if I'm using that medium.
Not Optimal.
Yet.
Okay. The two manikins are on top of the Prismacolors cases but aren't that hard to move if I need to use the Prismacolors, which I will in order to finish Pink Lilacs for Peachfuzz. But when the table's clear they can sit in front of the printer. The two large colour pencil tins on top of the Pastels Box isn't necessarily a bad idea. The main thing is that Loew-Cornell Brush Washer with its rows of handy brush holder holes. That needs to be set somewhere it's not going to move much at all or get picked up, because three or four skinny handled brushes jump ship and get lost in everything else fast when I move it.
Could that permanently live on the table with the printer? Not up in the tray where it gets moved every time I scan something, but down in front of it... maybe. It'd depend on exactly where I put it so that the bomb bay door of the printer doesn't hit it. It's not skinny enough to put on the far side of the table... or is it? So that the printer door slides in front of it and opens fine and all the brushes are in easy reach over there. Hmm. That may work. But in the meantime I need to organize and find places for the stack of lovely supplies that is occupying most of that table.
I've gotten the Three Drawer Pastels Box into place where it's going to live, and rearranging things around it (including making sure some leather pencil case doing duty as mousepad is on top of the stack) isn't as much trouble as getting it up there was. It's wonderful. I love it. When I finish rearranging everything it'll make a lot of those little things findable and usable and also mean I can do pastel painting without having to cross the room to hunt down the right pastels box.
Ooooh coolness! I didn't realize the set of palette knives comes in a travel wallet! That means it can be folded neatly and set with everything else that has its own carrycase, that nice stack of small black or dark blue zippered and snapped things that I know what each of them is at a glance. And live right on top of the oils sterilite tub. A bit big to go in it, but handy right on top of it and easier to just grab and take outdoors when I finally pick a warm bright day and drag myself out there with all of it.
Looking close at the points on the smallest, I can do knife work on ACEOs with these... oooo neat! I didn't realize how pointy the little curved point got on the smallest. Wow. Purr!
They're all also that bent-stem kind that you can use the flat of it on the painting without dragging your knuckles in the part you already painted.
They are sealed, for the ages, inside the tough type of clear plastic containment that resists attack from shoplifters or, for that matter, the new rightful owner. Aha, the Try Me hole on the front is a breach in its considerable defenses, enough to get scissors into. Ari! No! I don't want to cut your whiskers off while I'm doing this, I like your whiskers as much as you do!
Short break for petting the cat.
And here he comes again. I forgot. That's what it was. Cellophane addiction. If there is clear crackly packaging on anything, Ari has to chew on it. This is like Kitty Gum or something. Well, this packaging is so tough I'm not worried about his swallowing long bits and strangling his intestines. I finally managed to separate the part of it Ari wanted (the tough packaging) from the part I wanted (the nice set of palette knives in zippered wallet) and we're both very very happy with the results! He's now sitting on the floor merrily chewing on something that's fighting him as much as it fought me, and I'm not worried about his managing to swallow any of it.
Mont Marte has just beat Blick not only for price but the little extras of Not Having To Hunt Down Where Are The Palette Knives? Containment with loops helps me with any and all art supplies. I've never lost anything that came in a zippered travel wallet or container. Once zipped it became very compact too, fits nicely right on top of the oils box. Yet is narrow enough it could get slid down into the easel's carrybag if I'm going out, weighs nothing. Easy to put a tie through the end of the zipper pull too if I want to clip a bunch of things like that to the side of say, that messenger bag. I love containment like this.
Mont Marte Graphite Earth Tones pencils... do look a whole lot like Derwent Graphitint in new colours!!! I need to make a colour chart. Immediately. Maybe scan it and share it with you.
They're not quite as soft. Which may be a good thing. They're still soft pencils, the first one I tried responded more like a 4B than an 8B. The ends are enameled in colour to show what colour it is, but there's no number or colour name to guide the colour-blind which one to choose or the used-up stubs list to reorder just one in open stock. Ooooh the colours are wonderful! Even dry, I haven't washed the samples yet, that darker blue isn't quite the Graphitints Indigo and is a rich dark blue-graphite tone.
Now to get out a water handle brush and wash the right side of each shading bar to see how they look washed lightly. Yep! Just like Derwent Graphitints, the Mont Marte Earth Tones do brighten when washed. There's no yellow as such but a cold brown does a decent pale cold brown and the yellow-green could be used for a yellow at its very lightest tint if you weren't fussy and didn't want a warm yellow. Must be something about what happens when you mix yellow and black -- you get green. So both companies went with it and went for yellow-green instead of warm yellow that'd unexpectedly turn green anyway.
I rearranged my small Blick order that's coming up next -- Tinted Charcoal Pencils and more of the cheap watercolor palettes with lids so that I can try more watercolor colors later on and always have an empty one. I dropped the Museum Cups with Lids and put in a 24 pencil leather case at last, because these Mont Marte graphite Earth Tones pencils deserve a good home and elastic-band protection, plus I'll have room on the other side to put a dozen random other Good Pencils like Ebony pencils, carbon pencils, et many cetera. Or mix those up with a dozen of the Lyra Pro Natura that are currently occupying a pill bottle on top of my desk. Right now they can live open in their tray and I'll coddle the packaging till I get permanent leather case packaging for them.
Now that it's dried I'm happy to report the A5 Art Diary pages stand up very well to a light wash! Which makes it perfect for wandering about with something like the Earth Tones pencils and a water handle brush for outdoor sketching of whatever, everything beautiful around you.
I am getting so cleaned up and organized as I put these things away that it's great!
There's the colour chart. Despite some fiddling in Gimp, it's a little off. The second band looks faintly greenish to me, a nice gray-green in life. Third up from the bottom is a bluish green rather than just blue, it's very obviously more teal in life. But that's something between me and Gimp and my patience, I otherwise got most of them very close to how they actually look. That dark blue is a nicely balanced blue, not leaning strongly toward either green or purple. This is important when it has to carry the duty of both in a composition, and it can mix easily with either without getting muddy. I really love that blue. The black isn't as deep-dark black as Graphitints Black but it's a nuce hue, and if I wanted a deep-dark black the violet mixing with a brown would probably give it to me.
I really like the A5 size too. That's just handy. Big enough to do more than one sketch on the page and small enough if I did just one I could get fairly detailed without spending all day at it. That size is very comfortable for all sorts of things. The back cardboard is nice and thick too, easy to draw on without bending. I wind up with sketches on the backs of sketchbooks too. They used to get festooned with doodles, phone numbers, notes and various drawings all at different angles, it's odd finding old ones and seeing numbers with initials and not remembering whose those were!
Sascha's Bath Art Crayons are cute and I know I'm going to have a lot of fun with her with them. Need to find a ziplock or net bag to put them in or they'll scatter from the bathroom all over the house as her crayons and things often do.
And now the wonderful last three items, seeing the colours for the first time in 36 Mont Marte Colour Pencils, 36 Mont Marte Watercolour Pencils (With Brush) and 36 Soft Pastels.
Ooooh nice! They include a foam pad to put in over the pastels if you keep them in their original tray. This is important. The tray's styrene but it's in a very sturdy cardboard slide-out tray. They took some care with the packaging, the next step up from this would've been a heavy cardboard lid that pops off.
Pale blue hunter's eyes follow me as I peel off the clear plastic wrapper and Ari doesn't move, but his fur ruffles and his ears swivel like the sonar dishes they are. Waiting to hear the sound of crumpling cellophane and sneak up, pounce and steal it. This is the soft clear plastic wrapper that I don't like giving him bits of because it might bind up his intestines. Hold it very still and quiet, wait till the blue eyes close, lean over, and carefully place it into the bottom of the trash bin without waking him. Ah. Good. The cellophane got away. Lift the foam. (Mine, not his.)
Ooooh that's a lovely range. It looks like a good third to a half of it is Pure Tones. Colours meant for mixing and lightening with a swipe of white and a smudge. Bright clear strong rich colours with the hue degrees that I find really important when, say, painting gardens where getting the pink of that flower distinct from that other flower distinct from the red of that other one and all of them real and vivid is tricky. The flower colours are there. THe basic earth tones needed to do human skin tones are also there in abundance. The yellow ochre is sitting up near the yellows but all the Portraits colours are there, with a few pleasant extras. Bit scant on greens, but they are well chosen strong greens, four in total. Three of the four greens look like Pure Tones greens. They form a progression yellowish, mid-green bright, blue-green and then a lightened blue-green. But there are no less than five yellows counting the yellow ochre they put up there, much more than many sets have. Plenty of blues. Five or six depending on whether you count that last one as a light blue-violet or a violet-leaning blue.
Plenty of pinks and violets. Those are sometimes lacking in some sets. Lots of earth tones, about ten of those counting the black (or counting the yellow ochre that's sitting with the yellows instead). There isn't a really dark red. There are plenty of red earths and a couple of darks that could be used to blend down the two bright reds, one more orangy than the other. Unexpected Neutrals... there's a distinct grey-green sitting with the grays and browns, which is something interesting in itself. I wonder if that reflects either the Australian landscape painter's need for a green-grey or the Chinese landscape painter's view every day. It leaves me wondering who selected the colours that go into the kit... an Australian at Mont Marte or a Chinese person?
Either way these get designed by artists. That's the one thing I've found out when looking through histories of art supply companies. They hire artists. I've seen that grey-green in nature again and again all my life. It's lichen. It's those indeterminate smears of mossy stuff on the bark of trees. It's a certain type of stubborn yet unshowy vegetation that thrives when the grass is turning Yellow Ochre and Burnt Sienna. It's a complement to all the earth reds when you're doing any sort of Grey Thing and want it to be a lively, popping grey.
It is splendid. It's a great colour choice for a set small enough to say, bring outside when it's not raining and do quick sketches off the garden or that interesting bit of weeds in the ditch that I can't walk to yet. Or just flip open one of my photo reference books or go back to LilCrabbyGal's DeviantART account and search her gallery for Keiraville scenes that I've never been in person and love to paint.
I watched a lot of pastels videos recently, just found some online for free or watched the preview episodes of workshops you can buy and started getting new ideas about clouds and skies. I look at this array of colours and I can see them in my mind spreading out into clouds and dramatic treelines and glistening reflective rivers. The intermediate olive and brownish greens aren't there. The set has three bright greens and one light blue-green for highlights and silently suggests "So mix a little orange in and see what happens."
The hue of Peach or A Redhead's Base Skin Tone is perfect for exactly that -- highlights on other light complexions or a redhead's base skin tone or certain flowers or fruit. It's sensibly down with the earth tones and portrait hues. In the blues, there's a deep blue-black that will be wonderful shaded up with white as a monochrome or used into darks to shadow and enrich them. These are all chosen to be good mixing colours. The box has many more than 36 colours in it.
I might put more than one pastel painting into your package, Lauren, since the clouds thing keeps sweeping across my mind, billowing and catching light and being awesome. It'd be hard to do those clouds in the same painting as the close-up flowers and cat and wombat, unless I used velour board and made it skinny and tall going up to the sky. But I think I'll do one that's mostly sky anyway and go searching my references for something cool to bounce off of, or just look outside through my window for one of the more splendid afternoons. Even when it's overcast like now, I look at the grey and see pink and violet and blue bouncing together to make it up, it's been different for a few weeks now. I did some of these colour experiments in watercolour recently and will no doubt do more, but these pastels are firing off my imagination like crazy!
If I close that box I can look at the coloured pencils next and get the same effect... hehehe... and get those onto ACEOs!
I'm getting stoned on colour in a way that every artist reader I've got would understand. :D
The entire set fits neatly into the bottom drawer of the Three Drawer Pastels Box, so if you're Australian and have the trouble I did just now of sliding the foam pad on top of the tray back into the original box, it's easy to just put the whole tray into the unpartitioned bottom drawer. Fits well. I'll start filling the partitioned drawers as I go pulling sticks out of the other sets and organize those by hue rather than brand, dare to take apart things like my Rembrandt set and all.
Looks like there'd be room for all the Rembrandts in both those drawers though... oooh...
Now for reorganizing before I can get at the colour pencils tins and use them. That means the Brush Washer must migrate to the table on the left. It fits! It does not obstruct the printer door, which is vital because the printer door opens whenever I print anything and the prints deliver out onto it. They don't stick out that far, the ashtray can be in front of it and the coffee cup even fits if it's out toward the end of the table. But anything that sits close to the printer has to not stop the door from opening or need to be moved to print anything unless it's the coffee cup.
Hmm... it leaves the pencil sharpener floating and being moved to get at the Inktense set, the big Coloursoft set (though not the small Coloursoft set), the Rolling Ruler safely in the drawer where it won't get broken like my last Rolling Ruler, the Blue Tack in the drawer safely, the Pastels Brushes needing a place to go but still in their original containment.
Earth Tones pencils need something to hold them even if it's just another pill bottle with the top off used as a pencil cup. They popped out of their tray and four of them made a break for freedom running under the chair.
Ahh. Thinning out the pencils in the zippered pencil case with the graphite ones, I managed to pull out some duplicates and accessories to make enough space for 12 more pencils. That's a good safe place for them, one that I often grab for sketching in the other room or outside. I think they can permanently live there. I had some random Prismacolor Lightfast ones in with the graphite selection, and also have the six-packs of Coloursoft and Derwent Drawing Pencils in there -- sketch pencils mainly, and graphite pencils. It's the little one that I take with for things like the life drawing group's meetings I used to go to. Handy. And useful for drawing outdoors, easy to grab with the A5 sketchbook. I usually peel the labels off the fronts of sketchbooks, but this one if I don't, it will be a permanent reminder of the sizes of the British sketchbook-sizes system.
It started out as a Faber-Castell sketch kit, just a handy zippered bag with lots of Faber-Castell graphite pencils in a good range of softness and some other supplies, handy sharpener and eraser and so on. It's since been stuffed with other sketching-things and is still handy for exactly that even if it takes a little longer riffling through the pencils to find the right one than when it wasn't quite full.
The two lovely colour pencils tins have a place to sit. I do need to move the electric pencil sharpener to take out any of the four good pencils sets sitting over there, but then, I've only got so much space to work with.
The comparable American size of sketchbook is a bit taller and narrower than an A5. I just stacked my Bienfang Notesketch with it and they fit together nicely. Convenient, that, the narrower means the spirals on the Notesketch fit right next to the other. The Notesketch is dedicated for dinosaur sketches and notes preparing for next year's actually official Three Day Novel Entry, a tour of Canada in the Mesozoic following the life and loves of an Albertasaurus sarcophagus.
The moment has come. The cat's back is turned, he's eating. The crunch of his food covers the faint sound of the clear plastic covering inside the tin of Mont Marte Colour Pencils as I carefully remove it, fold it down into a small handful and put it down into the bottom of the trash receptacle while crumpling it as little as possible.
Ooooh lovely range.
They really expect you to purchase another set rather than order replacements online though, again there is no colour name or number on the pencils. The ends are colour dipped so it's not hard finding the hue you want, the only difficulty this would create would be choosing to order just say, half a dozen of that orangy red because you're doing a very large colour pencil painting and know that red's going to cover about 3/4 of its area.
Peach or Lazy Artist's Pale Complexion Skin Tone is right up by the white at one end, they're arranged more or less chromatically, and there are seven beautiful useful greens. A fair good variety of earth tones.
Culinary interruption. Karl just came in bearing a big bowl of rice and fried vegetable bits and ground meat that smells yummy and tastes much much better. I'm going to do and post the colour chart next. After I eat this yummy bell peppers and onions and rice and some red vegetable that might be more bell peppers or cunningly disguised carrots or both with meat in dinner, which is excellent. I've been smelling those onions fry for a while now!
These are definitely Artist Grade colour pencils. They're nice and soft, softer than Derwent Artist, with a little bit of the "dry" feel that Derwent Artist has. The white is reasonably strong and opaque. I tested the white on a bit of dark blue Canson Mi-Tientes, any dark colour paper is good for white testing. So is the peach colour. Sometimes with colour pencils, the white will be more opaque than other colours or opacity varies with hue. Softness and opacity are consistent, that tendency to opacity is there in the bright red too and it really didn't let much of the dark blue paper show through. These will work well on dark or tinted art papers.
Strong pigment saturation is up there with all the other good Artist Brands. Australians need not suffer for a good colour pencil for serious works, these will be wonderful for that. They may lend themselves a bit more toward textured than textureless applications by that "dry" feel and I haven't tried the layered-blending Prismacolors technique yet -- but very few brands other than Prismacolor can do the layered-blending Prismacolors technique.
In all my explorations I have discovered that all artist grade colour pencils a) play together nicely within the same painting or drawing, and b) each have their own particular technique that they shine in. I can group them by types for certain techniques but each one with its unique binder, colour range and texture, will also develop its own look as I get used to them and find out what they're best for. Mont Marte will now be included in the Colour Pencil Realism Workbook!
And that itself may be available free online at least in part before I turn it into a book. After all, many books are compilations of articles and I'm doing an entire Art Site after I start the Writing Site this month. It's like anthologies though -- it'll naturally get a few bits that aren't in any other version when I get around to making it a book. Ideally I would create it as a workbook with bound pages of good art paper in between chapters so that you get the book and you can have what you need to try the exercises right there. Heh, turn it into a cross between a book and a kit. Maybe put in a few other incidentals like a page or two of graphite transfer paper for tracing sketches. It also needs to have the blank preprinted colour charts pages in it for filling in the pencils you actually own, like the big $40 pastels colour charts book has.
Speaking of which, sometime I need to spread out in the middle of the floor and take my big sketchbook and start colour charting all the pastels I've got across all the brands, separating Hard and Soft. Nupastels I've got a chart and also the Colour Conte Crayons, those aren't getting mixed into the batch. I'm reaching the point -- and now have the containment -- where if I do that I can also find out where the gaps are and instead of getting sets, watch for sales and get one red from Sennelier and one Schminke red and another from Holbein to fill those gaps. But first I need to see where the gaps are when all the sets are open.
Or do it all on a big piece of student watercolour paper and stick it to the wall in here like a poster, after giving it a good coat of fixative.
I noticed on all the pastels videos that the instructors did not keep neatly arranged sets of pastels but had handmade big trays full of pastels organized without any protection except maybe foam over the lot, usually broken to half length. A reason the half-stick sets are getting more popular. I like full sticks. But I've got something to keep individual pastels in now and it's going to be easier trying these other brands I haven't tried by just looking at what I have, identifying the gaps and picking the colour or two I haven't got as the way to experience what their formula feels like in my hand.
I have a feeling that testing art supplies has become a lifelong hobby now and I need to keep it within reason instead of throwing my entire check into it every other month.
Here's the Mont Marte Colour Chart with some mixing and technique experiments:
They may be a little better for Drawing techniques than Painting techniques, but I'm happy enough with the mixing experiments to know I could do a full-on Colour Pencil Painting with them. If you're in Australia, these are good for most purposes and Derwent Coloursoft will fill in for anything they can't do. Fixative is a plus, unless they're specifically Oil Colour Pencils, fixative helps prevent Wax Bloom. I'm putting some on the colour chart itself to help keep it from smudging the next page as well as protect its hues.
On paper, fixative may make the paper a little more translucent and if you have something on the other side, let it ghost through and show where it hadn't.
I love these pencils and can see they'll be among my favourites. The price still surprises me for the pure quality involved. The tin is nice and sturdy with a snap-off lid and they're not on the list of pencils that desperately need me to purchase another leather case right away soon. They're on the stack of those that live in their tins and get grabbed handily right off the top of that stack.
Now for Mont Marte Watercolour Pencils. That's a pleasant surprise. The tin is hinged-lid, still the same nice heavy tin that the Colour Pencils were in except the lid won't get lost. There's a thin protective foam pad laid over them instead of the clear plastic cover that protected the colour pencils -- both did arrive in their trays neatly without being all jostled toward the end however the box got handled. Colours are laid out chromatically with a couple of exceptions that may have been shifting during transit, a red wound up in the middle of the yellows and a red-orange between them among the lighter oranges.
The brush is a size 4 round, stiffly sized, looks like a natural fiber. I washed out the sizing and pointed it again with my fingers, it did get a better point that way since the tip of the point was a bit frizzed out in the sizing. Feels like pony or camel, it's not as soft as sable or squirrel, but it's a nice pointed round in a useful size. The point has been shaped by clipping so that you can get into small details with it even if it's not like the springy sable or taklon ones where it's the hairs curving in toward the point that do that.
Perfectly good for its main purpose, which is to swipe fast washes over things you've drawn with the pencils. You may want to pick up a better brush if you favour softer ones, or other shapes, like flats. A small flat would fit in its space.
As with their other pencils, this set is not designed to allow reordering individual colours by number or name. They skip the whole trouble of naming colours that way. Given the price, it makes sense -- you may eventually wind up with a bunch of extra pencils in the colours you hardly ever use, but it didn't cost that much to replace the set. Besides, there's always looking at the predominant colours of that stack and thinking "Well, I could do a good winter forest with lots of skinny brown branches or something like that" or more like "Well, it's time to do something with Sunflowers and Dahlias because all the nature colours are running short and the brights are still long."
I haven't met a colour I didn't like. But some colours just tend to be used over large areas more than others, say, sky blue or other blues, various greens. Watercolour pencils are a great bargain when it comes to range, because they do last a good long time and it costs a lot to get 36 tubes of watercolour in a good range of hues.
In the Colour Pencils set, traditional metallic Gold and Silver were included. The Metallic Gold was the usual dull bronzy hue while the Silver was as bright and pretty as it always is. These metallics are not included in the Watercolour Pencils, but there are two greys, not just one. There's also one more blue than in the Colour Pencils set. Let's find out what the hues are, since none of the pigments are labeled.
Ooooh many of the hues don't match. Used dry they have the same pleasant soft texture, a little different from the Colour Pencils but close enough for using in the same colour pencils painting with the same techniques. Like Derwent Artist, they seem to be wonderful for a line and hatching technique, both of them. There seems to be a duplication, a dark bluish green by its dipped end and a strong viridian or malachite green on the page. Of all the colours that could be tucked in as a duplicate that is possibly the most useful one. I think of how much foliage I use in most of my landscapes and an Extra Green for area coverage is NOT a bad thing. As I drift away from sunny blue skies into more creative sky treatments it moved up over Sky Blue as the most-replaced colour. So that may be deliberate on their part, put in when they left out the metallic colours.
I had to lay in some stripes under where the white pencil goes, this time using a waterproof pen so that the wet brush doesn't pick it up and spread it. Letting that dry thoroughly before putting the white on at all and washing it. I've got all the colours marked in, now to wet the brush and start washing half of each sample, light to dark, in one stroke.
Wow. Some of those earth reds are very bright when wet. They do sometimes change with washing. I'm carrying the wash a little farther than the drawn bar to see how it looks just painted on by the other handy watercolour pencil technique of touch the rush to the pencil point and then paint.
The white's not very strong, when wet it nearly vanished. So I tried it again on the bit of dark blue Canson paper and it was about like the white Colour Pencil for opacity -- till I washed it and it just about washed off. I'd recommend getting a tube of white gouache with the watercolour pencils if you want to do much with white over colour or adding body colour to opacify various colours. I can't remember offhand if any watercolour pencil white came out that opaque when washed other than white watersoluble crayons like Stabilo crayons. When this page is dry, I'll post the colour chart with all its many surprises. Some hues change. Some that I thought would be strong come out very faint in wet applications. Others strengthen when wet and become overpowering. It's good to know them from each other when painting so that a delicate pink flower doesn't turn into a vivid red flower or vice versa.
It's hard to tell on the two matching greens if they are an exact match or just two hues so closely related they look like it. I had thought the wash might highlight the differences as it did for some of the blues, making all of them look more distinct. It sort of did. The top one might be a hair bluer than the other -- but the difference is so slight that it may be a matter of which batch they came from. That colour's such a wonderful mixer though, that if I had to wind up with a duplicate of anything I'm happy to get it in that! Extra Yellow or an extra of a pink wouldn't have been nearly as useful.
The peach or Redhead Complexion colour is not in the watercolour set. Instead down in the earth tones is my all time favourite for any skin tone base, dark or light, Burnt Sienna. You have to be very sallow and yellowish not to have any degree of Burnt Sienna in your skin tone. Even then it works better to mix in some Yellow Ochre and Burnt Umber or other dark brown than to leave out the Burnt Sienna altogether.
Thank you so much, Lauren! These supplies are wonderful and I am so inspired now!