How to SPEED UP your Colored Pencil Drawings

One of the big turn-offs for using coloured pencils is how long it can take to complete one drawing. It can take hours. I know that I've done drawings that have taken like 50 hours to complete with coloured pencils and sometimes you just want to get a drawing done a little bit faster. Well in this video I'm going to give you guys a tip to speed up your coloured pencil drawings so that they no longer take you tens of hours. Hey everybody, welcome back to my channel. My name is Kirsty and my aim is to help you improve your art skills so that you can feel proud of the artwork that you create. The key to speeding up your coloured pencil drawings is to actually utilise other mediums in with your coloured pencil drawings because you see coloured pencils are great for rendering really fine details but they're not that efficient at covering a large area very quickly. It can take ages to build up layers just to fill in the white grain of the paper but if you add a base using a different medium for example pastels and you just go in and you add a quick underpainting a quick base with pastels or watercolours or markers something like that first then you can go over the top of your coloured pencils and really use them for what they're best for which is defining details creating lots of little textures. So I'm going to go through a demonstration of how I use pastel and this is pan pastel and I'm going to go through how I use it to actually speed up my coloured pencil drawings and I'm going to show you with two quick demonstrations. I'm going to go through how to do a quick lock of hair and then a really quick apple study and these studies are just really going to show you the benefits of just applying a very quick very simple base layer with these mediums before going in with your coloured pencil and the thing is we're still going to do all of the magic with the coloured pencils you really don't need to be an expert in these other mediums to actually get some great results with this technique you won't need too many different materials for this technique the first thing that you'll need is the pastels so I am using pan pastel and you can use whatever pastels that you have or pastel pencils but you don't have to use pastels for this you can use watercolours or markers whatever you have that's suitable for doing an underpainting and filling in the white grain of the paper really quickly for the coloured pencils I'm just going to use my really small set of 12 polychromos coloured pencils once again this technique will work with any coloured pencils that you own for the paper I'm going to use the Strathmore Bristol vellum 300 series paper and this is great because it has enough texture to accept both the layers of pastel and also coloured pencil on top and then for blending the pastels I am going to use my soft tool sponge applicator blenders and a few other tools that I will be using is an eraser to show you that you can also lift up the coloured pencils and the pastels if you make a mistake or you want to create some really nice highlights and I'll also be using my exacto knife to create some texture in the hair study as well but that is it for the materials and now let's get started okay so let's start with the lock of hair and the first thing that you want to do is go in with the lightest colour that you want to use for the pastels so I'm going to start off with a cream tone because I'm doing a dark blonde lock of hair and so you want to pick the first colour to match the highlights in your reference image so that is why I am using a cream tone because this colour is going to match the colour of the highlights in the hair I'm not worrying at the moment about where the shadows are I'm just simply shading in this cream tone applying it where the whole lock of hair is going to be the next thing that I'm going to do is add a slightly darker colour now this colour isn't a shadowed colour yet but it's a bit more vibrant so it's going to bring a bit more vibrancy to the drawing and also help to create some darker tones and I'm just going to apply this colour to where the darker areas of the lock of hair are so basically the only parts that I'm not applying this colour to are where the highlights are in the reference image you can see that I'm actually being very messy I'm not worrying about being too specific and you definitely don't need to worry about adding any details for this step we're just adding basic colours at the moment we're blocking in the basic colours because remember the details are going to be what we're going to use the colour pencils for and then finally for this underpainting I'm going to go in with some darker brown tones just to block in where the shadows are and so you won't really need to add this shadowed colour to too many different areas now once you've gone in and done your underpainting with pastels you can see that we haven't got any of the white of the paper showing through so we don't have to worry about any graininess we can simply now enjoy going in with our coloured pencils to render the detail and hair texture and to add in some flyaway hairs so I'm going to start off by going in with a light brown tone and I'm just adding in the hair texture by doing lots of line pencil strokes going in the direction the hair is going in just to build up the volume of hair you can also use different coloured pencils to bring more vibrancy to the study and I am now going to go in and add in some even darker shadows using my really dark brown pencil and this technique as you can see is much faster than having to build up all of your layers of shading from scratch with coloured pencils if you want to add white over the top of the pastels then I recommend using a paper that has got a lot of tooth so that the white coloured pencil can stick on top of the pastels and really show up but that is why I recommend starting off with your first pastel colour as the highlighted colour that matches the lightest areas in your reference so that you're not adding really dark tones and covering up those highlights. As some of you may know one of my favourite things to do with coloured pencils is to use my exacto knife to actually go in and scratch in some details by scraping off that top layer of coloured pencils it reveals the lighter layers underneath and gives you some really cool textures especially for hair and fur and the great thing about this technique is that you can still use this method you can still go in with the exacto knife to lift up that top layer of coloured pencil and it reveals the layer of pan pastel underneath and as you can see I've also added some lovely flyaway hairs around the edges of this lock of hair just to make it look more natural and not so uniformed and so that is it for the lock of hair and now let's move on to the apple study I'm starting off by sketching out my apple with a HB graphite pencil and then the first colour that you'll want to use is your red pan pastel and I'm just shading in the whole of the apple with this red pastel apart from the little stalk and an area at the top of the apple which is a bit lighter and has got more of a yellow tone once I filled in all of the red with the sponge tool applicator I'm going in with the yellow and now building that on top of the red and also covering up some of those lighter areas of the apple and you can also go in and use the brown and green to start to build up an underpainting for the stalk the final thing that I'm going to do for my underpainting is go in with a grey pastel colour and use this to block out the shadow for the apple and this is a great way to get in shadows because pastels are really naturally very soft and you can easily blend them out and get a really soft transition into the white of the paper so you can make your shadows look really subtle once again once I've finished the underpainting I'm going to go in now with my coloured pencils and build up some details and texture onto the apple I'm making sure that when I do my lines and shading on the apple that I'm curving it around how the shape of the apple would be so making sure my lines are curved and not straight if you want to do a lot of work with the coloured pencils on top of the pastels then I really recommend using a paper like pastel mat something that is probably meant for pastel drawing and has a lot of tooth to it and it's almost like a sandpaper feel to it so that it really can hold on to that pastel and then hold on to a lot of coloured pencil on top I'm also going in with some dark brown to darken up the stalk and to define it a bit more and the pencils are great for defining those fuzzy blurry edges because pastels like I said give very soft transitions but in certain areas you may want to have more harsh transitions and cut off points so you can go in with your pencils to define things a little bit more I'm adding yellows, reds, magentas and browns and greens to really define this apple even more and I'm also going in with my black coloured pencil as well as some magenta as well to define the shadow a little bit more and to darken that area up but I also like to go in with my white pencil just to go in and brighten up where the highlights and the gleaming parts of the apple are where the light is bouncing off the apple and you can even use an eraser to lift up some of that coloured pencil and pastel if you want to so the great thing about this technique is that nothing's permanent you can erase the coloured pencil and you can erase the pastel if you make mistakes that's really good so those were just a few quick demonstrations but you can definitely apply this technique to a full-on drawing so recently I did a drawing using this technique and I did an eye study as you can see and it's a really great way to create a really big drawing in just a couple of hours I think this drawing only took me like three hours and as you can see it's quite detailed and if you're just to do this with colour pencils it'll take so much longer than three hours so that is my tip for how you can speed up your coloured pencil drawings also if you are interested in getting started with coloured pencils but you think to yourself I don't know what colours to mix I don't know what order to layer the colours in and I just have no idea where to start then you can get access to a free real-time coloured pencil class where I take you through how to draw a study of some strawberries in real time and you can follow along with me a link to that class is at the top of the description or you can check it out here and follow along with me and get all of the resources you need to give it a go yourself thank you guys so much for watching and I will see you in the next video