Testing Drawing Materials for Use Under Watercolor

When creating an underdrawing for a water media painting, if drawing directly onto the painting surface, do you know which drawing utensils are safe to use? In this brief demo, we'll examine how various dry mediums perform under watercolor paint. To do this, I have a piece of cold pressed 140 pound paper secured in place, then I'll draw on small rectangles of each product. And then paint thin watercolor over top to see how each responds. What we're looking for is a product that remains in place without smearing too much and without altering the paint color. We also don't want it to be so waxy that it completely repels the paint. The products we'll test are ink, stone, carbon, charcoal, graphite, colored pencil, watercolor A china marker, also known as a wax pencil or grease pencil, and pastel. The last two are not normally used, but I thought it would be helpful for observation purposes. The first one we'll test is ink. Now, often you can buy ink in liquid form, but it's also available in this dry format, where you can rub it with water on what is called an ink stone. This creates permanent ink. I can then load my brush and paint it onto the surface. Ink was commonly used for underdrawings by oil painters throughout history, and could be an option for watercolor painters as well, as long as you realize it will likely be visible in your final product, as opposed to being covered as it is in oil painting. The next one is Conté's Pierre Noir Blackstone pencil. We'll do the H, or hard. This pencil is pretty dry-feeling, but also seems to have a little bit of tack. It's not an easy rub. It's a soft material with a matte finish. That's pretty dark for a pencil categorized as hard. The next pencil is Conté's Carbon Pencil. It's supposed to be a stronger, less messy form of charcoal. Some carbon pencils combine graphite and charcoal, both forms of carbon. So perhaps that's the case here. It's a little drier feeling than the Noir. Next is Conté's Charcoal Pencil. And we'll use the HB. This is even drier than the carbon pencil. You can hear it. Some charcoal pencils contain a touch of oil, making the charcoal less dusty. Now I'll also draw on a little charcoal from a vine or willow stick. This gets its name from the fact that the charcoal normally comes from charred willow stick or vine. It's very, very dry. We'll see if it responds differently. The next pencil is graphite, and this is what is used in your standard pencil. I selected the HB, or middle of the road as far as hardness level. It's about the same thing as a number two pencil. Graphite pencils are made of graphite and clay. The more the percentage of graphite in the pencil, the softer the lead. The more the percentage of clay in the pencil, the harder the lead. And by lead in this case, we're just referring to the carbon product. Soft lead gives darker lines. Harder lead gives lighter lines. H stands for hardness, and B stands for blackness. Because graphite is the most common dry medium used for an underdrawing in watercolor, let's test a harder and softer version as well. This is a 3B, a fairly soft graphite pencil. And this is a 4H, a fairly hard graphite pencil. And as we'd expect, it's harder to get nice coverage with the harder version of a pencil. It's handy, however, for making light marks and lines, as long as you don't press too hard and mar the surface. Some graphite pencils are water-soluble, but this one is not. So we've done the ink, stone, carbon, charcoal, and graphite. The next pencil is your standard colored pencil. These pencils are made from pigment, clay, gum, and wax. The wax may cause the product to resist, so we'll see. And we'll also test a watercolor pencil, which also uses pigment and gum binder, probably gum arabic, but it does not contain wax. It should melt right into the liquid, just like gum arabic, because gum arabic is the binder in watercolor paint as well. Next, we'll try a china marker, sometimes known as a grease pencil. I doubt anyone uses this on their watercolor paper, but I thought it would be helpful to see how the paint responds. We'll give it a try. It's called a china marker because it's so waxy you could write on china dishes and plates and cups. Lastly, another medium that isn't really used for underdrawings is pastel. Let's see why this one isn't popular. Once the ink is fully dry, I'll mix up a very diluted mix of quinacridone magenta. I want it nice and thin so that we'll be able to see if any of the dry mediums smear and Quinacridone Magenta is transparent as well, which should be helpful. I'll test the mix and add more water until it's thin enough. Now I'll wet my brush and load the bristles with the paint. We'll start at the beginning, the ink. As you can see, the paint glides right over the ink. There's no smearing and no resistance. It makes a beautiful, although permanent and obvious, mark under watercolor. Now for the Pierre Noir pencil. Well, this one is smearing. You can see that. And those white speckles in the black show some slight resistance. The carbon is similar. It smears, but maybe a little bit less. And it seems a little less resistant. Let's see how the charcoal performs. A little bit of smearing, plus a high degree of resist. Do you see the white boundary around the charcoal area? The vine charcoal smears as well, but it seems to have less resistance. This tells me that the pencil form does have some kind of wax in it. And now the graphite. Very little, if any, smearing, but it does show a resistance to the paint. Not completely, as you can see spots of paint on top of the graphite. Here is the colored pencil, which I would expect to resist. A little bit. Not as resistant as I expected. And there's no smearing. Some of the paint does remain on top. How about a watercolor pencil? It should dissolve, and it does. That has the greatest degree of smearing so far. Basically, the black watercolor pigment melted into the quinacridone magenta. The China marker should resist, as it's a product with a high degree of wax. Well, it didn't smear, and it did resist, but not as much as the charcoal, surprisingly. And now the soft and hard graphite. When we apply the paint over the soft and hard versions you can see that there's full coverage over the hard. So the higher the hardness, the more clay in the material and the less resistance. It also doesn't smear. So that is a good option for an underdrawing. And finally the pastel. Pastel is basically pigment, some filler, and a tiny bit of gum binder. That binder dissolves in water. So when the liquid hits this product, the material breaks up and distributes into liquid. Heavy, heavy smearing. It's kind of pretty though. So the harder graphite was the best performer. But let me suggest another alternative. We saw that the watercolor pencil smeared into the paint and brought the color down to a shade. But if your watercolor pencil coordinates with your paint, if you select one that is similar in color, Then, when you run your wet brush over the area, the color will simply blend into the new application. It's an option. I use watercolor pencil for the underdrawings in my oil paintings, as graphite tends to smear into oil. So now that everything is dry, let's see which lift up when rubbed gently with a paper towel. If it lifts up a lot, you probably don't want to use that under your watercolor. We'll begin with the ink. I don't expect anything to lift as it's applied as a liquid and is very permanent, and it doesn't. Ink is a good option, but you'd have to dilute it quite a bit and use a liner brush so it doesn't look too obvious under your paint, unless you want it visible. That is an option. The other medium that would be good and has been the medium of choice by many masters is graphite. The harder graphite is best as long as you don't apply too much pressure to the pencil. I used a 2H, like this, and this is a 4H, and this is a 6H. Notice how the marks lighten as you increase hardness. When you draw directly with these, the lines will naturally be faint, and we've seen that the paint will cover that. Let's see their lift. The soft graphite lifts a bit, but the hard hardly lifts at all, so no smearing either. It's a very good option. The Pierre Noir has quite a bit of lift. The carbon pencil picks up, but not too much, surprisingly. The charcoal really picks up. The colored pencil picks up a little bit. That actually surprises me. I didn't think it would, but it's not bad. The watercolor pencil picks up a little bit. Not much, though. And the china pencil, a little as well. The fuchsia watercolor pencil hardly picks up, and what does wouldn't be visible when blended into the paint. And pastel? That picks up a lot, of course. So the top three options for an underdrawing on the painting surface when you're working with watercolor are hard graphite, matching colored watercolor pencil, and very diluted ink. This video was taken from my class, The Watercolor Process, available on my website. I provide a link in the video description. And remember to like this video if you enjoyed the content.