How To Blend Coloured Pencils | Prismacolor Tutorial

Let's talk today about blending coloured pencils. This is something that I think can look really tricky but it's maybe not as hard as you would think. Now first up I focus on drawing realistic objects with coloured pencils and in order to draw realistically there is so much blending that needs to happen. Because generally in nature we don't have really hard edges to all of our colours they tend to merge and blend into each other. That is what I need to focus on doing in pretty much all of my drawings. So I think it's going to be easiest if I show you by drawing this pepper how I'm going to blend all of these colours together. You'll see in this pepper I've got a mixture of some yellowy oranges on the left going all the way to some very dark and deep reds on the right. So I need to create a really nice and smooth gradient throughout this pepper. Now before we get started on the drawing if you want to draw this with me in a lot more detail it is available on my Patreon. I have not only this pepper but loads of other drawings in all sorts of different subject matters. I have drawings in coloured pencils but also graphite pencil and watercolour pencil. For every tutorial I include really in-depth instructions, all of the real-time footage, details of all of the I have some faster drawings like this pepper or like this for example and also some much longer drawings which have a real wow factor to them. I also have some full courses on my Patreon so if you are a complete beginner I can talk you through this step-by-step process to help explain coloured pencils make it a lot less of a mystery. Check out the link in the description. Now the key to blending pencils is to work in layers. Rather than just scribbling each colour really hard down on the paper we want to build up the pencil one layer at a time and generally speaking I find it easiest to work from the lighter colours towards the darker colours and then back down to the lightest. Now let me show you what this looks like in practice. So what I want to do is start off by looking for the lightest colour that I can see in my reference photo. So I would say that the lightest colour on the light spots is actually a very light grey and looking at the colours in my set I would say the closest match is the French grey. So what I'm going to do is lightly put down a layer of this pencil in any area where I can see this grey, so any of the light spots. Now in order to put down the pencil nice and lightly there are a few things that I'm doing. First up you'll notice that I'm holding the pencil much further back than you might expect. I'm not holding it really close to the tip and what this does is it stops me from being able to press too hard. If I hold it closer to the tip I have to have a lot more pencil control. I've also got a really nice and sharp pencil. If I try and build up light layers with the blunt pencil it just doesn't go down in as light or smooth and consistent way and my absolute number one thing I want to do here on this pepper skin is create a really nice and smooth colour. I want to blend all of these colours together in as smooth a way as possible. Finally to blend these colours together really nice and smoothly I want to be working in circular motions rather than just scribbling back and forth. You'll see that I'm working in some oval motions and again that helps the pencil go down in a much smoother and more consistent way than just scribbling. Once I put down this absolutely lightest colour what I want to do is work my way from that lightest colour as I mentioned towards the darker colours. I'm once again comparing my drawing to my reference photo and the next darkest colour I would say is this very bright pink and I can see this pink just around the edges of the lighter areas so this helps blend these lighter areas into the much darker pepper surrounding. So I'm going to go over the top of that grey with this pink still really lightly. You'll still see that I'm holding the pencil quite far back and I just want to put a light layer of the pink on these patches anywhere where I can see a hint of this colour which is generally as I say around the edges. Now let's move on to our next darkest colour and actually on the left hand side of the pepper it looks very orange where it's in a brighter patch of light. So I'm going to use this orange over the whole of the skin of the pepper. Now first up note I'm using this in exactly the same way holding the pencil a little bit further back working in circular motions. I am being very careful as I go around the edge because I don't want to put this pencil on the background and I just want to put down a nice and light colour of this pencil over the whole of the pepper. Now I also want to be putting this orange over the whole of the right hand side. The right hand side of the pepper does get much much darker in some areas it is really a very dark brown but because we want to smoothly blend all of these colours together it's going to create a much richer and smoother blend if I put this colour over the whole of the drawing. I always think with every colour I want to put it anywhere I can see that colour or darker. So it's obviously much darker on this right hand side so I should still put the orange and we're gonna keep working in this same way from those lighter colours towards those darker colours and I can't stress enough that to begin with this isn't going to look amazing but that's okay. So working through these colours I now want to be putting in quite a vibrant, this is kind of an orangey red, this is the poppy red in my set, it's a really vibrant colour and I once again want to put this anywhere I can see this colour or darker. So I don't want to go over those grey patches of light, I don't want to go over anywhere where I've put that pink and there are only really a few areas on the left where I want to really ease up with this pencil where it's more of an orange. Bear in mind when I'm putting down these colours it's going to look a lot less vibrant than this colour can eventually become. So there's a few patches that I need to avoid over on this right hand side, there's just a kind of orangey patch of light over here as well as those grey areas but you can see that I'm working reasonably quickly, it is a bit time consuming, it's not an instant process but we just need to be building up these colours on top of each other gradually to create that smooth blend. So let's once again move on to the next darkest colour and you can start to get an idea of how many colours I need to use for a drawing like this. So this is a much deeper, richer red, we're still nowhere near those darkest colours yet, you can see in some areas I'm going over a patch more times so where there's a fold in the pepper on the left hand side I've gone over that more times, I haven't pressed harder, it's very important to note that, I've gone over it more times to build up a richer colour but in some areas like around here I want to be just putting a very light and thin layer of pencil to add a little hint of this but I don't want it to be really deep. And then after the red, the most obvious next colour I would say is a very dark brown, there are some other colours in and amongst here but for the first few layers I like to stick with the really obvious colours, I want to be mapping in the key colours and shapes so that I can find it a bit clearer what needs to go where. So there's a particularly dark shadow in this section here, let's just lightly put down some of this dark brown to give an idea on where this shadow needs to go and you can see we've got a very light blending of colours already just from going through these first few steps but it's all looking very, very pale, it's looking a little bit patchy but we do now have a foundation to build upon. So from here I'm going to go over particularly the darker patches a number of times to build up the colour further and I'm going to use pretty much the same few colours again and again. So I'm starting off here with actually quite a rich purple, this is probably not a colour that you would have expected to see within the pepper but when I compare my drawing to the reference photo I would say a purple is the main colour that's missing within their drawing at the moment. Now what I like to do here is I constantly want to be thinking about the most obvious colour that's missing, it doesn't matter if it's not perfect, if I just add in all the time particularly looking at these darker colours the most obvious colour eventually it will all come together. So once I've added in all of the dark purple I can once again think about the most obvious colour that's missing from here. So I now want to go back to that darker red that I added in before and build up some more of this colour, still want to really stress that I'm pressing nice and lightly, I don't want to be pressing hard, the whole key to this blending is to build up the colours gradually. I can then go back to the same very dark brown, this is the darkest brown that I have in my set it's the dark umber, go back over this central area to build up some more of this colour before moving on to a kind of reddish brown, this is the sienna brown, it's not a hugely dark colour but it probably is darker than the dark red. So I can add this in, again in any area I can see this colour or darker and then go back to the dark brown again even though I only just used it I want to really start filling in these deeper shadows towards the middle. I'm still not pressing hard, I'm maybe pressing a little bit firmer than I was before but by no means full force, I do find the more pencil you put down on the paper the slightly more pressure you need to add to get it to show up but I absolutely want to stress I'm not pressing hard. I then want to go back to that dark purple because I think it's not looking rich enough now, all of that purple I added in is looking a little bit lost and I can once again go back to that sienna brown, that reddish brown, you can see I'm really just using the same four or five colours for these darkest areas to really try and get this matching the reference better and hopefully you can see that by layering these colours up one at a time it is building a really nice smooth and blended pepper. So after going back to the brown here I'm pretty happy now with these darkest areas. What I can now do is work my way back down from the darker colours towards the lighter colours. So I'm going back here to the dark red and again I'm still putting this everywhere that is the red or darker so I'm really focusing on building up a lot of this red towards the darker patch on the middle here but I will need to add some around the lighter left hand side as well before I can move on to that same brighter poppy red that I used earlier going over all of these sections again and then once I've gone over all of the poppy red I can then use the orange. Now you'll notice that where we're going over some of the darker areas with the lighter colours like this red it's not stopping those dark areas from looking very dark what it's doing is blending and merging the whole colours together in a way that makes them look really nice and consistent it makes it look like it's all one object which is obviously what we want to be doing I think the dark red without putting this poppy red over the top doesn't blend and match as well with the pepper as it should but adding this poppy red over the top you can still see the darkness of that red it just matches this red a bit better. So then as I'm working towards the lighter colours I can go back over the pink areas so particularly around these grey areas here go around the edge and then that smooths and blends these areas into the rest of the red much better and I'm also going to go back to the grey and again build this up a bit more now I'm generally happy with the pepper at this point what I now like to do is brighten everything up it's looking a bit scratchy it hasn't got that really good glossy look so I'm going to do what I did with the darkest colours with the lightest colours I want to be comparing my drawing to the reference photo and thinking about the most obvious colours that's missing so on the pepper itself it has particularly on this left hand side a real kind of yellow look it has got orange but it's a much more vibrant yellow undertone than what I feel I've got at the moment so I'm going to still lightly go over the top of these areas with this very vibrant yellow and that helps brighten up and smooth out some of the areas on the left I can then go back over this area with that same red that I've used a lot that poppy red it's still not looking vibrant enough so let's build up a little bit more and as I mentioned as I'm building up more of the pencil I am at this point starting to need to press a little bit firmer I really want to be creating a nice and vibrant pepper now I wouldn't say I'm pressing full force I don't want to be in a situation where I can break my pencil lead but I do want to put down a lot more pencil and in fact I want to tweak this darker area on the left it's looking a little bit too scratchy so I can go over this with this darker reddish brown again building up more of this colour and as I get towards the end you'll see that the more colours I add particularly towards the end it starts getting a lot more vibrant because we're starting to apply a little bit more pressure to get the pencil to be as vibrant as we would like it really brightens up quite quick I would say at this point so I'm using that darker red again before going back to that very deep brown really applying some pretty firm pressure on some of the darker shadows down the bottom down here and then at this point I am pretty happy with the pepper but it's still not looking quite smooth enough there's one more step I want to take here what I'm going to do is go back to the kind of most obvious colour on the whole of the pepper so that is that poppy red that kind of standard red and actually what I'm doing here is rather than just pressing super hard I'm using this red with a really sharp pencil to just kind of draw in all of those little white dots so you can see that I'm just going over these with really tiny little circular motions now so similar to what we were doing before but much smaller circular motions and I'm working really slowly starting on the left as I have been throughout and working towards the right building up a little final layer really of this pencil and by just working over here with some really small pencil motions really focusing on trying to fill in those white spots you can see it's looking so much smoother we have a much more blended pepper and I'm going to do this over the whole of the pepper so you can see me really going over all of these white dots using these circular motions I wouldn't say I'm pressing hard I would say I'm using a medium pressure here but the most important thing is a sharp pencil it's going to be much easier to fill in all of these white dots with a sharp pencil rather than trying to do it with a blunt pen so it's just not going to work as well and this is now looking very nice and blended together the final thing I'm doing on this whole drawing is just going over the shadow down the bottom because I think it looks a little bit scratchy but then that is it so that is how I always go about blending colors together I want to build up the colors in a series of light layers a lot of light layers mixing all of the colors together I like working from the lighter colors towards the dark colors and then back down to the lightest now don't forget if you want to go through this pepper with me in a lot more detail it is available on my Patreon and if you'd like to learn a bit more about layering check out this video here happy drawing guys and I'll see you in the next one!