How to Draw Realistic Grapes (Colored Pencil Tutorial for Beginners)

Hi everyone. In this video, I'm going to show you how I drew these realistic red grapes using colored pencils. Here you can see me getting started on the first grape. For this drawing, I was using a combination of Prismacolor and Polychromos pencils on Legion Rising Museum mount board. I like to use the two-ply white. And I basically worked on all of these grapes the exact same way i started off with an outline and then i started filling in some of the shadows and highlights and then i worked over my mid-tones blended with solvent and then added a few details for this drawing in particular the top portion of the grapes were a lot warmer in color so they were more reddish and then the bottom layer of grapes was a little bit cooler so more purple so I just adjusted the mid tones that I was using to accommodate that but it's really simple to do this drawing is actually a tutorial over on my membership if you are interested in learning how to draw it you can watch me to do several of these grapes in real time and I just kind of walk you through exactly what I'm doing as I'm doing it. I'm just having so much success over there, so much fun watching other people, some people who have never drawn before, learning how to draw things that look so beautiful, so that's very exciting for me. So check that out if you're interested. There are links in the description. You'll see me using a Q-tip in this one to apply the solvent. If you've watched any of my videos in the past, you might know that I typically will use a paintbrush to apply the solvent, but lately I've been favoring the Q-tips. They are really easy to use for one thing. The ones I use have this kind of sharp point on them, so it's really easy to get into tiny little crevices and corners and around edges and things like that and then they're also so firm so it they really dissolve the pigment well and then the final reason that I really like working with the q-tips is that I they're disposable so with each new color area that I'm working on I can grab a fresh q-tip and I don't have to worry about transferring any of the color from the last section i was working on to the next section so definitely worth trying um i will for sure be using both q-tips and paint brushes in the future so i'm not like completely giving up on the paint brushes but the q-tips work great the solvent i was using for this drawing was Utrecht Nude odorless paint thinner but any odorless mineral spirits or solvent will work well to um you know for this technique it's basically i'm using the solvent to dissolve the binders that hold the pigments of the pencil together and it just gets rid of any kind of graininess that you might typically see with colored pencils which is why my end product looks really smooth more paint like kind of turns the pigment into a paint like substance although it's not like it moves around a ton you can spread it some but for the most part you're able to draw on the color and it'll it'll pretty well stay in place even when you're blending have to be kind of deliberate about it to try to drag color around so moving around into the lower grapes like I said I'm going to be using some cooler colors more purples and all along I'm mixing the two somewhat just so that there's balance in the drawing used a lot of that amethyst from Prismacolor if you can use a combination of a hard leaded pencil like Polychromos, so like an oil-based colored pencil, along with the softer pencil like Prismacolor or even Caran d'Ache Luminance, the waxier-based pencils. I really like the combination because you can use the Polychromos for the edges and for details because they don't bleed as much. There's not near as much of a spread there. And then you could use the wax-based pencils because they blend so beautifully and provide maybe just a bit more coverage in certain cases so you saw me use the Polychromos there to create the outline and then you'll see me come in with some of the prismacolors and I use both pencils for both applications I can use a Prismacolor to create an outline if I need to sometimes I'm going to base my decision on you know the characteristic of the pencil I need so I really want this sharp point and for an edge and I have both Prismacolor and Polychromos I'll usually choose the Polychromos but if I don't have a Polychromos available that's a good match I'll just use the Prismacolor so it's not like a big distinction but it can be helpful to have both sometimes I'm basing my choice of pencil on the color that I need sometimes I'm basing it on the value that I need maybe I just really need a dark value and a Prismacolor or Polychromos you know the the value is going to be a lot more important than the actual color so thinking about your pencils in that way the color and value that they can provide and also the characteristic of the pencil if it's a wax based or an oil-based hard leaded pencil or soft leaded pencil you can make a choice based on that combination really relied pretty pretty heavily on that Prismacolor white pencil to make those really beautiful white highlights and it's important to think about when you're working on your highlights you want to make sure that they're not just like a bright white circle you want some detail even within the highlight so get the highlight drawn in and then add some dots in there or blend some color on top of the highlight using your solvent so that it looks a lot more natural that's something that took me a while to learn and so here I'm just working to finish up this drawing with the green stems that was a super easy part of the whole process and once again here is my finished drawing let me know if you have any comments or questions and I will see you in the next video bye everybody