Five Little Pencils

Happy Friday everyone~! I wanted to share with you the fun I've been having with the five little pencils in the Faber-Castell Floral Gallery Kit. This is a great kit to introduce you to watercolor pencils and watercoloring on canvas. It comes with a terrific instruction booklet that goes through various techniques that you can use with these pencils. It includes 4 pre-drawn boards for you to color and also a "practice" palette board to experiment with the colors. 

Following the directions in the book on getting a range of colors from the five pencils, I proceed to test drive the colors in a traditional manner. I colored lightly and with more vigor onto the rectangles of the canvas and then applied water to my brush [included in the kit] and activated the pigment that I had laid onto the canvas. [first two rows above]. Then I proceeded to see what colors I could create with the 5 pencils I had. I was impressed at the range of colors with just adding equal parts of color--of course there are millions depending the percentage of each color that you add to the mix.

In the instruction booklet, it was also suggested that you could use a piece of paper as a palette to mix the colors and then apply THAT to the canvas...in the bottom  3 rows of the canvas board in the previous photo is what the paper pallet colors looked like...they have a super pastel feeling quality to them. Again, it was easy to get a terrific range of color with this technique. My only recommendation here is to be generous with the water. On paper your color easily soaks into the paper once activated with water--you need more water to have paint to apply to the canvas!

After my "test drive" I decided to work on one of the canvases that looked similar to a sunflower. Since I had used my pencils considerably playing and checking out the colors, I needed to sharpen them--there is a wonderful little sharpener included in your kit. Of course I did not want to waste the shavings that were made and so I dumped them gently into a little paint pallet and used them to mix and create the sunflower canvas. 

Working from the background to the foreground I first layered washes and then more concentrated colors to bring out the details of the flowers. Many stop with just the application of color onto these little canvases but I find I like a little doodling with my watercolor. 

I pulled out a variety of sizes of Sharpie Markers and proceeded to tangle my favorite flowers over the watercolor. I LOVE the effect. The Sharpies worked beautifully over the Faber-Castell Aquarelle watercolors and canvas. The kit comes with 2 flowers that look sunflower like and 2 that look Tiger Lily like. My plan is to gesso the tiger lily boards and make more sunflowers so that I have 4 happy sunflower panels! 

Thank you for looking! I hope you try this super kit...experiment to see all the colors that you can get with 5 little pencils!~leslierahye