Image source: Merlina McGovern
And now I have arrived at the final medium for my lemon and lime study, colored pencils. I used to think that colored pencils were only for little children. These were the clumsy tools we used to color in our flimsy coloring books, right? It wasn’t until I began taking community art classes, especially classes taught by the talented Anastasia Semash, that I began to see what colored pencils can really do.
For my project, I used Prismacolor colored pencils. These pencils are pricier than other brands; you can get them for about $15 for a set of 12. But I have found them to be smoother and far less likely to break and crumble as I color.
Colored pencils will use pigments, just as watercolors, gouache, and other mediums use, but the binder that they use to keep the pigments together is wax. As you drag your pencil across the paper, you’ll deposit these pigments onto your drawing. Now, for my project, I used a pretty cheap sketch pad. It has a lot of texture to it, so when trying to lay down a smooth layer of color, the tiny ridges will catch the pigments, and the divots will be left blank, leaving tons of tiny spots of white.
What I love about colored pencils is the control you have over where you can lay down your color (cheap paper aside). However, that control comes at a price. Because the tip of your pencil is tiny, you will have to spend a long time and a large amount of wrist and arm movement to cover large pieces of paper with color. And as you’ll see, the process for colored pencils is a layered process. You will have to cover the paper multiple times as you add on different layers of color to achieve a layered effect.
Similar to my watercolor and gouache efforts, to begin my project, I started with a graphite sketch. I loosely blocked in the major shapes. While I did slightly erase the sketch, I knew that my colored pencils would cover up most of the sketch, so I didn’t have to spend too much effort erasing those marks. (You have to be much more careful with this with a watercolor sketch, since the watercolor paints will set that graphite, and the colors are often too translucent to ever fully cover the original sketch).
Image source: Merlina McGovern
After that sketch, I began layering in my colors. I started off with the lightest pressure and the lightest color. What’s important about colored pencils is to remember that if you press harder, the color you lay down will be darker. Because you are covering such a large space with such a small tip, you can quickly end up with uneven colors if you use differing amounts of pressure as you color. What I found to be helpful was to hold the pencil far up the shaft. Some artists will suggest circular strokes, which I did do for the first layer of the background.
Image source: Merlina McGovern
But, I found that by holding the pencil further up, I was able to apply an even layer of color just as easily, and I was able to cover a lot more background at once, which is such a lifesaver for my wrists.
When I started on the fruit and the wood paneling, I started with the lightest colors first. Like other mediums, you can change the color of your drawing by layering different colors on top of each other. For example, for the limes, I used a very light yellow green, a more saturated medium green, and then indigo blue. The important thing to remember is to press very lightly with your initial layers. If you press too hard, you can end up sealing off the colors and then it can be hard to continue blending multiple colors together. Pressing too hard can also result in damage to the paper. This is something that I noticed was very easy to do with this cheap paper. In a few places, I had pressed to hard and the next stroke ended up slightly tearing the paper.
Image source: Merlina McGovern
As I continued, I would layer darker and darker colors on top of those initial light layers. I did end up using a white gel pen to add the very final highlights for the piece.
I won’t go too into detail on the technique of burnishing. I did not do that with this particular project since it was a bit larger and because my wrist was already tired from all of the layering. To burnish a layer, you can either use a darker or lighter color on top of a layer and press down firmly to smooth the layers using a firm pressure. You can also use a colorless blender to do this if you don’t want to add another color onto the layer. What this does is to smooth out the colors helping to cover over some of the white gaps left after initially coloring your layers. Once you do burnish a layer, however, it can be very difficult to layer more colors on top of that burnished layer, so be careful when deciding to do this technique.
As I mentioned, I was already a bit fatigued over the several days it took to create the layers I did. And that is the biggest difference between this medium and the other ones that I experimented with. Adding in the multiple layers and shades took so much longer. I did get into a flow as I did my coloring, but toward the end, I just wanted to see the finished project.
It’s possible I may experiment more with colored pencils in the future, but I’ll certainly need to rest up a bit after this particular entry into my medium study.
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