SketchBox #11 - Charcoal it is!

My SketchBox subscription for April arrived today and contains a lot to do with charcoal and, to be fair a little bit more...

Obviously, the big ticket item is a set of Derwent tinted charcoal, 12 colours in all. I haven't, to date, done a lot with charcoal, but I have the General's charcoal set and that is primarily black and white. This set looks really interesting to experiment with and seems to contain a good chunk of the colour range available (there's 21 in total).

All in all, the set looks interesting for doing some landscape work and so I think I will find this fun to try out.

Now, when I try these out and, potentially need to take care of a little bit of an oops, they've included the Koh-i-noor kneaded eraser. The folks at SketchBox claim that it is great for charcoal lifting, though also have similar erasers, so this may go in the future use storage area.



Also included, and very exciting for me, is Derwent's blender pens. These pens are designed to be used with coloured pencils and graphite and what has me interested in their performance is that they may be a great option for travelling when taking solvents isn't a good choice (e.g. flying).

Finally there's a couple of Stabilo pens in Sienna and Medium Gray along with a tiny trial pad of Stonehenge White paper. The paper is recommended for dry media, though it feels like it has some real heft and so it will be interesting to do a doodle on. As you can see from the picture above, this is not a large pad!

This is a box that has me really interested to experiment, enough that I think I will do a follow up post this weekend that tests out some of these supplies and provides a more detail comparison.