Caran d'Ache Creative Art Materials NeoColor II Water Soluble Wax Pastel Set, Multi-Colour, Pack of 15 & Artist Plexiglass Pallet White 26 x 13 mm

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Snowy Farm, Neocolor II water-soluble wax oil pastel on grey Clairefontaine Pastelmat paper, (33x46cm) Caran D'Ache of Switzerland. Water-soluble wax pastels (coloured crayons). Suitable for numerous artistic techniques on a wide range of materials. The set also comes with an inculded metal tin containing a 2-hole KUM Magnesium pencil sharpener, one Technalo B watersoluble graphite pencil, two sponges, a hog hair brush, and a metal scraper. These are very nice additions to the set though it’s a shame that no proper paintbrush was included. The hog hair brush is far too wide and stiff to get any good detail or small brushstrokes and is in my opinion much more suited to mixing colours on a pallette, and the sponges are not much more suitible for similar reasons. The KUM pencil sharpener is very, very good – it’s the only sharpener I can find that you can sharpen Neocolors with, without them gumming up the sharpener or not even fitting in the hole. It works really well for fragile pencils too. I don’t know where I’d be without this sharpener, it’s brilliant. These pastels work on a wide variety of surfaces – a real advantage for an artist who likes to experiment. I also found you can use each individual crayon as basically a paint tube. Grab a wet brush and rub it against the end of the crayon to transfer some paint to your brush. You can use them as paint without even letting them touch the paper! Price Point

I scraped shavings of sky blue followed by moss green and olive brown into the nearer hillside then solubilised these shavings with a flat brush, which achieved a transition from a misty hilltop down into the group of trees below. My suggestion is to keep it simple - I bet that a small set of 10-15 will be more than enough for art journaling!If you plan to create portraits or drawings where you’ll need a variety of colors, you’ll want to get more. Hint: Get the colors that you LIKE and you'll use them! A note about using pens or markers on top of wax crayons. Don’t do it! Scraped shavings of colour were applied directly to the paper then solubilised with a brush to create a transitioned wash effect. Techniques for using Neocolour II The first thing I want to mention is paper. If you are going to be using a fair bit of water with the pastels I would suggest using mixed media paper. I like Canson Imagine and Daler Rowney Mixed Media paper. But you can also use a toned mixed media paper. I have used a heavyweight coloured paper but only used water very sparingly.Jessica, I am so embarrassed not to have caught your name at the top of this post, you can probably feel the heat emanating from my red face to wherever you are. Please accept my apologies. You wrote a great review of a wonderful product.

Selecting ultramarine blue and a pale yellow, called Sahara, I scribbled these colours onto a scrap of watercolour paper, which I then used as a palette. I recommend trying these out if you are an artist who loves experimenting with new materials or looking to up your watercolor game. These are seriously my favorite new medium!

The pastels achieved a good effect for the posts when I pressed hard then reduced the pressure as I drew downwards. How to paint a woodland scene using Neocolour II The grass in the foreground was painted using short strokes from the wide range of greens available in the set, using the following colours from light to dark: Chinese green, yellow green, moss green, olive brown and dark green. Breaking off a short piece of burnt sienna, I dragged this across the top of the trees, the foreground bush and the facing wall of the barn on the left. I then developed the lit sides of the other building by working dry raw sienna over the walls. Next day, I added the tree structures and placed shadow onto the buildings using the dark grey pastel.

In a lot of my watercolor paintings, I use colored pencils to build color in an area or add texture, and these pastels would be excellent for doing that. With markers, I found that they are best used on top, after adding a “base” layer of marker underneath. You can start dark or light with the markers, the neocolours are so opaque that they easily show up over the markers. Another strength of them being rewettable is erasing – if you make a mistake, most of the pigment can be lifted off by dabbing it with a damp cloth and the remaining errant pigment can be covered up with additional layers of crayon. To put this medium to the test, I decided to do a couple of test paintings, trying out and combining different techniques. This included wetting the crayon itself, or using dry crayons over washes, heating up the paper with a hair dryer to melt the crayons onto the paper, and creating my own pan palette by disolving shavings of crayon with water onto my palette as if I were using watercolours.

Final Conclusion Of The Caran D'Ache Neocolor II Pastels.

You always know what colours to expect when using Neocolor IIs wet or dry. A lot of other brands in this medium look a little dull when used dry and get a lot more vibrant when water is added, which personally I have never liked. Neocolor IIs have the rare advantage in this medium to look nearly exactly the same colour dry as when wet, making it much easier to judge values and hues, and thusly to combine wet and dry techniques. Painting of a siamese fighting fish/betta fish I made for Inktober using Neocolor 2s By the way, I used Pentel Aquash water brushes, which are the best water brushes you can get, as the water does not leak to the brush unless you squeeze the firm reservoir. My watercolour painting of Yu Morisawa, a.k.a. Creamy Mami, using Caran D’Ache Neocolor II Bare with me here- I wanted to give a nice example, with a video of some of the process. As things sometimes go, they went awry. They are REALLY water-soluble. This is a simple rendition of Van Gogh’s Starry Night . After I put down the color I used a small spray bottle. At first it was looking great and I was saying wow! Then I used too much water and was saying something else… Dry Wet-Really Wet

For my beach landscape painting, I used my Moleskine Watercolor Sketchbook and a Water Brush (a lifesaver for travel sketching). |Water-soluble wax oil pastels that can also be used dry! Tim Fisher shows how to create a wide variety of effects on different surfaces with Neocolour II from Caran d'Ache. Top features: All discounts against RRP are made against the United Kingdom Recommended Retail Price (RRP). Unless specified, offers and vouchers are not valid on products which are already discounted from RRP, gift vouchers, books and from the I LOVE ART range.

Taping down your paper before you start drawing

After allowing the surface to dry, I worked with dry pastels to develop the painting, starting with a dark grey, which helped to establish the darks. I experimented with a different surface, Fisher 400, and worked with more ideas and techniques to paint Woodland Walk. crayons, in the colours above plus: ochre, vermilion, ultramarrine blue, turquoise, yellowish green crayons, in the colours above plus: light grey, grey, raw umber, salmon, reddish brown, carmine, rose, lilac, light violet 1, Prussian blue, light blue, malachite green, lemon yellow, light olive, dark olive Neocolor IIs are great for mixed media projects and cover well on many different kinds of surface because they are so opaque. Pretty much the only thing they don’t work very well on is glass.