If you love color but find paint difficult to handle, colored pencils are an excellent choice. It takes a little longer to achieve large areas of color, but you have a great deal of control, and can create the most beautiful, jewel-like effects with careful layering. Good quality colored pencils have much more pigment in them than the cheap children's ones you probably remember from school, so you can get really intense color - especially if you use a nice 'toothy' watercolor paper which grips the fragments of colour. (A hot-pressed paper that doesn't have too much 'size' or glue in it, which has a smooth look but feels velvety-rought to the touch).
Learn basic colored pencil techniques
colored pencil drawing tips.
draw a candle flame in colored pencil
draw shiny metal
rose in colored pencil
Comments
I have started getting into some color and researching the options.
There is a new product, tinted charcoal, has anyone tried it yet?
Ooh no, haven’t seen that yet. Sounds interesting – I’ll have to head over to the art store!
in July I did not paint at all but I made sure to realized 1 ot 2 sketches per day outdoor with graphite pencils…
I used pastel pencils to add colors… I have given most of my sketches to people passing by.
What are the best color pencils available today ?
As a retired secretary/bookkeeper I had never done art until a few years ago. At that time I took up colored pencils, due to an unusual allergy to the metal in paint tubes.
I love it. Being able to create colorful paintings satifies the creative right brain and using colored pencils with their exactness and technique seems to satisfy the analytical left brain. So now the whole brain is happy.
Another advantage is that there is practically no setup or cleanup to take you away from your painting time. Just bring out the box of pencils, the paper and get to work. In fact, I leave mine sitting on the art table so that whenever I need to take a relaxing few minutes I can just sit down and paint for a while. So relaxing.
I highly recommend this medium to all you budding artists out there. Go for it.
Peggy
I’ve done the colored pencil thing for over 20 years and have really seen the pencils improve. I have always went back to DERWENT brand pencils – good coverage, stay true colors over long period of time. Have used both common and water-color pencils. The “Graphi-tinit” pencils are really nice for shading, I get ‘adult’ coloring books and then can print the pictures onto fabric for quilts. ML
Gerald, there are many excellent brands on the market. My personal preference is with Prismacolor for ‘regular’ colored pencil – I think mine must be the ’soft core’ type ; they’ve changed their branding a little recently. They also do ‘Verithin’ which are harder, for outlining and detail. I find the Prismacolor to have excellent, intense pigment; the handling quality can vary a little because of this, but for me the purity of colour is the most important thing.
I also like Faber-Castell for watercolour pencils. I haven’t tried the Caran D’Ache colored pencils . I’m not personally a fan of the Derwent Artist’s colored pencil line as I find the pigments a little chalky, but some artists love them.
@ Peggy, your observations about colored pencil are interesting – I hadn’t thought of the left-brain right-brain aspect! And so true that there’s no cleanup or mess. I guess we shouldn’t let such practicalities interfere with creativity, but we also have to live in the ‘real world’ after all.
@ MaryLou – ah, a Derwent fan! As I said in my previous comment, not a personal favorite for me – it’s very much to do with one’s way of working and what suits you. So it’s a bit tricky to give recommendations.
I’ll have to get the Graphitints out again and see what I can come up with to make the best use of their combination of colour and graphite.
Derwent also do an ‘Inktense’ line which have very strong color as the name implies.