Pencil + oil

So here's my genius idea: You know I love my Polychromo colored pencils. They're oil based (unlike a lot of brands, like Prismacolors, which are wax based.) Usually I work letting the grain of the paper or board show through the layers of pencil, unless I burnish. And I hate burnishing. But I would like to have a more painterly 'feel' or look to my work sometimes.

So I thought "heeeeeyyyy, I wonder if oil mixed with the pencils (remember, they're oil based) would somehow do something cool?"

And guess what ~ it does!

Here's a little experiment on illustration board. The first sphere is just two colors of Polys all by themselves. The second one has some baby oil applied over the top, with a brush. And the third one has a second coating of pencil (a cobalt green) over the top again, and also one more layer of oil. Cool, huh?!

I can't believe I'm the only one who's thought of this. I'm sure I'm not. I've just never seen anyone talk about it anywhere (I'm sure now someone will point me to a famous illustrator who does this technique, and I will find out I'm the last one to know.)

I also tried it on Stonehenge paper. Its just slightly less effective, maybe, but I also think its because I did a bit rougher application of the pencil to start with.


The bottom left is the first one, which is just pencil. The next one over has oil; the next one has another layer of pencil over the oil; the top left has two layers of pencil (two colors) and then some oil; the one to the right of that has one more layer of pencil on top of it all.

Obviously I have a lot more experimenting to do. But I'm thrilled that this works!
What I expected was that the oil would 'spread out' on the paper and make an icky blob. But no! I'm applying it in little strokes with a little brush ~ a lot like you would if you were doing picky gouache painting.

If you lay the oil on too thick it DOES make the paper transparent, like a greasy cheeseburger in a "to-go" bag. So you can't really get painterly with it. Its more of a vehicle to make the grainy pencil kind of shmush together.

Also, I love that it dries almost immediately! You can put another layer of pencil over it right away, like within 2 minutes or so. Or less even.

And it smells nice! The thing I hate about solvents (which people use with the Prismas or other pencils) is the smell. Ick. It makes me sick. This is lovely. Now, I don't know how archival baby oil is (!) or whether linseed or some other "art" oil would be a better choice. (You will laugh to know I thought about trying this with olive oil first, just because I had it handy, but decided to break down and buy a bottle of baby oil because somehow that seemed like a better choice.)

One other thing I noticed is that in the samples where the oil is the last layer to go on, it works as a kind of seal, and the pencil doesn't rub off. If I put another layer of pencil over it, then it rubs off easily, like it usually does. So it may be possible to seal the painting, at least sort of, with the oil, not sure.

I would like to try it with Prismas too, and regular graphite.

Like I said, I have more fiddling to do, but for now this seems like a good technique! I need to try it on an actual 'real' piece now and see what I can do with it. Stay tuned.