Mandala: More Water

Painting with watercolor is as simple or complicated as you wish to make it. If you approach it with the openness of a child while releasing any expectations on what the end result will look like, you'll find it easy and will most likely have a great time working with it. It is an art media that anyone can use "right now" - yet like many things, can take a lifetime to master.

In this piece, I worked with water tinted with paint, rather than a wet brush filled with paint. This gave me the ability to create thin layers of color.

Prismacolor colored pencils

These Prismacolor colored pencils are the first such pencils I bought about 6 or 7 years ago. I initially purchased a few individual colors as open stock from a local hobby store, then went crazy and bought a set of like... a million or so from eBay. Didn't have a use for all of the colors in the giant set and ended up giving half of them away to a co-worker's daughter who liked to draw Anime.

Overall, I find the leads inconsistent - ranging in extremes from soft and creamy to brittle and waxy. As I no longer have the original box, and knowing that Prismacolor currently has several different kinds of colored pencils available, I had to do a bit of creative Googling to figure out that these are from the Premier line.



My patience runs thin when creating art with pencils and so I only pull these out now and again to color in the occasional mandala. Though the Albrecht Durer watercolor pencils are a bit more expensive, every pencil I've tried has been soft & buttery and I love that I can use them with water. If you ask me, I say skip these and try a better pencil that allows for a greater range of creative versatility.