Guest Speaker: Illustration Media

My good friend, Neecy Twinem, teaches several illustration classes over at the Southwest University of Visual Arts (SUVA) here in Albuquerque—and I'm always happy to visit her classes when she asks me to come in and talk about colored pencils & illustration.

As usual, I packed up about 3 bags worth of supplies, samples, books, and finished pieces to share with the class. I discussed a few different methods of working with pencils, did a short demo, and talked a lot about how I got into pencils and developed a way of working with them that suited me (a lot of it was trial and error, luck of the draw, and timing).

I'm thinking about writing a post specifically about all this… sometime in the near future. For now, let me just say—I have used Prismacolor a lot in the past. I still have a rather large collection of Primacolor pencils… but these days I'm using mainly Caran d'Arche Luminance 6901 pencils—for three very important reasons:

One—they almost never break inside the barrel of the pencil. Prisma breaks often and easily, I've wasted whole pencils on breakage like that. 

Two—they do not bloom, there's not waxy white haze that forms over unsealed artwork that is heavily burnished.

Three—they have the best lightfast rating of any colored pencil on the market.  

 I'll see about putting together more posts about working with colored pencils… soon.