I was almost done with this guy when I remembered why his face looks so familiar. He’s practically Mushu’s western cousin.
This was done almost entirely using two Derwent Inktense pencils (Payne’s Grey and Sepia Ink). These are a delight to work with, as they produce nicely saturated colors and are easy to control. They’re also less messy and more compact than traditional watercolors, so you might consider a few for your plein air watercolor kit.
The method of working is similar to a typical watercolor pencil: draw with the pencil, then apply water with a brush. The water dissolves the binder and allows you to paint with the pigment very similarly to watercolor paints.
One of the strengths of Inktense pencils is also a weakness: once the binder has been dissolved in water, it’s gone and the pigment is permanently affixed to the page. This means that if you make a mistake you’d better hope you can erase it (which works about as well as on standard colored pencils) or live with it. It also means that all colors can be used to apply washes, tints, and glazes of color without worry of removing the preceding layers of color – a trick you often can’t do with certain watercolor paint pigments.
Also – and I assume this has something to do with the binder composition – the leads on these things seem more resilient and pencil-like than colored pencils or normal watercolor pencils, both of which tend to be brittle or too soft. An Inktense pencil draws about like a graphite pencil in the 2B-4B range.
I added the color of the eyes and along the back of his neck frill, as well as the smoke, using Prismacolor colored pencils.