Advanced Colored Pencil Techniques

After you've learned to use colored pencils on coloring pages and hopefully learning to sketch, it's time to move on and learn to paint with colored pencils. This will take you from being a colorist to becoming an artist. 

I've read the Colored Pencil Painting Bible by Alyona Nickelsen. I drooled over this book for two years before I finally had the spare money to purchase it. All of the colored pencil techniques currently circulating were discovered by her. I highly recommend this book for anyone wanting to learn how she created her masterpieces and improve their skills. For this post, I'm going to share what I learned from the book.

First of all, you need the right paper. Only dense paper with a tooth will work. Colored pencil paper is graded more by gsm than weight. The higher the gsm number, the more dense the paper. Dense paper can absorb more layers and stand up to solvents, scraping, impressing and erasure. I advise starting out with student quality paper to practice and advance to artist and professional quality as your skills improve.

Canson Mixed Media Paper: 98lb, 160gsm; for preliminary sketches, practice and experimenting.

Colored Pencil Paper: 100lb, 163gsm; wood pulp; practice.

Heavyweight Drawing Paper: 100lb, 163gsm; 25% cotton; practice. Stands up to repeated erasing.

Strathmore 100 Series Youth Paint Pad: 90lb, 190gsm; wood pulp; practice. If your only source for art materials is Walmart, this watercolor paper will work. You probably assume that the Canson Watercolor Paper is better because it's 140lb, 300gsm, but I beg to differ because of the tooth. The Strathmore Youth paper has a tooth similar to colored pencil paper, whereas the Canson paper has a deeper watercolor texture. The Youth pad is also smooth on the reverse and is more dense than the Strathmore Colored Pencil paper above.

Pentalic Nature Sketch Paper: 130lb, 211gsm; 25% cotton; mixed media; fine art. Toothy rough vellum surface.

American Crafts Textured Card Stock: 80lb, 218gsm; wood pulp; practice. Toothy rough surface. This is the best cardstock I've found for practicing with colored or tinted paper. It's available in 135 colors and 12x12" sheets in six different 60 sheet packs for $15.48/pk from Blick Art.

The AC Color Splash pad is great for when you don't want to bother with painting a background. Get it from their website for $14.99.

 

Stonehenge Paper, white, black or tinted: 90lb, 250gsm; 100% cotton; fine art.

Canson Colorline Art Paper: 184lb, 300gsm; 100% cotton; fine art.

Rough Vellum Bristol Paper, 2-ply: 215lb, 260gsm; 100% cotton; mixed media; fine art. 3-ply is 325lb, 390gsm; 4-ply is 430lb, 520gsm.

Textured Inkjet Printing Paper: 80lb, 216gsm; for printing finished colored pencil art.

Prismacolor Premier pencils are wax based.

Caran d'Ache Luminance pencils are also wax based, but they have variations of earth tones that Prismacolor doesn't.

 

 Lyra Rembrandt Polycolor and Faber Castell Polychromos pencils are oil based.

 

Prismacolor Verithin pencils are used for texture because the colors are the same as the Premier line guaranteeing an exact match, but they're limited to only 36 colors.

June Gold sells 2mm colored mechanical pencils with built in sharpeners in 36 colors with refills for $19.99. Two pencils of each color come in this set for a total of 72 pencils. The lead quality is equivalent to Crayola. They also offer 0.7mm colored lead. I truly wish Prismacolor had done this. Maybe they'll catch on.

You can use Crayola colored pencils for texture also. The problem with them is that they don't sharpen very well.

  

Masking fluid can be diluted with water. It can be applied with a sculpting tool, spattered, flicked or used in a precision bottle for tiny areas. Masking fluid rubs off easily. The white Prismacolor pencil can also be used for masking and scraped off with a craft knife when using an Icarus board. In most cases, it's used for highlighting anyway.

Artist Tape is a low tack masking tape designed for paper. Get it from Blick Art for $4.39.

Masking paper for large areas is also available from Blick Art for $29.73. It self adheres to paper and is impervious to solvent. It removes without lifting media.

Mini Sieve, Silicone Bowl and Mini Spatula TKB sells a mini sieve for $4.75, the bowl for $1.75, and mini spatulas are $0.99/5. The book mentions using a metal tea strainer to shave a pencil to make a wash for covering a large area. Ester Roi also uses this technique for creating tiny dots of color and heat setting them with tracing paper on the Icarus drawing board. This can also be done with an iron.

 

Blue tack adhesive and scotch magic tape are tools mentioned in the book that I hadn't considered. They're used for lifting graphite and colored pencil to create highlights.

  

If you want to remove 90% of the color, lift it with the blue tack first. Then, use a sand eraser to remove the remaining color and restore the tooth.

Heat Burnishing

The Icarus Drawing Board will take burnishing and blending to a whole new level. It was inspired by the encaustic hot palette which is nothing but a steel plate with legs on top of an electric hot plate. The Icarus board is like a light table with a warm and cool zone. It melts wax based media for an encaustic effect. It also has the advantage of vaporizing solvent so it dries faster. The smallest version sells for $300, so I won't be using one. 

  

I have a more cost effective idea. All you need is a 15x21" cookie sheet, a heating pad or seedling mat and a book or board. Find a book or cut a piece of 1/2" plywood to 14x20" so it rests inside the pan. Set the heating pad on top of the board. Flip the pan over so the lip is down and place it on top of the heating pad. The high setting is best for colored pencil. You need the low to medium setting for crayons. The seedling mat can't be adjusted.

The alternative to an Icarus board for melting wax is a cray pen or encaustic wax pen. It is a wax melting tool that works with crayons and colored pencil. Get it from Blick Art for $14.99. Extra tips are available.

Kemper wipe out tools are used for blending and spreading hot media. The heat makes scraping easier as well. Get them for $1.80/3 piece set on eBay.

Use flour sack towels over the paper to protect your arm from the heat. Uncoated acetate is useful for protecting your work from hand smudging.