Colouring with Coloured Pencils

Colouring with Coloured Pencils

It's quite easy to create tone and form with coloured pencils just by changing the pressure that you apply from the pencil onto the paper. Below are a few ways I like to use the medium. To create a nice gradation from one colour to the next, you can either use a flicking motion or use fading. Both require you to apply tons of pressure on one area (dark area) and gradually reduce it, letting the pencil just hover over the paper and finally apply no pressure at all on the opposite area (light area). Cross-hatching is what I like to use when I try to achieve a flat layer of colour. This can also be used when shading since the tighter the cross-hatching is, the darker the layer becomes.

Below are only for ways to blend colours together. NOTE that there are more ways than this. Dividing the area into sections which corresponds to only one colour saves a lot of time when shading. It does however have the tendency to achieve a result where the colours aren't blended well together. Layering creates an entirely different shade of colour. It is however the most time consuming since it's not just putting the two colours/shades together, it's marrying them into one. This is done by starting with a slight pressure from the pencil and then building it up from there: gradually adding more pressure as you move onto a darker shade. Obviously, you don't have to start from the lightest colour. Dark, which is what I call this technique, is using the darker/darkest shade first to map out the dark areas and the shadows, then simply just adding the main colours to blend it together. 

For all of these boxes, I used red as my main colour and chose another colour that I wanted to shade with it. The first combination uses another colour from the same colour family of red. I used a darker shade of red. The second combination uses a colour that's somewhat related to red, preferably the colour next to it on the colour wheel, which is wither orange or violet. The third combination uses black with red to really emphasis the contrast between the bright red and the deep black. The last combination uses a complementary colour of red which is green to provide depth and interest to the colour.