Understand your pressure

Knowing how hard or soft you normally press is useful for understanding how much scope you can have to go lighter or heavier.

If you are fairly new to colour pencils, try doing a pressure test to see where in the range you naturally sit, with 1 being the lightest pressure you can manage, and 10 being the heaviest.

Most colour pencil work is done at level 3 or 4, and slowly gets heavier as you layer.

Burnishing is the heaviest pressure you’ll use, and this will be a 9 or 10.

A glaze would be the lightest at level 1 or 2.

Hold your pencil differently

After the pressure test, if you find that you are working too lightly or like me, too heavy, consider changing the way you hold your colour pencils.

Further up the barrel will help to lighten your pressure (see left).

Closer to the nib (see below) will enable you to be heavier.

Vary your pencil strokes

It is easy to forget sometimes that your colour pencil has sides and edges as well as a point.

You don’t have to apply colour, fill large spaces, or map out your under-layers in the same way you create texture or smooth out your top layers. 

Using the side of your pencil you can fill an area very quickly, and it saves on sharpening.

Angle up to get a thinner line and remember to rotate your grip to keep the point sharp.

Blender Pens

There are many types of blending mediums out there for colour pencils, but I love blender pens.

As an artist who prefers pencils and pens to paintbrushes, I find these so useful for smaller areas. They don’t smell anywhere near as bad as odourless mineral spirits or other blending mediums either, which is great.

Blender pens dissolve the binder and smooth out the pigment, covering the tooth quickly. They also make the colour really pop. 

The image on the left shows coloured pencil before and the one below after uisng a blender pen.

Smooshing/Smoothing out

If you don’t fancy using a blender, you can achieve a similar effect by using a light colour over the top, such as white or a very light grey. This will smooth out the pigment by squashing the layers together to create a solid colour.

Again, you need a generous amount of pigment down before you do this and you need to press firmly (6 or 7 on the pressure test) to get the best results, so don’t do this too early if you need the tooth. 

Helen Carter

See more from Helen on her website, www.helencarterartist.com, Facebook and Instagram.

UKCPS

For more information about the UK Coloured Pencil Society please visit www.ukcps.org.uk.