Colored pencil techniques described in this guide include soft tonal layers, heavy burnishing, underpainting, filling in backgrounds, mixing colors and preventing wax bloom with a couple of light layers of matte workable fixative. A step by step project that can be adapted to your choice of colors and subjects demonstrates all the techniques shown.

Colored pencil art falls into two general categories according to my numerous art books.

Colored Pencil Painting is called textureless -- pencils or a blender have been used to give a thick uniform layered surface over all of the ground, and strokes are either blended together to invisible perfect detailed shading or "painterly" strokes used to emphasize specific textures like hair or pine needles or animal fur. The image above is an example of a Colored Pencil Painting, albeit a small ACEO size one, ACEO High Red Desert.

Colored Pencil Drawing is called textured, because it uses the paper, canvas, board or other ground as part of the finished artwork. Strokes are visible, may be loose, it has more of a "drawing" or "sketch" look and negative space may be important in the composition.   Blue Rose 3 is an example of a colored pencil drawing. While some areas are heavily shaded and burnished, the paper shows and I've used some loose strokes to sketch some details.

The terms "textured" and "textureless" may be confusing if you're deliberately doing smooth shading on something "textured" and it trails off like a graphite pencil drawing to white, while a "textureless" painting has curly visible strokes making a moss texture on tree bark that was shaded smoothly. The difference comes in mostly with whether the entire artwork has been burnished.

Burnishing or Blending With either a light color like white, cream, pale blue or yellow or pink, or a colorless blender, you can cover a colored pencil artwork with heavy strokes that smudge the underlying colors together to a smooth tone. I use a Prismacolor Colorless Blender very often with other brands of colored pencils, but the white pencil in your set if it's not Prismacolor will burnish without lightening too much -- and you can darken over a white-burnished area by going into the deepest darks again with the original color.

Burnishing is best done with a fairly blunt point on your light or clear pencil. Colorless blenders are just colored pencils with no pigment in them, they are used as smudgers. You can smudge with a cardboard tortillon or stump too -- those cheap pointed paper rolls you find at art stores in open bins next to the checkout are there to use for blending any dry medium. They work fine with colored pencils and will give a smooth tone. They can also be used to give a lighter tint of a dark color on white paper -- you can even scribble into a solid area of the dark color and then draw with the cardboard blender to get a very light smooth application.

Burnishing and blending both work best if you have smooth gradual shading under them. I will start with a sharp colorless blender and work into details, keeping it within a color area like a green leaf or the corner of a flower petal, then let it wear down as I work into the larger areas in that color, staying within any hard edges of that subject. I'll burnish each leaf shape separately. This ensures that I'm not blurring the green leaf into the gray background unless I want to do that. I might want to if that's a background element and I want soft focus on the background to make the detailed foreground subjects pop out.

To blur over a sharp line go back and forth with the colorless blender in short overlapping zigzag strokes. To go next to a sharp line without blurring it, angle those short zigzag strokes so they start beside the line and go away from it into the color area you're blurring.

Filling smooth areas of color: One problem many beginners have with both burnishing and smooth tones is a tendency to fill flat areas with large heavy strokes that don't overlap, except in rows that create a ridged effect instead of a smooth area of color. Filling smooth color areas takes going over them lightly more than once, and letting strokes overlap evenly. At the end of creating a smooth tonal layer, I go in with a sharp pointed pencil and very lightly touch up any light streaks in it no matter which way they fall, bringing it all to the same level of color the darkest strokes in that area have. It takes practice to do smooth tonal layers. Here is a small sample of two distinct areas where I mixed colors by doing smooth tonal layers:

 It's very useful to do smooth tonal layers when you want to mix colors, because then your mixture can stay as light as the upper part of this sample by just going lighter with the pencils as well as using more light colors than dark colors. This is what can turn a 12 or 24 color set into a full range of colors for photorealism, for rendering the exact color and shading of anything you want to draw.

When you blend over smooth tonal layers like this by scrubbing hard with a colorless blender, they will turn into a smooth flat color layer and lose that interesting juxtaposition of color flecks that mixed-color smooth tonal layers get. But they will also lose those annoying white flecks from the paper in your dark areas! Look at the smooth shaded area in the middle of the cardinal's chest on this sample, and the way the shading looks where it darkens toward black. The background is just white paper, but the bird's entire body and head were heavily burnished to eliminate those white flecks (which would make this a Colored Pencil Painting if I'd done that to the background too).

  Burnishing like this over either smooth tonal layers or smoothed heavy layers will give smooth gradual transitions especially if the short burnishing strokes zigzag in the direction of the fur or feathers or other texture you're doing. Blending pushes the wax around, blending back and forth pushes it in both directions. Going parallel to the edges of the bird's form avoided haloing this cardinal with a pink glow. Using short strokes helped give the texture of small feathers where deliberate strokes of dark went up into light jaggedly, it smoothed them but left them partially distinct.

To get solid smooth areas, after doing a light tonal area, keep going with short circular or zigzag strokes always filling in. Burnish with the color you're using, following the shapes of the subject. Very often an artwork can be improved by making the strokes contour around the three dimensional shape of the subject instead of going against it. Visible strokes can be very appealing in a colored pencil drawing! They just need to be placed in a way that enhances it rather than a way that draws attention away from the main subject.

If you have trouble filling in solid areas, try doing smooth tonal layers and then burnishing with colorless blender instead of filling in heavily. One fill technique is to do short circular strokes, again with a blunt pencil. This gives a smooth allover texture to the area and can be used to blend over other colors gradually, just go lighter as you go into the other color and put the light color over the dark so that it burnishes it as it mixes. Go over it again and fill in any white gaps, when it's as smooth as you can get it, go heavy with the colorless blender.

Working around the outsides of the colored pencil piece with long visible strokes draws attention to the shape of the paper and away from the subject. It can be an interesting way to frame the subject, but if you do that, then outline the subject too for about the same width, then fill in the irregular areas in the negative space with concentric geometric shapes. This effect can be a gorgeous background when it's deliberate and used to make the overall piece look tribal.

  This example is a feather design I outlined with Prismacolor Indigo, along with three pointed star shapes, then colored in around it in that tribal "lines showing" way. The shapes made in the negative spaces between the forms are also forms and part of the art, the outline becomes a specific border, but where those shapes got closed off by shading I filled them in with concentric lines and deliberately left all these lines rough. Let's make this piece smoother by burnishing with a lighter color of blue, but not color in the shape itself.

Try this technique with colored pencils in a color group from your set, just pick a simple shape like a leaf or star or acorn, something recognizable by its outline, sketch the outline with a hard line in the darkest color and then fill the background by first going around the edges of the background, then around the edges of the shapes, then by filling in the blank spaces left with concentric shapes till they're filled. Let your lines show light and dark at this stage.

Next step, I burnished over all my Indigo background fills with True Blue, a bright medium blue. A lighter color would have showed more of the Indigo lines and lighter streaks under it, they are barely visible in the areas I've done. The example shows where those geometric shapes in the background form by going thickly around the edges of the art and the edges of the outlined shapes of stars and feather, I will finish burnishing before the next stage. What this example shows is that even if your underlayer is not very smooth, heavy burnishing can smooth it. I could make this a smooth pure blue background if I worked at eliminating those dark streaks by going over the rest with a little indigo and going hard with the True Blue to lighten them.

 Second stage, burnishing for smoothness and to create a flat layer of the lighter True Blue for Indigo strokes to show against. This shows exactly how much a heavy burnishing can blur underlying lines. The pure True Blue areas are lighter, but the mixed color is still there in the darkest spots.

I sharpened my True Blue only enough to get some more point to continue burnishing here, it does not need a sharp point for burnishing except when it goes very close to outlines.

If I used a Colorless Blender, I would have gotten a lighter shade of Indigo and not this mixed color. If I used White, I would have gotten a lighter shade of Indigo. But now let's make it look more tribal and go back with Indigo over the burnished layer, to bring back the strong dark outlines and some heavy dark lines to recreate that background pattern.

 The dark Indigo lines are restored and made more prominent, a bit more organized by using Indigo over the mixture. A light tonal layer of Indigo is placed on the right side of the feather to prepare for burnishing with white, the stars will get burnished with white. My monogram signature is in one of the triangle areas, like a puzzle piece -- visible if you look for it in the center bottom.

Finally, I burnished the light subjects with white. I did the bright white areas first, working from the center so that I wouldn't carry indigo into them, and softened the line of white with the Indigo outlines like a little glow, then burnished over the soft tonal layer on the shadow side of the feather. Last, I went in again with a very sharp True Blue and my magnifier, carefully going over all of it and eliminating white dots, then did this again with the lines and Indigo to strengthen those and remove the last white dots from Indigo lines.

  ACEO Tribal Feather finished.

Even going in the pattern of the lines in the background, I tried to keep my lines relatively short and overlapping, except where I did long heavy lines to suggest shapes. Once burnished it became a nearly smooth layer of True Blue, and lines going in the direction of the underlying lines had to be drawn over that layer. You can get very light shades of dark colors by using a soft tonal layer and then burnishing with White. Once finished, I sprayed two light coats of workable matte fixative on this ACEO piece, Tribal Feather. Try this technique with any simple objects you think of, in any color you have light and dark versions. It can be very dramatic using red and orange for light and dark, then yellow for the final burnishing color for a fire-themed piece.

Hopefully trying a tribal-lines background will also help you get used to filling in background areas smoothly. If you have trouble filling in backgrounds, the tonal layers in the shading on picees like this may help you get to where you can do smooth areas of flat color like mist or sky or any flat background.

Shading: Start with a heavy dark layer in the darkest color you're using, then go lighter and lighter. Practice doing shading bars until the gradations between faint tonal layers at the lightest end and solid burnished fill-in with no white areas or strokes showing at the dark end have no sharp divisions. Alternately, do some by trying to create as many value differences in tonal areas burnished with white as you can, each with a sharp edge from the next. Choose the darkest color you have in your set to do a value strip first, after that you can start finding out how far on the value scale between black and white each of your colors falls for value.

It helps in shaded drawings to do a value drawing in a dark color, either cool like Indigo or warm like Sepia, treating it as if you're doing a pencil drawing. Then start burnishing other colors over that value drawing to change them. For skin tones, practice on scraps till you get the exact color you want between brown, peach and white, keep in mind that orange and pink used lightly can help a lot in matching someone's complexion. Darker people are easier because sometimes their skin tones only go up to a rich gold or reddish brown, just play with combinations of the browns and warm colors you have till you match that person.

Mixing color is a matter of putting one light tonal layer over another till you have it the exact hue you want (what color it is, that's hue), and the exact value (how light or dark). Theoretically a 12 color set can duplicate any color you can see with the right mixtures, but it's much easier with a larger set and more colors to mix to get the effect you want. It works best to pick the colors closest to the one you want and mix them till you find exactly the right proportion. I've found it possible to get anything I want with 24 color sets usually, but not all 12 color sets may have the right combinations for every pink or purple or pure light color out there, some don't even have white to lighten.

Mixing black is easy, mix a very dark cold color like blue or violet with a very dark warm color like brown. Mixed blacks are snappy and jazzy, they pop and look more dramatic than using the black pencil unless it's on colored paper. Browns can be mixed and so can grays by mixing opposites on the color wheel until you have exactly the brown or gray you want, and muted versions of bright colors can be made by mixing just a little of its complement into it. These are the familiar color wheel complements: red is opposite green, yellow is opposite purple, blue is opposite orange. Browns usually function like dark oranges or yellows.

Underpainting: Remember those pesky white flecks that I had to get rid of with a magnifier, going over them with a sharp point? I wouldn't have had to do that cleanup if I had decided to do solid blue in the first place and done a watercolor or marker underpainting. Thinned acrylics can work for underpainting. I divide my picture area into light areas and dark, and color zones -- the foliage will be green or autumn reds and golds, the sky blue or light gray or sunset red, decide base colors in a simple way and then fill with flat color. This creates something like working on colored paper, and the little flecks that come through sometimes even in very heavy burnishing won't show because they're already colored a variation of the base color of the area.

Sometimes underpaintings can be very soft and light. Other times they can be bright and gaudy, toned down by the choice of pencils to put over them. One portraitist I knew always underpainted light complexion faces with bright pumpkin orange -- and then toned it with white and pinks and browns till it matched the skin tone but was very lively. So don't be afraid of bold underpaintings that by themselves would look cartoonish and unreal. You can change the hue with your colored pencils to a great degree.

Markers are very handy for underpainting because even if you scribble and streak with them, the penciling will overcome the light and dark variations. Don't worry about whether your watercolored underpainting is a flat smooth wash, it's easy to go over streaks with the colored pencils and get rid of them just the way most of the first layer of Indigo streaks on my example vanished under True Blue.

Whether you do heavy burnished applications or light textured applications, perfect detailed realism or wild abstracts, geometrics, stylized renderings and primitives, I hope this Guide has helped show you some basic techniques to use with colored pencils.

In my next Guide, I'll go into some types of surfaces and accessories, effects you can get with them and what colored surfaces do to your color mixtures. Enjoy, and check out eBay sellers for bargains on bulk lots of colored pencils and big colored pencil sets -- sometimes they come up cheaper than small ones in stores!