ArtGraf watercolour graphite & water-soluble pencils

First of all sorry I disappeared for a while... I just keep falling ill again. I thought I was getting better the last time I posted but a second round got me the day after. I've been too ill to do much for two weeks now. It is getting rather annoying...

But I'm finally up for writing again so hopefully it's finally going away.

 So for Christmas I got ArtGraf watercolour graphite and water-soluble pencils. Both my mum and I love the work of Yoann Lossel so after getting me the gold watercolours for Solstice the graphite was the logical next step (well logical looking back at it, at the time I had no idea.)

I've wanted to do greyscale plus one other colour (preferably metallics) paintings for a while now. It's a style I really love but I've barely touched outside of little doodles.

But for one reason or another I've never quite been satisfied with my black tools, pens only give one shade unless you crosshatch, I seem to have problems ruining my paper trying to get darks with normal pencils and I dislike the graininess of the 6B and higher pencils, I also don't like the shade of my black paints both acrylic and watercolours though Payne's grey could work.... there’s something very muddy feeling about black paints, I'm not sure I could really explain it. 

Anyway this ArtGraf watercolour and pencils might be the best solution to that problem. I mean I can use Payne’s grey and I might still, I'm curious to compare them, something I still need to do. One thing is that the graphite has a slight glossiness to it where the watercolour is matt. I think there's times I'll want one or the other more but there's also the benefit of using the graphite on smooth paper, not only watercolour paper, with the gold paints will also look better on.

First of all the picture on the left is of fairly normal sketchbook paper where the one on the left is much glossier. In my opinion the glossy paper is actually much nicer to work on with the watercolour graphite.

So firstly on the subject of the pencils: Without adding any water to them they act basically how you’d expect pencils to. They rub out fine though on the glossy paper they smudged a little (though I don't know if normal pencils would too on it.) 

Hopefully you can tell the watercolour graphite and water-soluble pencil tests apart. 

When you add water to the pencils I'd say they're a bit harder to tell how transparent your patch is going to be (though to be honest both pencil and watercolour are quite hard.) But having said that I've only played around with them a little.
They don't pick up all the graphite you brush over with water and leave a little bit of texture underneath. Whilst you can get a fairly smooth transition between the dry pencil and your wet arias once you add water to them they seem to want to form a dark edge around the pool of water.... I need to test the pencils out on watercolour paper, I'm wondering if they actually might be easier to control there. 

The watercolour graphite behaves quite differently. First of all don't use it straight out of its tin, you'll end up with pure thick black. I used the lid of the tin as a sort of mixing trey so I could tell how much water was in it to get what shade. 

When it comes to rubbing it out you really want to use the glossy paper, standard paper I could only rub it out about half way and when I later used it on watercolour paper it did nearly nothing. However applied really thickly and blotchily on the gloss paper you can rub out the thinner bits leaving patches of graphite that look quite cool (see the little top box on the right picture.)
Another thing, though I've only got it to work on the glossy paper, is it granulates really easily which I love...should see if adding it to watercolours will help granulate them. This shall be fun.

The last lot of text were just to see how the gold watercolours behaved next to the watercolour graphite and water-soluble pencils, I didn't want them to bleed into each other unexpectedly. 

As long as I didn't put the gold watercolour next to the watercolour graphite whilst they were both still wet they didn't bleed (though that test where they do looks awesome.)

You can even layer one over the other but with the exception of when the pencils are dry it is very very easy to disturb the colour underneath and accidently mix the two.

Yes mum.... I am going to keep teasing out the painting you've not seen yet. Next post, I promise. :P

Edit: After trying to actually do a painting on the glossy paper I have discovered that though it is great for granulation, it's terrible for getting a good gradient in the graphite and for actually painting with.