The Club’s 2025-26 season got off to a flying start with a demonstration by Chris Church depicting a deer’s head in watercolour pencils. Chris has had a varied career with Nissan, firstly in Computor Aided Design, then in designing connected services such as a phone that heats your car.

Chris has been painting for 9 years and was a finalist in the David Shepherd Award with his depiction of a Red Panda. He uses acrylics for his pictures of cars but watercolour pencils for animals, as in this demo. He prefers Faber & Castell pencils to Derwents, finding the latter too waxy and uses acrylic paper – on the straightforward basis that it works! He always works from his own photos, with the centre of interest kept to one side.

Apart from watercolour pencils, he uses mechanical graphite pencils for initial drawing, which doesn’t need subsequent erasure, plus Winsor & Newton foundation brushes and Poscara paint markers for highlights. He works upright and eye level with the source image to avoid distortion, with the traditional progression from light to dark. Lighting uses daylight bulbs so the yellow scale can be seen.

 

Brushes, when used, are fairly dry to ensure precision, important when rendering fur. The watercolour pencil is applied dry before water is added, and brushes are used to push down the pigment to darken colours without adding more paint. Pencils are held at an angle to cover a larger area without digging in and and damaging the support surface.

 

 

Chris’s palette includes light ultramarine, burnt umber and a mix of mauve and nougert, the latter being his commonest base colour. Blue and green was used to render the deer’s chin, whilst brown ochre and walnut brown depicted the eye. Interestingly though, and in a marked break with watercolour tradition, Chris uses black more than any other colour.