Caradoc Beddow (Derwent Drawing on Vinyl Paint)
My first drawing with the new expanded set of Derwent Drawing Pencils. Done over some Lefranc & Bourgeois Flashe paint. Coloured pencils over the top of vinyl paints is one of my favourite combinations of all time. You get to set your own ground colour and play with that.
The expanded set of Drawing pencils is fantastic! The oranges (Mars Orange and Autumn Leaf) have especially made me certain they did well. These soft beauties are so amazing to work with and they blend a bit more like oil pastel in thick layers than other pencils which tend to just give up. They don’t hold the sharpest tips, but making them harder would take away all of the most wonderful things I love about them like the blending and the heavy saturation with minimal effort. They’re absolutely perfect for what they are.
What I did well
- worked quickly
- chose good light tones
- used black instead of trying to be chromatic about it
What I didn’t do well
- the world if I used references rather than my imagination would be so much better. I know this.
- more red peeking through would have been nice
- used the graphite transfer paper instead of the wax one
Caradoc
Caradoc had all the features of a man from my world: heavy eyebrows which could shadow his eyes to full darkness; a stoic mouth that perpetually carried a cigarette; and a ridiculous height like he was spending his time in shadow whispering to the gods. The first time I saw him, I wasn’t surprised, but I was disappointed. Rhys’ mum had been so much brighter and happier than the people I was used to in The Glass Hollow, but his uncle seemed to be simply another man. My immediate hope was that he’d ignore me, because in my experience, the alternative was to hurt me.
But, the first thing Caradoc ever did to me, as soon as Rhys introduced us, was welcome me to his house and assign me a chair around his table. It hadn’t even been a question or an offer, he’d simply assumed that I was staying and that I was going to have tea with them.
That was so alien to come from someone who looked similar to my father’s mates, that I didn’t even indulge the idea that it could be a trap of some kind. It isn’t worth anything, but it is fact that no one ever trapped me into their nefariousness, they were loud and proud of it from the beginning. That’s when I noticed that Caradoc, though unsmiling, didn’t have those eyes. Beneath the shadow was kindness, and most bizarrely, patience.
