Last Wednesday I was back in The Rocks again and this time I ended at Susannah Place – a favourite spot to sketch. I normally sketch this historic building in the morning and have fun memories of rapidly changing shadow shapes. But on this occasion (4pm in the afternoon) the whole area was in shadow! So my focus was on the texture and doing some more experiments using Caran d’ache Neocolor II.

And I’m totally in love with the Salmon colour. Yum!

The first pass involved 3 x Neocolor II and 6 x markers

The ‘ugly’ stage – at this point, I decided that I would add some ink. Note: I don’t always go to ink, but on this occasion, I decided a little fude would free me up to continue focusing on the texture.

The moment when I paused and reviewed what was on the page.

I decided I wanted to add a little blue but I got totally carried away testing how the crayon behaved working in the wet and ended up with a full blue sky.

A detail of the texture

Final version with additional washes on the left side walls to create a little variation in values.

This was so much fun to do… and as always, the best way to test materials is to put them into action in a real-life sketch on location. I’m really not sure what my long-term use of these water-soluble crayons will be, but right at the moment, as I’ve hyper-focused on creating my Teacups course, they are adding a delightful playfulness to my ‘other’ sketching.