The View Toward Galway Lighthouse

Some years ago, when I was thinking about my watercolor technique, I bought some pencils made with water-soluble graphite, the kind that are designed to work with aqueous media. My idea was that the graphite lines would diffuse when I painted over them with colorful watercolor washes. This would give me some flexibility and range in how I combined watercolor with pencil lines. My ideas didn’t work so well in practice. The graphite lines were too dark and heavy looking for my watercolors at the time. And so, the pencils sat unused in my watercolor kit for years.

Until…

I went to Ireland this fall. I brought a pared-down watercolor kit with me, small enough to fit into my suitcase, but large enough to extend my brilliant watercolor technique to the very shores of the Emerald Isle, or so I thought. I just happened to include the two pencils that I hadn’t used in years.

The weather for the trip was generally good (for fall in Ireland), but it was still cool and damp enough to make plein air watercolors impossible for me. I usually soak the watercolor paper when I paint, which is not a problem in summertime in Texas, when the intense sun dries the puddles out quickly. But I soon found that a liberal soaking was not going to work in Ireland in the fall. I ended up watching puddles of wet-into-wet color combining into inglorious mud. What to do?

With nothing else to lose, I began to experiment with the graphite aquarelle pencils. I found that they combined nicely with regular graphite pencils, allowing me to make plein-air sketches of the beautiful Irish landscape that showed both delicate and heavy pencil lines combined with monochromatic washes of water-soluble graphite.

Working out the technique was straightforward. Simplifying my tools made the technical puzzles easier to solve. What could I do with two different pencils, some water and a brush, smooth watercolor paper and a lovely view toward Galway Lighthouse on a cool and damp day?

It was not the type of work that I intended to do when planning the trip to Ireland, but it was the type of work that I could do, given the conditions of the trip.

The clouds over Galway Bay smiled when I stopped fighting my expectations.