HOW TO USE COLORED PENCIL - Guide for Beginners

In today's video, I'm going to be going through a full guide for colored pencils for beginners. And so by the end of this video, you will know everything you need to get started with this medium, including the materials you'll need, how to pick colors, and also I'll be going through loads of different techniques that you can apply to your drawings to make them look amazing. Once I've gone through all of that, I will demonstrate how you can use all of these tips on a piece of artwork. I will be demonstrating how I did this strawberry study. Let's start off by talking about the useful materials to have for working in colored pencils. And we'll start off with the actual colored pencils themselves because there's so many different types and brands out there. Colored pencils come in a variety of different set sizes. So you can have some really small sets and then really large sets of colored pencils as well. So you can definitely find one to suit your needs and budget. The smallest set tends to be a set of 12 pencils that just have all of the general colors that you need to get started with creating colored pencil drawings. And then you can have really large sets that are over 100 pencils big and have loads of different color options to choose from. So it can be overwhelming to know which one to go for. But you can definitely make amazing artwork with even a size 12 set of colored pencils. So don't feel like you need loads of colored pencils straight away. Luckily, big brands colored pencils make loads of different set sizes. So just go for one that suits your needs and budget. Normally a set of about 36 will be fine for beginners and give you enough colors to work with. Now colored pencils normally come in two types. You can either have a wax-based colored pencil or an oil-based. Wax-based pencils tend to have a softer, creamier core and makes for easy blending. Whereas oil pencils tend to have a firmer lead and so hold their point better. I wanna talk through my favorite brands of colored pencils because I know a lot of you guys are interested in what brands I use. One of my favorites is Prismacolor and this is probably the most common among beginners and a very popular brand. I personally have the set of 150 colors so I have all the colors that they own and I think these are a great set for loads of different types of subject matters. I produce portraits with these pencils because of their creamy wax-based leads. It makes them really nice for blending and creating soft transitions between colors. But then they're also great for creating details and doing animal studies. So they are a very versatile brand of pencils and they're actually the ones I'm using for the demonstration today. They also work great with a large range of techniques that I use, for example, when I create detail with an X-Acto knife and for blending with solvent as well. Another brand of colored pencil that I love using is my Faber-Castell Polychromos. These are oil-based pencils which means that they have a harder lead and so hold their point really well. You don't need to sharpen them as often which makes them great for doing animal studies and getting in loads of details and they work great with the solvent technique which I regularly use when drawing animals and we'll be talking about later on in the video. So mainly I do use these for animal studies. They are great for detail, whereas Prismacolors, because they are a softer lead, you do need to sharpen them more often and they wear down quicker. So depending on what you want to draw, that may be something that you want to consider. The last brand of colored pencils that I use is Caran d'Ache Luminance. Now these are the most expensive out of the three and the largest set that they do is a size 76. These are some of the highest quality pencils out there. They're also wax-based so they have very creamy leads which make them perfect for doing realistic portraits because of how easily the colors blend together. But again, you can use these for any subject matter that you want and they'll perform great. But because these are so expensive, I definitely don't recommend them for beginners. These pencils have some of the highest lightfastness ratings around and lightfastness is something that you want to consider if you're selling your artwork. And this basically means how phase-resistant your colored pencils are when exposed to light and you can normally find out this information about the brand of colored pencils that you want on their website. Moving on to paper. I use lots of different types of paper for my colored pencil works depending on what technique I'm using. I mainly use three different types of papers and I'm gonna go through what I use them for. The first brand of paper that I like to use is the Strathmore Bristol Smooth Surface Paper and this is what I use whenever I want to draw portraits or when I'm using the burnishing blending technique and just using the pressure of the pencils to blend. This paper is great if you want to get ultra-smooth blending and I love this paper because it's really nice and thick so you have a nice sturdy drawing. It also works great for the X-Acto knife technique that I'll be demonstrating later on. And so overall, this is the paper that I go to for portraits. Whenever I use solvent to blend my colored pencil work which is a very common technique, I use watercolor paper for this and mostly I use cold-pressed paper but you can use hot-pressed watercolor paper if you want. And so if you are using a solvent to blend your colored pencils, you will need a paper that's suitable for wet media because solvent is a liquid so you want a paper that can take adding lots of liquid to it without warping or buckling. I use the Arteza watercolor paper because I find that this paper isn't too textured so I can still get lots of detail into my artwork. Solvent is great when blending blurry backgrounds or when doing animal studies where you want to do lots of layering. I use solvent to blend the strawberry demonstration that I'll be showing you guys later on. And the third type of paper that I use is a toned paper. So this paper is like a mid-tone color which is great if you want to practice your values. And the paper that I like to use is the Strathmore toned gray and I use the mixed media paper. This is super thick, really, really thick. And toned paper is great to work on. It's really fun to use and if you are struggling with highlights and shadows, this is a great paper to practice on because you have that mid-tone established and so you can just identify highlights and shadows and create depth in your colored pencil pieces. So I recommend testing it out and you can get loads of different colors of toned paper to try. So colored pencils and paper are basically your bread and butter of drawing with colored pencils. They're really all you need to create amazing artwork but there's some other tools that are super useful and can be used for some really cool techniques. Starting off with solvent. Solvent is amazing. You can use rubbing alcohol, odorless mineral spirits, turpentine and then to blend with, I use brushes. I use Filbert brushes because they're super sturdy and they're great for having lots of control over the blending process. And then for smaller details, I use round watercolor brushes that are really tiny for those details so that you can work around all of the tiny details when blending your drawings out. I use the Zest-It pencil blend to blend with but I know this isn't available in all countries. The next tool that I use is an X-Acto knife and this is a little crafting knife and this is great for etching or for creating details and highlights in your art. A white gel pen is also really helpful for creating really bright highlights in your artwork though white gel pen isn't archival with colored pencils so bear that in mind if you want to sell your artwork. I also always have some tape on hand to attach my colored pencil drawings to the desk to stop them moving around. Pencil extenders are really, really useful and what these are basically for is when your pencils get teeny weeny and you don't want to throw them away, you can put them in a pencil extender and now they're just the length of a pencil and you can get so much more use out of them. A large brush is good to have on hand to wipe away the little bits and crumbs of colored pencils that get on your drawings so that you don't have to wipe them with your hand and mess up your drawing. So I recommend having one of them. And for those of you guys that always ask what my sharpener is and how I get my pencils so sharp, I use the Derwent Superpoint Manual Helical Sharpener. Yes, that's a mouthful. And as you can see, this pencil was blunt but a few turns in my sharpener and it gets so sharp. I have not seen another sharpener that gets pencils this sharp. As always, I'll leave links to all of the materials that I've mentioned in the description below. And finally, a graphite pencil and a kneaded eraser are always good to use when creating your sketch outline. I don't use colored pencils for the sketch outline. I just use a normal HP pencil and a kneaded eraser to lighten up my sketch before I begin coloring. Picking colors for your drawings can be one of the most challenging parts of the whole process. What I recommend doing is whenever you get a new set of colored pencils, make sure that you create a chart and swatch out all of your colors so that every time you go and choose the colors for your drawing, it's easy to look at your charts and pick out the best ones. Because when you have loads of each color, it can be hard and overwhelming to choose the best one. So I'm gonna go through how I pick the colors for this reference here. Whenever I'm picking colors for a reference, I identify the main colors that I can see in that reference. Is there reds? Is there deep reds? What's the shadow colors? Is there any greens? And then I swatch out all of the potential colors for each step of the reference. For each different color, I write out all of the options using the swatches that I've made from my color chart. As you can see, I've swatched out all of the types of red that I could use for the strawberry, all of the types of oranges, pinks, dark purples, and so on. And then from each of those rows that I've created for each step, I then identify the best one, the best match, and the one that I want to use. And so I break it down and go through it as like an elimination process until I've created a list that best serves the needs of the reference and gives the most accurate colors. One thing that's really important is that you don't have to match the exact color of the reference. It's more important that you match the value of that color rather than the hue of the color. So make sure that you have the light colors, mid-tones, and shadows, and that you've got a range of values in there. But any of those reds could have worked. Let's move on to talking about some of the most useful techniques to use with your colored pencils, starting off with some tips on layering. Instead of holding your pencil right at the front and using the point of your pencil, try holding your pencil further back and actually using the side of your pencil when doing your layering and shading. This is because when you hold your pencil further back and use the side of the pencil, it actually helps you control the pressure and get a more even pressure when you're doing your shading. And this means you get smoother shading and you don't have any stubborn, darker lines that show through, which can happen when you hold the pencil at the point because you get more of an even pressure. When you're layering different colors or trying to transition between colors, make sure that it's a slow, gradual change. For example, I'm really slowly transitioning between the blue and the purple by varying my pressure, keeping it really dark where the purple's meant to be the most intense, and then getting lighter and lighter as it blends with the blue. What you don't wanna do when you're trying to mix colors together and transition between colors is have a really harsh cutoff point. And also, I'm demonstrating here some really messy shading where I'm holding it more towards the point of the pencil, and you can see some darker lines and streaky shading showing through. But you can also see that I've done a really harsh transition between the red and the purple. I've not eased off the pressure of my pencil to transition between those colors. It's a really harsh cutoff point. You can see the top swatch of shading is really smooth, the shading's smooth, and also, there's a really gradual change between those colors because I varied the pressure and mixed them together, whereas with the bottom one, it's very streaky, very messy shading, and it's a harsh cutoff point between those two colors because I just stopped one color and then started the other without mixing them together. Now let's talk about blending, and let's go through method one, which is blending with solvent. So again, I'm using the Zest-It pencil blend and my filbert brush to blend this. The first key step when blending with solvent is to make sure your brush is clean. So I previously used this to blend out some red, so I know my brush is really dirty. So make sure that you dip your brush into your solvent and just clean it off on a bit of tissue before you go and blend your new project. Otherwise, you might have accidentally gone in and smeared that red all over your new drawing. So make sure that you're starting with a clean brush. And then before you go in and blend, make sure that you get rid of all of the excess solvent onto that tissue because you only need a tiny bit to blend. To blend, go in circular motions and just move your way across from the lightest color over to the darkest color, or in this case, I'm just working from one side and moving over to the other side. To get your drawing to blend really smoothly, you need to make sure there's enough pigment down, enough colored pencil down on the paper so that the solvent can actually fuse the pigment together and give a smooth layer. Now, for the mistakes, some things that you don't want to do is first go in. You can see that I was blending that top swatch. I'm filling my brush with solvent. I'm not going to get rid of any excess, and I also didn't clean off that brush. When you use too much solvent to blend, you actually get a greasy stain form around your drawing, which isn't nice and could ruin your work. Plus, you have so much solvent that it's hard to control the blending process. Also, when you don't clean your brushes between blending different colors, you run the risk of actually transferring that color onto the new color that you're drawing and it can make the colors all muddy. So make sure that you clean your brush between blending different colors. One great thing about using solvent is that you can layer lots of layers of colored pencils on top of each other when you use this process to blend. And you can go in and blend it all out over and over again with the solvent multiple times. And with each new layer, it gets a really smooth result and it smooths everything out even more. And it also makes your colors really vibrant and look more like a painting than a grainy pencil drawing. So this is great if you need to build up lots of layers of detail in your work. Method two is burnishing. And burnishing is probably the more common or well-known way to blend because this is just where you're using the pressure of the pencils and the layering process to actually create a smooth, blended look. So I'm just doing a little sphere, like a little skin swatch, and I'm building up multiple layers and multiple different colors just by hatching them over each other and just layering them by going in circular motions. And then when you want to blend everything out and get a really smooth result, all you need to do is go in with even more pressure on that pencil and go in circular motions, as I'm doing with this light peach pencil, and it will start to bind all of those different layers of colored pencil together and the pressure blends all of the colors to give a nice, smooth result. So this is great if you want to do things like portraits and you want really smooth colors. So that is mainly what I use this method of blending for, whereas the solvent, I use it more for animals or when I want more textured, detailed work. But burnishing is great for smooth shading. An X-Acto knife is a really handy tool to have for colored pencils for two different reasons. Method one is for etching. Etching is a really cool technique because if you have any areas of highlight that you want to preserve, for example, whiskers or tiny little highlights, for example, if you're drawing an apple and there's little sparkles, then what you can do is go in with your knife and indent these highlights into the paper first. And like I said, this technique works best with smooth paper. And then once you've indented in all of your details by just applying pressure to that knife, you're not cutting the paper, you're just indenting it, you can then go in with your colored pencils and layer them over the top and build up all of your details like normal, but the colored pencil can't get into those indents that you formed, so they stay white. And this is a great way to preserve whiskers because it's super difficult to try and work around those tiny highlighted details. So this is really convenient. And also I did the little swatch where I created some little tiny dot indents to give the look of sparkles. And you can see that these tiny details and highlights that would be really hard to preserve otherwise, are super easy to get with the etching technique. Another way that you can use your knife is to scrape off your top layers of colored pencil. Now the key to this is to start off with a really light base layer of color. So I'm using white, and I'm doing a little section of pink hair. So you add your lightest color first and then build up your other layers as usual, building up your mid-tones and your dark pinks. And then when you want to create the details over the top, like these tiny flyaway hairs, you can go in with your knife and simply scrape off that top layer of colored pencil to reveal your lightest layers underneath. And that's why it's key to start off with your light layer of colored pencil so that when you lift off the top darker layers, it shows those lighter layers. And this is great for drawing hair or fur. And it's super useful to get those tiny details that again, it would be hard to try and work around and get in afterwards. Again, this is a technique that works well on smooth paper. Highlights is something that people struggle with a lot when it comes to colored pencils. So I'm going to go through four different methods for how you can create highlights. Firstly, if you're using solvent to blend and you want to preserve some highlights and make sure that they don't get too dark, what you can do is go in with a white pencil and actually just mark and sketch out these highlights first. I'm creating some veins for a leaf and I'm pressing quite hard on a wax-based pencil. I find wax-based pencils work best for this. And then once you've got in your highlights, you can go and shade the rest of your study like normal. But the great thing is because you've applied the white pencil first to your highlighted areas, when you blend with the solvent, those highlights just pop straight back out and you've preserved those areas from getting any dark pigment on them. So they stay nice and white and you've preserved that area of the paper. And as you can see, here's the final result and those highlights are just so bright. The next method is when you use solvent to blend, the great thing about it is you can add lighter colors over the top of your darker colors, which is hard to do with the burnishing method. So you can go straight in with your light colors and add all of those lighter highlights. But again, this only works with the solvent method. And that's why I love it when drawing fur and animal studies because you can build up all of those layers and texture in the fur. And this is something that you can't easily do otherwise with colored pencils. Method three is actually going in and using the white pencil or any light pencil to add some highlights once you've burnished it out. So you can apply and brighten up areas by simply adding more pressure to your white pencil. So this is how I create highlights in my portraits. I just go in with a lot of pressure with a white pencil and just go in circular motions to create those highlights. And if none of those are working and you need to get your highlights even brighter, you can use a white gel pen. Like I said, this isn't archival, which means it won't last well over time. But I've had artwork from a few years ago that I use this technique on and they still look the same today. But if you're selling your artwork, then bear this in mind because you don't want to sell artwork to someone that isn't going to look the same in a couple years time. But this is great if you're practicing and just having fun with your artwork and you want to create some really glistening highlights like I'm doing here with this eye. Those are the different techniques that I want to discuss. Now let's go through the demonstration and I'll show you all of these techniques in action. I'm going to be drawing a strawberry study of half a strawberry and then a full strawberry next to it. The first thing that I obviously did was create the sketch outline just using a HB pencil. And then I go in with my kneaded eraser and lighten up my sketch so that none of the graphite lines will show through when I do my layers of shading, especially in the lightest areas. I start off by working with my red pencil and marking out where the seeds are so that I don't accidentally shade them in with the red. This reference had a lot of tiny little highlights. So I decided to preserve them using the first method that I showed you guys with the highlighting technique where I use a lot of pressure on a white pencil and just mark in these tiny sparkly highlights so that when I go and blend with the solvent, they will pop straight back out even though I'm layering the red pencil over the top of them. When I'm doing the layering process, I'm making sure to keep my hand far back on the pencil and use the side of the pencil to shade because I know that I wanted to do lots of different layers and mix different colors together, adding some oranges and some yellows. So you don't wanna press too hard straight away. Plus the great thing about blending with solvent is that you don't need to press hard to blend out your colors because the solvent does all of the hard work for you. I started off working with my lighter tones and then I moved on to getting in the darker shadows and it's really important that you do create a good contrast in your artwork which means having different values, having some darker colors as well as your lighter tones. For the leaf portion of this drawing, I actually used the burnishing method just to show a variety of the different blending techniques. And so I'm using the pressure of the pencils and layering the different colors together until I get a smooth result. And I actually do go in with my white pencil to smooth everything out and get rid of that graininess by applying a bit more pressure to the pencil and applying pressure to your pencil will help to fuse those colors together and to get into all of the dips and creases of the paper so that it doesn't look grainy anymore. And then I went in afterwards with my exacto knife just to create some little details and texture by using that scraping method. Though it didn't work as well on this paper because I was using watercolor paper because we are using the solvent technique. For the shadow, you can see that I'm changing the pressure of my pencil to go from the darkest, where it's the shadows closest to strawberry and then get lighter. I then started on the next strawberry. Once again, going in, marking around all of those seeds first keeping my pencils nice and sharp so that we can get even smoother shading. And when you keep your pencils really sharp, it can get into the creases of the paper a lot easier and the different grooves, which means that you don't need to apply as much pressure to get a really solid coverage onto your paper. One thing that I did was I went in with my eraser and I just started to erase any little bits of graphite sketch that was still showing through. And I used the same process of starting with those lighter colors and then slowly building up to getting in all of these little shadows between the different seeds and to create the dimple texture that you obviously get with the strawberry. And you can see that I'm layering lots and lots of the color pencil on my paper before I blend it out with solvent. And this is key if you want the solvent to do a really good job at blending out your pencils. For the next leaf, I'm going in and I'm etching in some details for the veins. So again, I'm using the different exacto knife technique for this leaf. And this is great because I can then go in with the greens and the darker tones and the darker shadows and I don't have to worry about preserving these tiny light veins because they were really tiny. And I was able to get in those little details without having to work around them. So I really recommend getting an exacto knife. It really does make everything a lot easier. Now it's time to blend all of this out. And I'm using my filbert brush to blend out the large areas. And you can see those highlights just pop straight back out that we preserved at the start of the drawing, which is why I really recommend using this technique if you're blending with solvent but you've got some highlights that you want to keep really white. And then I use the really small paintbrush to go around the little details, for example, to go around the little seeds because it would be hard to keep control with that large filbert brush, whereas it's a lot easier to do it with the smaller brush. So I recommend having a variety of different size brushes depending on the area that you're blending out. You can see that the colours are becoming much more vibrant and it's starting to look like a painting rather than a grainy pencil drawing. And this will only work well if, like I said, you have enough pigment down on the paper. I'm also blending the shadows out and I started off blending the lightest area of the shadow and then working my way to the darkest part. It's important that you blend from light to dark if you want to keep everything really neat and if you don't want to muddy up your colours. Once you've waited for the solvent to dry, you can then go in and layer in all of your details on top. I'm getting in the highlights with the white pencil as well as defining and refining some of the shadows and details a bit more. And it's so easy to add additional layers of colour pencil on top of your blended layer with solvent. And then you can go back in and smooth out anything else that you want to with even more solvent. Like I'm doing with the shadow, I wanted to get it really nice and smooth so it has a really nice realistic illusion to the strawberries. So you can blend multiple times with solvent but use less and less solvent with each layer that you blend. And remember to always get rid of the excess solvent on some tissue before you blend out your drawing. I'm going in and adding the highlights to the seed and creating some lovely bright pink highlights at the top of the strawberry to give it a wet, shiny look. And I'm making sure that I've got the contrast right in the strawberry and got a good depth and texture by going in repeatedly and darkening up the shadows. Once you've finished your drawing, you can go in and add any little details and textures that you want with the X-Acto knife. Even when you blend with solvent, it still works kind of well, not as well as if you use the burnishing method. And I also add a couple of tiny highlights using the white gel pen, mainly in the open half of the strawberry to create the little glistening highlights. But I also did use it on the large strawberry as well. And this is great just to create an extra pop to those highlights. And adding highlights with gel pen is usually the last step. That is the full guide to color pencils for beginners.