Derwent Waterbrush

Derwent Sketch Kit gift set included a Derwent waterbrush.

Derwent Fortnight #11: Waterbrush

Derwent has created a waterbrush as good as the original Japanese versions. I first tried a waterbrush when I got one in a Sakura Koi pocket set of watercolors. I loved it for its convenience -- a nylon round watercolor brush with a hollow soft plastic handle. Fill the handle with water and you have convenience.

The brush stays wet. Just touch watercolor pans or tips of watersoluble pencils to pick up color and you can paint. It means not going to the sink to wash out brushes and refill water cups if I'm having a bad day. It means not having to carry a water bottle if I go out and want to sketch in watermedia.

I loved that first one and bought several more in different brands. Unfortunately, some of the brands other than Sakura gave me problems. Water would drip too fast through the brush or not come out without some serious squeezing, the flow would be uneven. One brush lost bristles and went from too little water to too much. They're not always well made.

My original Sakura Koi ones from the small and large pocket sets were perfect, so is the Niji one I tried.

Right up with them is the Derwent waterbrush, with its elegantly shaped reservoir. Derwent redesigned the handle with a graceful curve and a little extra width up near the tip. This does two things. It holds more water and if you set it down on a slanted surface like a drafting table, it won't roll off because the fat bit is flattened. The top snaps neatly onto the back end so it won't get lost, something that I can't always do with some others.

Derwent actually takes top prize for my favorite waterbrush because of that little innovation. None of the rest have the no-roll extra width design. Sakura and Niji come very close with good products that have excellent flow, last a good long time,
and serve the purpose just as well. So there are three brands I'd recommend and Derwent tops the list because of its handle shape.

You can also fill a Derwent waterbrush with solvents such as odorless mineral spirits or Bestine rubber cement thinner. Don't use the same waterbrush for thinners and water, it's like using the same brush for oils and watercolors. Keep one for watermedia and one for thinners. Using a Derwent waterbrush with thinner will let you use your Coloursoft or Artists' or other colored pencils as if they were watersoluble, give you wash effects between layers or to smooth a final layer.

My Derwent Waterbrush came in a Derwent Sketch Kit gift set. I found it on Clearance at Blick, where I think it was one of those nice annual limited-edition gift sets. I bought it to get a dozen spare Graphitint pencils in something like a Global Classic case, and was intrigued by the waterbrush. It included Derwent Watersoluble Sketching Pencils in Light Wash, Medium Wash and Dark Wash as well as three values of Derwent Charcoal Pencils and a dozen Graphitints.

It also has a very nice hardbound sketchbook with perforated pages in case I wanted to rip out a good sketch to give someone.

Derwent Watersoluble Sketching pencils are great. I like watersoluble graphite pencils, they allow me to fill areas in graphite sketches quickly with a wash or to paint a monochrome in pure graphite. Derwent Watersoluble Sketching Pencils come in three degrees of hardness.

Light Wash is HB, your standard pencil hardness. Medium Wash is 4B, a good soft pencil for darkening or doing sketches that scan better. Dark Wash is 8B, almost the softest a graphite pencil can get, wonderful for smudging or washing. With the Derwent Waterbrush, it became easy to paint with graphite just touching the points of these pencils with the wet brush tip.

Here's an example painted mostly in Medium Wash and Dark Wash Derwent Watersoluble Sketching Pencils with the Derwent Waterbrush. I drew no sketch lines anywhere on this, it's strictly a wash sketch done with the brush. Whether you like painting or washing over drawings, the Derwent Waterbrush is one of those small accessories that become essential as soon as you try one.

It is a bit hard to find in the USA, but worth the price if you see a Derwent waterbrush by itself or included in a gift set. For some reason it's slow or impossible to get some Derwent accessories in the USA despite how good they are and how popular they'd be if available. This is something to do with the distribution process.

So if you really want one, hunt for it and possibly be prepared to place an order with a UK online or mail order company. Then again you can always put together a list of all the Derwent items you can't find in the USA and do that all at once in an out of country order. It's worth paying a bit extra in shipping or price for this one because of its quality.


Pine Cone and Pillbox
4" x 6"
Derwent Sketch and Wash graphite watersoluble pencils
Painted with Derwent Waterbrush on Derwent A6 hard cover sketchbook paper.

Derwent Aquatone

Derwent Fortnight #10: AquaTone

Available in open stock, sets of 6, 12 and 24 colors, Derwent has created a soft woodless watersoluble colored pencil. The colors are very strong and bright. Pencils are unusually long compared to the Cretacolor AquaMonolith and used dry, they have a soft creamy blendable texture in a category with Coloursoft and Prismacolor. My photo shows the entire 24 color range and a color chart I made with them, showing both wet and dry shaded applications.

They may have a short range of only 24 colors, but those colors are well chosen for mixing and the sheer quantity of pigment you get with AquaTone makes them a great bargain, especially when you want to do large works and need to cover big areas. I've noticed that all three of the woodless colored pencils I have tend to wear down slower than wood-cased pencils. It's not that they need sharpening less often, it's that they don't need as much sharpening to restore the point.

Also in some ways they do need sharpening less often. When I want to fill a broad area, I'll turn the point on a shallow angle so the side of the entire point touches the paper. Wearing it down that way gives a chisel edge to the tip that's useful for doing fine lines and details. When I do that, I don't even need to sharpen them at all.

Because these are watersoluble, even the shavings are useful as watercolor. Collect them in different palette wells, add a drop or two of water to liquefy them and you have good clean watercolor hues. That versatility makes the AquaTone pencils a good choice for a field kit. The big woodless angled points also make it a little easier to pick up a lot of color with a wet brush or waterbrush for direct painting.

Each of the pencils comes in a wrapper matching its color. You can peel back the wrapper a little at a time as it gets shorter or let the pencil sharpener shave bits of it off when you reach it. If you remove it entirely, breaking the pencil into smaller pieces allows handling them like pastel sticks -- using the width of a piece to create a big bold stroke on rough paper.

Washed, the colors are nearly as strong as Inktense. They are completely rewettable. If I get an area too dark, it's easy to wait till it dries, touch with a wet brush and pat with a soft cloth or tissue to lift color almost all the way back to white. They're great in combination, glazing over Inktense is very effective when you want loose soft-edged wet in wet effects combined with hard details that don't soften or wash away.

They are a little expensive per pencil compared to other Derwent products and artist grade colored pencils, but still very economical because each pencil has five or six times the usable pigment of wood-cased watersolubles.

Most of the colors are lightfast with a Blue Wool rating of 6, 7 or 8. More importantly, the full spectrum is represented in lightfast colors, with some nearly lightfast useful hues in between. Magenta and Crimson Lake rate at only 5 for lightfastness, but a touch of Dark Violet with Deep Vermilion may serve when a cold red is needed.

Whether you like these as colored pencils may depend on your hand and preferred softness. They're also an incredibly convenient form of watercolor, just as handy as pan watercolors for carrying along when going out.

They dissolve to good strong transparent watercolor, as shown in my example painting. I kept a few linear elements especially in the stems, but went over my drawing washing it and then added dark violet shadows by pulling a wet brush along the point of the dark violet pencil.

You can find the lightfastness chart and examples of art done with Derwent AquaTone pencils at Derwent's home page. Like most of Derwent's pencils, I love these and use them often. Incidentally, a 24 color tin fits neatly into the big pocket of a Sketch Folio portfolio available at ASW, which is often where this set lives.


Yellow Iris
4" x 6"
Derwent AquaTone watersoluble woodless pencils
Lanaquarelle hot press 140lb watercolor paper
Photo reference by Helen on WetCanvas.com posted for March 12-14, 2010 Weekend Drawing Event.

Derwent Inktense ink wash pencils

Derwent Fortnight #9: Inktense

These pencils first appeared in 2005 or so, close to when Derwent invented the Graphitints. They are well named. Inktense are intense -- the color is very strong, much more like using colored inks than watercolor. They're weird and unique because the color can't reactivate once washed.

They only wash once, unless they weren't completely activated the first time. That can happen on heavy applications especially if you're not using much water. Lay them down by touching the tip with a wet brush and you've got a strong color that will not lift or move when you glaze other colors over it.

Derwent Inktense are my favorite underpainting pencils, whether I'm using pastels, colored pencils or anything else that I want a strong, vibrant underpainting for. It took some time to get used to the strong color. Less is more, and if it dries quickly you can't always correct blossoms or overpaint to get a smooth effect. This makes using Derwent Inktense wet an exciting, risky endeavor compared to using the AquaTone or Watercolour Pencils.

The results are well worth it though. Inktense create drama in almost anything I do with them. I started with a 24 color set that I passed on to a friend when I bought the full range of 72. You're seeing it in a Global Classic leather case because as soon as I opened the first tin and tried them dry, I knew these pencils ought to be pampered.

They're soft and strong when used dry. Their texture came pretty close to Prismacolors, which makes them a good choice for a dry colored pencil as well. Just be careful about spraying or splashing water near your dry piece, because that will activate them and create bright spots of wet texture. The colors are good and bright when dry too, so you can get some lovely traditional colored pencils drawings with Derwent Inktense.

Lightfastness varies. Check the Derwent Homepage for exact lightfastness on specific colors. Most of the greens, blues and browns are lightfast but there's a gap in reds and violets so choose the nearest to lightfast for anything that's going to be framed and hung. Earth tone warms may be a better choice than the bright reds, or treat the painting as fugitive and protect it with museum glass.

Derwent Inktense are available in open stock and sets of 6, 12, 24, 36 and 72. 24 color sets include the Derwent Outliner, I'm not sure if the 12 color set has an Outliner. This is a tremendously useful waxy graphite pencil that's completely nonsoluble. It's soft, somewhere in the B range of softness for graphite pencils and will not dissolve in even the wettest washes.

If you've tried using normal No. 2 graphite pencils or other graphite pencils for accenting a waterbased wash, you've found that some of the graphite drifts out of the lines to tint the colors. This can get seriously annoying. So the Outliner is the perfect sketch pencil under any form of water media. You can get the Outliner separately in open stock.

Certain colors like Chinese Ink and other blacks in Derwent Inktense are very good for doing traditional sumi-e style painting. Just scribble some on a porcelain plate with the pencil, add a little water to mix it to different values of ink.

Be sure to keep brushes wet and rinse them clean immediately when painting with liquefied Inktense or washing over an Inktense drawing. If you let it dry on the brush, it will stain the brush. I use The Masters' Brush Cleaner and Conditioner to wash my brushes and condition them after using Inktense, since that will get out the stains on nylon and sable brushes well even if they've soaked in. Stains don't necessarily ruin the brush, but it gets annoying when the hairs turn some weird combination of purple and brown.

Derwent has recently created a Steampunk Manga Kit that includes 12 Inktense pencils, a brush, a spiral bound A4 sketchbook and a CD with a 20-step lesson in drawing three great steampunk characters by leading Manga artist Hayden Scott-Baron(Dock). A couple of previous Manga collections also featured Inktense pencils.

The reason for this is that Inktense are a perfect coloring medium for any type of comics art. The colors are strong and with practice you can get fully saturated areas of pure flat wash colors easily by doing a smooth tonal layer and washing it. The Outliner provides clean graphite outlines that don't move when washed, although you could also do your lines for manga or comics art with any non-watersoluble ink pen. Or even do them with a dip pen and an Inktense wash, just mix some shavings in a palette cup with water and dip to draw your lines.

While not all comics artists like a manga style, the manga sets would be good to familiarize yourself with the medium and practice for using them on a Western comics style. The processes are very similar - pencil a good drawing, then ink and color it. Color or inking can go first, depends on which works better for you.

I've got a graphic novel project that I'm planning to script this April and will definitely be using Inktense for coloring its final pages, should I get good enough at comics art to do the story justice. The strong colors, ease of applying a watersoluble pencil and the way I can glaze over previous layers without reactivating them make them my choice for that style of art.

And for anything where I want very strong wash effects and don't care about lifting to lighten. You can still blot and lift while it's wet, but once it's down it's permanent. That is so great if I want to say, do some blue detailed foliage effects in dry brush and then wash an earth yellow over all of it to get different varieties of green. Inktense are a lot of fun. Try them in a small set and give yourself a chance to find out how strong and dramatic a wash medium can get.

Below is a tropical fish that I drew and painted in Derwent Inktense. All of it is washed, but some linear elements are strong and I only washed over them lightly. The background was done entirely by touching the points of pencils with a Derwent waterbrush and painting.


Tropical Fish
6" x 7"
Derwent Inktense used wet
Derwent spiral bound watercolor book 90lb watercolor paper with a wove texture.
Photo reference by AlainJ on WetCanvas.com for March 5-7 2010 Weekend Drawing Event.

Derwent Graphitints

Derwent Fortnight #8: Graphitint pencils

Derwent Graphitint tinted graphite pencils are another Derwent innovation. They're sketch and wash pencils with a 4B softness. These fat 10mm round pencils with 4mm cores are very rich and soft, perfect for sketching. They have a touch of color used dry but when washed, the color becomes more intense.

Even washed, the colors are still softer and muted compared to watercolor pencils. But they have a unique silvery sheen from the graphite that gives an eerie quality to any painting done with them. Available in sets of 6, 12 or 24, they have been an important part of my sketching arsenal since 2005 when I first bought mine.

There is only one comparable product, it's Australian. Mont Marte, an Australian company with a wide range of student and some artist grade products, came out with Earth Tones pencils in a range of 12. I know of nothing else anywhere that's like these and I prefer the Derwent Graphitint for their greater softness.

One discovery I made with these the first time I used them is that if I draw a spooky subject, it will gain immense power from that silvery graphite sheen. It'll look spookier done in Graphitints than anything else. That eerie quality lends itself to mystical or nature subjects too.

The white pencil has no graphite in it, but everything else does. It's just as soft as the darker ones, so when you're sketching on dark or tinted grounds this makes a good white sketch and wash pencil. Accents sketched over other colors come up well too, it's reasonably opaque and a good lightener.

Combining dry and wet techniques in the same piece can give a lovely contrast, since the washed areas have stronger color. Some artists prefer not to use intense, saturated color and enjoy a more muted palette for sketching.

Derwent Graphitints have an enormous value range in most colors. They blend well and handle like the softest sketching pencils used dry, but the hint of color allows the artist to use aerial recession, use complements for intensity and all the other color tricks without losing that sense of it being a sketch. Any of them would make good monochrome colors, but I prefer the blues since I've got a soft spot for blue monochrome drawings.

Not all the colors are lightfast. Derwent's home page lists the lightfastness by Blue Wool scale for each of the colors in the set. Choose accordingly depending on whether you're doing a serious drawing or painting to frame and exhibit or filling your sketchbook with field drawings and quick color notes from life.

Lightfastness isn't a major issue for sketchbook work. I realized that some time ago and organize my pencils by whether to keep them to the sketchbook or use them for paintings to frame.

Anything that's kept in a closed sketchbook with opaque covers and layers of other drawings protecting it has a good chance of lasting for years even with a fugitive pigment. I understood this when I looked at some medieval books of hours and the brilliant colors in their illustrations, when the same colors in paintings had faded and discolored till they were sometimes absent.

Graphitints shine both for serious pencil drawing to give subtle color variations and for sketchbook use. The 4B softness invites gestures, quick sketching, smudging with a stump, tortillon or finger. Brighter washes can add emphasis where you want them or they can be used for eerie, muted paintings in a watercolor journal or painting.

Port, Juniper, Aubergine, Dark Indigo and Storm are the sketchbook-only colors that rate lower than 6 on the Blue Wool scale. My favorite blue, Ocean Blue, has a rating of 7 which is between "lightfast" and "best lightfastness."

The tin is heavy, sturdy, well made and fits the pencils nicely. They don't all roll to the bottom if it's turned on its side and the lid snaps on well. I'd put a rubber band around it if sticking it in a backpack or messenger bag.

Despite their softness, I've had no trouble with internal breakage on any of my Derwent Graphitints. As with all fine art pencils, I use a sharp fresh pencil sharpener blade when sharpening them. Use the wide hole on a two-hole sharpener or a General's All-Art sharpener for them, or an electric sharpener that handles wide pencils.

While at first I thought these were fun special effects pencils, I started using them more and more. Since I bought the set, a good third to half of my sketches and value drawings are done with Graphitints because I love their softness, hint of color and smooth laydown. They erase exactly like 4B graphite. They shade like 4B graphite. They're top quality 4B graphite sketch and wash pencils that also have a color range, and that becomes irresistible when I'm doing value sketches.

Below is an example drawing I did on hot press watercolor paper. I used three techniques -- washed the sky very heavily over a smooth tonal layer to dissolve to a smooth wash, then washed lightly over stronger marks on the row of bare trees and the pine at the bottom. I let that dry and finished with the almost silhouetted large tree to show how the contrast of textures works so well in a sketch.


Cloudy Day
4" x 6"
Derwent Graphitint pencils
Hot press 140lb Lanaquarelle watercolor paper.

Derwent Tinted Charcoal Pencils

Derwent Fortnight #7: Tinted Charcoal Pencils

When I discovered these new Derwent specialty pencils on the Derwent home page, I couldn't wait for Col Art to bring them to my USA art suppliers. I'd already tried Derwent Graphitints and thought they'd be something similar, only charcoal pencils. Finally, I found a supplier that had the full 24 color range and ordered them.

These are unique. Nothing else like them is available from any art supply manufacturer. They are typical of Derwent's wicked inventions intended to get me ordering more must-have pencils when I've already got lots: they fill a gap in my supplies and add to my range of possibilities for sketching. Used dry, they were exactly what I expected.

Charcoal pencils, with a nice firm smooth soft compressed-charcoal texture and a bit of a tint. Not much, the tints are very subtle and most of the colors are soft. The color shows up most in light applications and especially in smudging. But blending and smudging are one of the great techniques for charcoal. Charcoal pencils have a stronger value range than other types of sketching materials.

They're dynamic, quick, shade easily whether by hatching, use of a tortillon, light marks or finger smudging. Any sort of pastel blender will work to blend these charcoal pencils, they have that lovely dry powdery texture that gives strong intense darks and delicate muted lights.

The full range set includes a good white charcoal pencil and three degrees of softness in black charcoal pencils, plus several gorgeous light colors that fall into what I'd call a medium value range in pastels and a long range of thrillingly varied darks. If you use these in conjunction with pastel pencils, you can extend the dark range around the spectrum and produce sparkling varied shadows. Details that stay within the hue and temperature of what you're accenting or complement it are another great use for these pencils, as accent darks.

They are watersoluble. That's where the comparison with Graphitints vanishes. Unlike the Derwent Graphitint range of soft dark tinted graphite pencils, Derwent Tinted Charcoal pencils do not brighten or intensify the color when washed. They retain their original colors perfectly.

It's useful to know how any watersoluble product shifts when washed. So before using them in paintings, do a color chart and wash half the sample of each color. Each of the dark colors is a wonderful deep monotone with a long value range, even the light colors have a good value range other than white, which has a long value range on dark or black paper.

These are perfect for multimedia techniques in dry media, they handle like charcoal. Their great advantage is that whisper of color. It can be used to great advantage in nature sketching, where you may need cool winter shadows on snow or tawny golds and browns in a deer but really want to keep the whole palette muted. Easy smudging makes them a good fast sketching medium, and that's what I mostly use mine for.

You can only get them from Derwent. If you like charcoal pencils, you will probably love these. If you use charcoal pencils for accents in your pastel drawings, you may start finding them a necessity for those times when very deep accent darks look so much better with a hue than without. Use them exactly like other brands of charcoal pencils but enjoy the range of subtle tints for any time you need just a hint of color.

I'll be keeping my set restocked because having these around encourages me to sketch more. Below is my life drawing of the corner of my drawing table with a blue glass coffee cup as the central element. One great advantage of charcoal pencils in general over other sorts of sketching pencils is easy scanning! While light tones in graphite may drop out, charcoal and these tinted charcoal pencils tend to show up clearly in all their tonal gradations.


Coffee Cup
4" x 6"
Derwent Tinted Charcoal Pencils on white ProArt sketchbook paper
From life, blue glass coffee cup on a corner of my drafting table with supplies, edge of the table and drawers under the table.

Derwent Pastels

Derwent Fortnight continues with #5: Pastels.

Derwent Pastels are medium-hard sketching pastels. Comparable to Prismacolor's NuPastel, Color Conte sticks, Cretacolor Pastel Carre, Richeson Semi-Hard or Faber-Castell Polychromos, these pastels are versatile for both painting and sketching. Like the Derwent Pastel Pencils, these pastels have been reformulated for softer, more consistent texture and greater lightfastness in some colors. I haven't got the old formula to compare, but I like these very much and consider them as a probable improvement on NuPastel, which has lightfastness issues.

I loved the NuPastel texture but didn't like the way some very useful colors were fugitive. Derwent hasn't posted lightfastness per color in this range on the Derwent home page yet, but I'm sure they will later on. They post this information for almost all of their products and this formula's new, which may mean Blue Wool testing is still ongoing.

The earth tones blister pack I tested is a great range for life and nature sketching. The reddish earths would make excellent skin tones for figure drawing or portraits, while the cooler browns and deep darks would help with background elements and deep shadows.

I like the example sketches on the package, but that was done with a larger set since it seems to include a pale yellow or ivory color not in the blister pack. Thus any shading to light I did with these had to be using reserved white on the paper. They smudged easily when deliberately pushed, but weren't so delicate that I wound up getting them all over my hands for a completely muddy surface.

Just firm enough to get a clean line or hard detail, they're soft enough to give a good scumbled texture. Several of the sticks had broken neatly in half when I opened it, so that was handy. I used the side of the stick to block in some areas and found that just as effective as using the tip.

Some of my highlights in my test drawing are reserved, others are created by lifting with a kneaded eraser. Derwent Pastels don't stain the paper in any of the colors I used. I was able to bring back pure white in a couple of spots I wanted to remove color, one of them (the hole in one of the dried leaves) had been a dark spot with a heavy application. Spraying with SpectraFix alcohol-casein based fixative did not dissolve the color or change the colors.

Being compressed, the first stroke with a new stick may be a little light and not lay down much color. The solution is just to scribble a bit till the color comes up. If you have scrap pieces of sanded pastel paper or sandpaper, one swipe will take off that outer compressed layer revealing the working core.

They have uniform softness without grit or hard lumps in them. None of the sticks crumbled under hard pressure or on being squeezed, something that happens sometimes with other pastels in vigorous applications. They are nicely pigment-rich and have a texture very close to the American Prismacolor NuPastels.

The range is only 36, but like other short range Derwent products, it's got a good balanced spectrum of brights and some great earth tones. A short range is the only drawback, but then, if you're on a tight budget a smaller set that's good artist grade quality is going to make it a lot more affordable.

I hope that in future Derwent does choose to extend the range to 72 and beyond, since these pastels are wonderful for so many uses. Every application I listed for the color Conte crayons applies to these. You can use them for sketching, sketch under pastel paintings without changing the texture, paint with them from beginning to end or do an underpainting by blocking in large masses of color and then rubbing them smooth to provide a base for softer pastels in later layers.

Corresponding with Dick Blick, I discovered that the current stock is the old formula, somewhat harder Derwent Pastels. The distributor has informed them that this new formula will be available in June or July 2010 and presumably that's when the rest of the USA suppliers will have them. I've written to them for an old formula sample, so I can tell exactly how much softer these new ones are. The texture on these is splendid, consistent and firm without being dry or brittle. If you like the older formula, stock up on them while Blick still has the previous ones. Derwent might also have changed some colors in the range.

Here's the test sketch I did this morning with my six-color earth tones blister pack. I like the palette for nature sketching and feel it'd be glorious for figure drawing. Definitely something to bring along the next time I find a group of artists doing life drawing. All whites and lights are reserved, smudged light applications or erased out -- this range is better for white or light paper unless you accompany it with a white pastel pencil.


Bone and Gall
8 1/2" x 11"
Derwent Pastels (six color earth tones assortment)
White ProArt sketchbook paper
Sketched from life.