In case you have been working with a simple pencil and a sheet of paper for awhile, the notion of having the ability to trade in the color gray for a whole palette of colors is pretty exciting. Here are a few hints for using colored pencils which can allow you to maximize the bang color can provide. Implementing them well can produce some remarkable results. Good-quality brands include Prismacolor, Staedler, Faber-Castell and Prang. You will also require a high quality pencil sharpener that will permit you to sharpen your pencils to a very nice point. This is the way many artists refer to working with colored pencils. To put it differently, you do not draw with colored pencils, you paint. That is because the traditional means to do a colored pencil drawing or painting is to draw the picture with a standard lead pencil, then to color the picture in, and then to apply a wet brush to match on the spaces and then combine the colors and create different effects.

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Strategies for Using Colored Pencils

1) Keep your hands clean

If you usually press the outside portion of your hand on the newspaper as you draw, you might have to correct that habit when you use colored pencils, or you may combine and smear the colors in ways that you probably did not mean to do. If it becomes an issue try placing a tiny blank piece of paper under your hand and above the newspaper. This will eliminate the majority of the smudging, but if you’re pressing very hard you are still likely to smear the colors on the paper just a little bit.

2) Use various patterns for fills

You may use the normal cross-hatching short lines close together to make a pattern, but also experiment with curlicues, full circles and any other design you can consider. Fish scales are an option, for instance. So are triangles. If you go to Art College, at least once you are likely to be asked to make a drawing that uses no line, just different sorts of patterns. ionforums are a fantastic medium to have fun with this technique.

3) Use pencils along with colored washes

As stated earlier, you can paint with colored pencils, using the pencil lead as if it had been dry paint on the webpage. So it is possible to create washes of color with the pens. After the paper is dry, you can even go back and put on the pen to the dried scrub, too.

4) Use solvents

Solvents break up the wax that’s in the colored pencil lead. By control utilization of the dissolving agents in solvents you can do interesting things with negative space, or stains where there is not any color. This can be effective if you are attempting to demonstrate how light reflects on water, or the light reflecting off any polished surface.