Teaching an old dog new tricks

Not really frustrated, but I know what you mean Dermot. I'm not keen on coloured pencils just on their own, always seems a bit like colouring in when I was young. However, I do use them on occasions, normally as an addition to a watercolour, the Caran D'ache Aquarelle in particular, water soluble and a lovely range of colours.

I have the same problem as Dermot- I can't stand using a pointy thing to fill in areas of colour. Pointy things are for lines. It amazes me that people buy those colouring-for-grown-ups books, sold by the thousand in WHS and even Waterstones. It wouldn't relax me at all- it would drive me mad. I have used coloured pencils, and the results are just like Northlight's above. Same when I try pastels- although one can use them on their side to give a broad brush effect. I once went to the UK Coloured Pencil Society annual show- there was one quite large photorealistic portrait picture there which (when I asked) I was told took 800 hours to do. 800 hours??!! Time for 400 watercolours! Gerry

I bought some watercolour pencils a little while ago but they don't do anything for me. Even after applying water I could still see the pencil marks and anyway it took too long to do. I have used them on occasion to add a little something to a watercolour but on their own no. The same goes for Inktense pencils, I can't seem to get the hang of them at all! As for pastels, not on your Nellie! Tried the soft pastels, all I got were filthy hands. Tried the oil pastels to no avail. So me I'm sticking to my favourite watercolours, I'm not wasting my time (or money) on anything else ;) Oh and no I can't see why adults find those colouring books so good but they do, my hairdresser swears by them, she says it relaxes her. Each to their own.

I think the only thing that they are good for is sketching while travelling. You can use them to draw and roughly indicate the colour and apply water later, when it is more convenient. The Inktense colours are good and lightfast. But their cousins the art bars are horrible and emphasise the texture of the paper, whether you like it or not. Having said that, I've never done it, it was merely my intention. I might use my coloured pencils, now that winter is drawing in, as the conservatory, where I paint is getting too cold.

I have a couple of boxes of coloured pencils, one of them won in a competition on this very site - I do enjoy working with them, but I haven't the patience to make it a main medium and certainly can't be doing with spending hours on it. But they're very useful for colour notes, sketches, try-outs for paintings; and some of them work well with acrylic and watercolour. Diana Hudson, who used to post work here, is a genius with coloured pencils and a member of the Coloured Pencil Society. It can be a very rewarding medium, and these days the colours are so much more extensive, and lightfast, than they used to be when we were all kids and coloured in our drawings with them. The medium I did, and do, have trouble with is pastel - I'm not so bad with the hard ones, but the soft ones, with all the necessary blending, take me beyond my threshold of patience, not least because my "studio" is a corner of my flat, and the dust gets everywhere. I don't think one can hope to master all the various media - broadly, I stick to three, with excursions into pencil, pen and ink, ink and wash, and coloured pencil now and then: but I don't think I'd want to show my CP work - dunno, perhaps I will! But on the whole I'm less drawn to the dry media than to liquid paint (not necessarily all that liquid in the case of oil) and brushes. Coloured pencils are a clean medium, though - no dust, no ghastly masking fluid, no solvents or oils: they have a lot to offer, and they don't have to be used in a tight, finicky way; but it does take a fair amount of time to build up the layers, if that's the way you work. Watercolour pencils - well, I watched a demo a while ago where the artist very carefully shaved colour off of the pencil, and then wetted it and applied it - and I thought: yes: but you could just have put a damp brush into a watercolour pan and got the same result much more easily. Still - I've used a Cadmium Yellow watercolour pencil in a watercolour, because I couldn't have got the opacity other than with gouache; it worked, and so far that's the only real way I've used them. But speaking of demos, I saw another - I think on Bob Davis's instructional site, if any of you know that - where he drew the outline of a bird in watercolour pencil to give himself a guide rather than going straight in with the brush, and then he applied water and fresh paint, allowing him to incorporate his drawing into the painting without any drawing lines showing. I don't mind pencil lines working with watercolour, as it happens - I rather like them; but it did work. http://www.isleofwightlandscapes.net http://www.wightpaint.blogspot.co.uk