My Top 10 Tips for beginners
Colored Pencil Drawing Tips
Tip #1 // Get to Know Your Pencils
This advice comes from my personal experiences as a beginner and this is what I would tell my past self.
To come up with this list, I spent some time looking back at my earliest drawings and notes that I made in an effort to remember what I struggled with and what questions I had.
Hopefully, it will help you!
Tip 1
When you find yourself staring at a beautiful tin of perfect pencils, it is easy to feel intimidated! You might have had a belief that once you purchased these professional quality pencils that everything else would fall into place and your artwork would be magically transformed into the kind of finished pieces you see on Instagram. Then you made your first few marks, maybe spent 15 minutes and you have something that looks like this. (It is a leaf, if you are wondering.)
So you put the pencils away and go back to watching other people draw on YouTube. Or scrolling through Facebook wondering why you can’t create artwork like the pieces you see there.
Or, you might look at that beautiful tin of pencils and not want to ‘mess them up’. “Look at these perfect rows of color perfection! If I use one, it will be shorter than the rest and the tin will be ruined.” I hope I am not the only person who has thought this.
These pencils are your tools! They won’t create anything without you. You are the boss of them! Don’t let them intimidate you. And, by the way, you can purchase individual pencils to replace any that you use up. These cost as little as $2-4.
Making swatches
A great place to start is to make swatches. Start with a single color family- maybe the greens.
- Swatch, compare and order them by value from darkest to lightest.
- Pay attention to which appear to be cool (more blue), and which are warm (more yellow).
- Are there any that you are particularly drawn to?
- Any you don’t really like?
- Learn their names.
- Try mixing them together.
- Try them on different papers if you have them.
- Mix them with other brands of pencils if you have them.
- See what happens if you burnish them.
- See what happens if you dissolve them with solvent.
- What happens if you mix them with white or with grey?
Making swatches is the best first step toward creating beautiful artwork with colored pencils.
