The Grande High Witch Under Inktense Scrutiny
Have you seen The Witches? Not the 2020 film with Anne Hathaway. The original, with Angelica Huston playing the evil Grand High Witch, Eva Ernst, head of all the witches in England. If you have, then you'll be very familiar with this week's monster.
But you may or may not be familiar with the medium I used to illustrate her. I barely was. They're Derwent Inktense water soluble pencils and they really surprised me. I've tried watercolor pencils before, but these had a little extra kick. The bold, strong colors are a little bit of magic that made the Grand High Witch pop right off the page.
One important tip about Inktense pencils, is that you really need to swatch your colors. The color band on the back of the pencil barrel rarely looks like the pigment core of the pencil. And that pigment core, when laid down dry, looks amazingly different once you add the water to it. Once you work up your own personal swatch guide based on your palette of pencil colors, you're set to go.
You can start by laying the colors down on the paper, and then brush them with water to activate the pigments. The main difference between regular watercolor pencils and Inktense (according to all the marketing) is that Derwent Inktense pencils contain ink pigments that are incredibly vibrant when activated, and become permanent on the paper after drying. And that means you can lay down a base color, wait for it to dry, then go over it with a glaze of new colors without lifting or smearing the original color.
Altering things permanently is something Roald Dahl understood when writing The Witches. When he turned child protagonist Luke into a mouse — spoiler — he remained a mouse. Permanently. Even when the witches had been defeated. In the movie version (the one I'm using as inspiration for this illustration) producers and the director thought it best to have mercy on the kid and transform him back into a child at the end of the film — a decision that never sat well with the author.
Another great feature of the Inktense pencils is the ability to modify how much pencil texture you leave in the final piece by modifying your water saturation. With a gnarled, boil-covered witch like Eva Ernst, leaving some texture on her wig-rash-covered scalp can add to the story. You can even get pretty close to the look of traditional, granulated watercolors if you're careful.
As usual, in Patreon we've dropped a few in-depth posts and videos about the different ways to use Inktense pencils, and I've posted my entire 72-color swatch guide in the free tier. If you'd like to see any of those posts you can join the Patreon here. And if you want to see how The Grand High Witch turned out, you can view the video below.