Gift - Set of Wolff's Carbon Pencils

This week we had a sketch outing and one of the gals gifted me with a set of carbon pencils - B, 2B, 4B, and 6B

I've been playing with them and find I really like the wash ability they provide as they are water soluble although I don't recall seeing any reference to that.  I always test so that no surprises if wanting to take watercolor to my pencil sketches.

Initial findings as I compare each grade of pencil.........they all can go very dark in value to include the B.  What makes each different (at least to me at this point) is that it takes less pressure to obtain those darker values the softer the grade.

The darker, of course, smears more easily and I'm one who doesn't think to lay a piece of paper down or tissue to keep my hand/fingers from hitting areas already drawn and making smudge marks.  Example of that is evident below.

The bottom of the above example was my taking the 6B pencil and scribbling a dark block on a piece of cardboard.  Then took a damp to wet brush mixing that block and then to paper.

This next example is using the 6B and working a line sketch first and taking damp brush to create the wash on paper.  Some areas were still damp when I penciled back over and other areas had already dried providing a nice textured look.

When posting in a Facebook group I'm in, someone asked if the carbon still smudged after taking water to it.........so of course I had to give that a test run as well.  Here are my results:

Exploring that further, I wanted to see how it would work taking water to the carbon and then applying watercolor over it.  Although colors are muted due to the under lying wash tones, they still remained what I would consider clean.  Best area to show that is the yellow flower on the hat. 

For this example I only used the B pencil.  I worked the line drawing to include some hatching and then took the wet brush "painting" with water.  I allowed it to completely dry.  Then without fiddling, I brushed over with watercolor. 

Not sure I'd want to use the softer grades but I may later test that out as well.  I normally don't like going too dark with pencil lines anyway if I'm going to ink and/or add color.  And even with regular graphite I have found I need to take care on how dark because even graphite can dirty colors like yellow when applied.

All examples were worked on Bee Aquabee Super Deluxe paper.