Tips to improve colour pencil art

Colour pencils are a drawing tool that was considered to be primarily for kids, because it is simple and you need not plan nor require any intensive set up, unlike water colour or oil painting. The core of pencil consists of wax or an oil-base which contains varying proportion of pigments held together in a wooden shield.

There are so many benefits of starting your artistic journey with colour pencil. Nowadays, they use it to make realistic portraits and paintings.

To begin with the colour pencil art, you need to learn few techniques that can transform your drawing into a painting because the detailing and intensity of an art is the same.

Let’s take a look at few blending techniques of coloured pencil as a wannabe artist.


1. Basic Shading


First, start with the most basic colouring i.e. straight side-to-side shading. Make the line straight and flat, let the fingers adjust the direction and pivoting from the elbow. People make mistake while doing simple basic colouring, is they twisting their wrist, the curves and patches appear as a result. To make it more perfect try to adjust and change the amount of pressure you need to apply to see the right tone of colour.


2. Hatching


The second basic technique is hatching. Hatching is drawing parallel lines in the same direction; these lines can be close for gathering or far apart. The other way is cross-hatching where horizontal and diagonal lines are drawn to build a shade. The look of the drawing can be in your hand by adjusting the distance between the lines.


3. Burnishing:


The literary meaning of the word ‘burnishing’ is polishing which can give beautiful varnish look to your drawing. The process of burnishing is applying the layers of colour and then by applying pressure with the light colour pencil or with some other artistic tool. Rubbing it significantly with light colour follows until a graceful and bright effect is achieved.


Burnishing is the useful technique to create glass, metal or polished surface effect.


4. Blending


Every time you colour and mix it, you are blending. When you do one colour over another that is also blending. One way to blend the colours is with the help of tissue paper or dry cotton. The technique is simply rubbing over the paper area which you want to blend.


The other technique of blending is with the help of baby oil. Yes, you heard it right! Baby oil is easily available at home and can be used for blending colour pencils. The technique is very simple. Firstly apply colour and do layering and then apply baby oil with the help of blending stumps or Q-tip.


The other tools which are used to blend are colourless blenders. These are basically a colour pencil without colour and it works for any colour pencil.


“Don’t worry about how you should draw it. Just draw it the way you see it.” – Jim Burton.


So, don’t only fill colours but paint like a pro with colour pencils.


Happy Painting!

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