For some years there has been an interesting medium that combines drawing and painting: “Water colour pencils”.

They look like ordinary coloured pencils but the lines you draw can be diluted by water. These pencils are perfect for people who like water colour pictures, but are not prepared to walk the long way testing and practising  water colours.

For example you are on holiday and you go to your special place on the beach every day. There are three palm trees, the sand and the sea and you want to do a sketch of it. But a simple pencil drawing does not catch the atmosphere, the summer feeling,  of the place. Now you take a bigger sketch pad, your water colour pencils and you do a sketch with them. At home, you can dilute the lines as much as you want to. Moreover you can add some more colour to the objects by adding lots of lines and then dilute them. You are going to see that your picture looks like being done with real water colours in the end.

The advantage to  real water colours: you can decide the shape of your objects by putting the lines and diluting them just the way you want.

Having done one to three sketches that way, you know how many pencil lines and how much pressure lead to the intensity of the colour you want to have. It is very much easier than practising with real water colours. It is a new way of combining drawing with light painting with stunning results!

Have a try, you can’t go wrong!

It is also fun scribbling lots of incoherent lines and then spreading them with water into interesting objects. The results can sometimes be most artistic like pictures of “Klee” or “Miro”.

The pictures on this site are from the fantastic book:  Lörsch/Egginger “Malen mit Aquarellstiften“