Speculating on the Antennae

I recently went into one of my favorite local art stores – Utrecht – to price some things for a class I will be teaching later this month. It was actually more of an Artist’s date. Being open to the creative flow, I made a couple discoveries. I love when that happens. The first was that Utrecht and Blick are combining forces. I’ve enjoyed shopping with each of them individually, so I anticipate that I will find this a pleasant merger.

My next discovery was more personally satisfying. As I was nosing around the color pencils, a person that I recognize as a local artist commented on the Utrecht brand pencils that I was looking at. He said, “Oh, now those are great pencils!”  He said they had a real creamy and rich feel to them, and that he liked them better than the prismacolors that I always use, because they didn’t have so much waxy build up when layering.  I bought about 25 colors to try them out. Today’s image is a result.

There was a time about 30 years ago that I read about a technique of layering prismacolor pencils with a super hard (8H) pencil in an art magazine. It was written by this fella that did super realistic pencil portraits. I tried it, and before you know it I was hooked. I never got to the realistic portrait thing because I fell into an emotionally inspired series that just presented itself to me every time I picked up the pencils and a new blank piece of paper.

I ended up combining some of my Prismacolors with these pencil because I didn’t have all of the colors I wanted. There really is less waxy build up and I am not certain that I dislike waxy build up. It adds to the richness. Anyway, they are nice pencils. I will be acquiring a full complement of their colors and using them with my prismacolors. Never too many good pencils I say.