Life has been very busy recently in March.  I haven’t had much time to do much of anything.  Because I needed to PLAY a little bit as a break from work and play with something that didn’t take much time….

I have been playing with water soluble pencils.  I love, love, love these new tools.  So much pigment…such great colors.  I bought them because I was going to be taking some online journaling classes and thought I might want them for the classes, plus my curiosity was piqued about them.  I have used the water soluble crayons before, but these are a little different.

I have a 5.5″ x 8″ visual journal with 140 lb. watercolor paper.  I decided to do  color washes using the pencils on some of the pages as a warm up exercise of play.  On some of them I doodled in ink, on some I tested stencils.  Most likely none of these are finished, but will have more added to them over time.

The next one is a blind drawing done with charcoal, then it was wetted.  After that I tried various pens and water soluble pencils.

More new tools…a water soluble charcoal pencil and a water brush.  The brush has a barrel to hold water in it.  So when you use water soluble pencils, crayons or charcoal, you just squeeze a little bit of water down to the brush tip and voila! you can paint!