Happy birthday Faber castell!

I'm still quite in shock to have been contacted few weeks ago by the art material brand asking me to test their new colour range of colour pencils!

I've been using their colour pencils "polychromos" for my drawings for a few years, it started when I was living in Seoul mostly because th art store there was incredible and I just had few minutes of subway to reach it and unlike many art store in France, you can "test" lots of art material directly in the store which make the choice easier (or more complicated for some of us!!)

Nevertheless I really enjoyed using them in combination with some painting but it's really when I came ack to France that I started to create pieces only with the colour pencils ( hey some of the drawings are still for sale in my shop HERE and they are currently on sale with a 30% discount until the 1st of september!!)

Now Faber castell is celebrating their 265th birthday and for the first time since 1989 they created 20 new colours focusing on pastel colours and asked me to give it a try.

It took some sketches and researches to find the right colour palette and I had to change a bit my approach.

I usually create my drawing focusing on the values first with brown and white pencils and then add thin layers of colours but this time I just thought it was reducing the beautiful colours they created and the brown's first layer became too dark, so I used only the colours they supplied.

And I must say it gave a very different mood to the image I used as reference which was a landscape from my art residency in Janyary in North Wales and that time of the year the colours were mostly grey, brown with a bit of green here and there.

Using bright colours makes it very joyful and allowed me to get out from my comfort zone.

Do you think I should work on a new series of drawings using only this palette?