COLORED PENCIL DRAWING
There
are two basic types of colored pencil - wax-based and oil-based.
Wax pencils are cheaper and more common but less solid (more
likely to crumble and produce tiny broken fragments) and oil-based
pencils produce cleaner, sharper lines and are more solid. There
are also a few brands of 'watercolor pencils' made with either wax or
oil, that can dissolve in water and thus can be used much like a sort
of watercolor paint.
That said, ordinary colored pencils can
also be used to create 'soft' blended images. Blender pencils are
colored pencils without the color. Like the acrylic painter's
'matte gel' they can be rubbed over the surface of a drawing to smooth
it out and blur it, offering a softer and more painterly effect.
And
like the 'gloss gel' used in painting, there are also burnisher pencils
- which are essentially blender pencils with a bit of shininess or
glossy reflectivity. These blender and burnisher pencils allow
for more effects than would be possible with the colored pencil set
alone.
With colored pencil, as with regular pencil, I'll
recommend the artists' vinyl erasers - the white ones - as a pretty
good way to minimize damage to the paper. These artificial
erasers are good at removing pencil marks without wearing down the
paper. The cheap pink erasers you remember from school, the ones
on the end of your #2 pencils? They're not as good.
Often
colored pencil will be applied in layers. Forget your childhood
coloring books, which used one color per area. That won't be as
interesting for a realistic colored pencil artwork. Try thinking
about the tones of color on an object, and layer them. Starting
with the darker colors is best - they're very opaque against the paper
and it's clear to me that dark colors placed over light colors, will
overwhelm the light colors. The reverse isn't true - if the dark
colors are applied first, the brighter colors can be layered on top and
both the light and dark colors will be visible.
With pencil art,
as with canvas, surfaces do matter. Consider the roughness or
smoothness of the paper you draw on - the smoother papers are easier to
fully cover without those obnoxious little dots of white which make
your pencil art *look* like rough pencil art. I've had this
problem persistently with painting as well and am just now beginning to
go over my canvases with a square of sandpaper, simply to smooth it out
a little.
This said, sometimes rough surfaces are what you want!
It all depends on the effect you're going for and the subject
you're drawing. Is it smooth or rough? Maybe your subject
is a scene with multiple objects, some of them smooth and some rough,
in which case you may want both!
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