 Hello there, it's Sandy Allknock, and today I'm going to talk about getting started with colored pencils. And I'll start off with a little bit of eye candy, my Prismacolor, my Polychromos, and my Luminance pencils, which I store in these types of cases. I do that because the boxes are a little unwieldy, and I have knocked them over from time to time. When you drop a pencil on the ground, you can break the lead inside of it. So I find these cases to be a little easier for me. I'm going to flip through my swatch book, and what I have for each one of my brands of pencils starts off with a hex chart on white, and then on a couple colors that I color on regularly, a craft and a black. The black, you can't see the numbers after you start coloring the little colors in. So I print it onto a piece of acetate. You can take it to the coffee shop and have them do it for you if your printer doesn't do that. But then you can see all the numbers right through, and you don't have to write anything in, which is really helpful. Next up is my swatches. Now these I don't recommend anyone else do. I did this because I wanted to be able to put the colors beside whatever I'm coloring when I take pictures of it from my blog or for social media, and I haven't remembered to do that because I lost the book, but I did find the book again. So yay for that. Maybe that'll start again. And next up is my Polychromos. Same routine, print it on whatever it is you color on, whatever kind of paper, whatever color paper, because that's going to make a difference in what you see. Notice that mine are not colored really heavily. I color them really light. And there's a reason for that. I'm going to show you my technique when we get to that section of this video, because I don't really color heavily. I do have my hex charts, though, colored in with a really thick, heavy coverage of the color, because since I have that and I have the swatches, I have both as an option to see the color shown either way. So that is my swatch books. Next up, let's look at the pencils themselves. Prismacolor is the cheapest of the pencils, and they moved their production to Mexico, I guess in 2010, I hear, and their quality went down a bit. The pencils that I have, lots of them are still the ones that I had when I was in college. I've taken good care of them, but some of them, not this one, but some of them will not have the lead centered in the middle of the wood. And that might be why you have some problems sometimes with pencils breaking when you're sharpening them or the lead just not being centered once you get down to a certain level in the pencil. The colors, though, are my favorites. I like their color selection. There's a few colors that I can't live without. And I also like that you can read the numbers. Unlike this Polychromos. I can't read that for Jack. It's terrible. It's a tiny font with like gold letters in a color. And yeah, I just can't read it. So it's really hard for me. But another interesting thing is that these two pencils, all three of these pencils are approximately the same color. They're not exact. But look how different the body paint is on each one. So that's one reason why it's helpful to have some sort of a chart to swatch things out to be able to see what they look like. This is the Luminance pencil and they have natural wood on them. It's their beautiful pencils, but I can't read that silver writing on the natural wood. Same deal. And again, that color is supposed to be a purple and it looks more blue to me. So not always are these pencils going to have the same color on the outside as is on the inside. And that's just something for you to deal with as an artist, unfortunately. So I've made a chart in my six by 12 Stonehenge sketchbook and I'll talk about Stonehenge paper in a bit. I do have a section here for Nina and a section with a piece of black Stonehenge so that I can do all of this with all three brands and a bunch of different techniques in one chart and not have to get out all different kinds of paper. So let's talk about Prismacolor first. As I said, they're now made in Mexico. The color selection is 150. It's the biggest out of the three of these. And again, I like the colors the best in it. Maybe it's because Blue Violet was a color that I used in college for everything. I don't know, but I really love their pencil selection and their wax pencils. Polychromos made by Faber Castell and they're made in Germany. So get a little German flag in here. They are an oil based pencil. So there's a couple of differences that the wax versus oil make. The biggest one that artists talk about is blooming, that when you do stuff with Prismacolor pencils, they can bloom or any of the wax pencils. That depends on your technique. My technique, I've never had blooms in all of my life of coloring with them. Never had a problem with it. But I'll show you what I think is the reason why. And there are 120 of the Polychromos pencils. Luminance then just added some. And I am going to be adapting the Luminance hex chart at some point in the coming months. So stay tuned for a video here on YouTube about that. And when I do, I will put a link in the description of this video to the new Luminance chart. You don't have to rebuy it. It'll just be a free download if you've already purchased the chart. So if you want one just without those colors, you can get it now. Or you can wait. It's up to you. Again, you don't have to have my hex chart in order to be able to use these. Plenty of people use their pencils without my charts. And so there are supposed to be 100 colors now and they are wax based pencils. So let's look at my technique and I color with a really light hand. It's because I like to blend colors together using multiple layers of multiple colors. That means I want a really soft surface of paper like this Stonehenge. It's a drawing paper. It's not like anything really pressed hard and flat. It's got a really nice tooth to it. And the tooth is what gives me such joy. The tooth is what scrapes the pigment off of the pencil. So what you'll find is you'll get stronger color on a drawing paper like this with a texture than you will on something smoother like the Nina that we're going to see in just a minute. But it does take a really long time to do this. My technique is to get a really sharp pencil and fill in all those little crevices, all those little white cracks, those little white dots to try to get it blended. If I were to try to do this perfectly, which these are not perfect, then it could take me hours to do just a little square. That is one of the reasons why I don't do massive colored pencil videos here on YouTube with lots of colored pencil backgrounds because they take forever to do with my technique. So the eraser that I just pulled out is called a kneaded eraser, K-N-E-A-D-E-D. And that's a really soft, gummy type of eraser. And I can twist it and pull it, and it basically is self-cleaning. Some of my kneaded erasers I've had since college. And you can just keep them soft by using them, and you can tap it onto this really soft surface and lift off just the slightest bit of color to help you get an even coat. And I use that a lot. So here I'm coloring on the Neenah itself, and Neenah is a cardstock used by crafters a lot. I use that in tons of my crafting. And you can get a much smoother texture on this with your initial pass of coloring. But one of the things you'll notice is that it's a lot harder to get rich color. I'm trying to use apples to apples pressure, both on the Stonehenge and the Neenah, to see what the difference is. And you can see the color is completely different. Stonehenge has a richer color, it's much darker, then Neenah is just much softer. And it's going to take you a lot more pressure. I have hands that are delicate, let's just say. I color and draw all the time, and I don't like taxing my hands that hard. Some of you have arthritis, and you may find hard pressure difficult to deal with. So the Stonehenge paper might be way better for you. You might get a lot more color for your effort. So now I'm going to show you a real quick, a couple of blending techniques that different people use. One is to just cover everything in white. And you can see it does smooth things out, but it kind of evens everything. It's just even across all of it. What I'm using right here though is a blending stump. And a blending stump is basically rolled paper. You can buy these or you can make them. They're much nicer when you buy them. I find I can't make ones as nice as the ones I can buy, and they're real cheap. And you can just go over whatever you've colored and blend it, just pushing the pigment around. It works better on Stonehenge, again, because that pigment is loose on the surface of the paper and can be moved. This is a stump sander. You can also use it as a pencil sharpener, and it's sometimes called a stump sharpener. It's basically a little piece of board with sandpaper on it. And you can rub it on there and it will sharpen it. It will also remove some of that color. So if you switch to yellow or something you don't want to get purple on your yellow, then you clean it with that stump sander or some stump cleaner. You can see that coloring over top of a color with white changes the color. And sometimes you'll want that. If you don't have that kind of a color in your collection, layer some white over it and you can make it into a more opaque pastel looking color. And if you just want to move the color and make it a little smoother, you can use a blending stump with no blending solution, especially on the softer papers. And then you can go back in afterward and add another layer of pigment to it. Add more colored pencil to increase your contrast. You can't do that over top of the white very well. You get a really weird, linear texture thing. It just, once you cover it with something where you've colored really hard on the surface, it makes it impenetrable to doing much with it in terms of good blending and anything that looks nice and smooth. Now for this black, this is black sketch paper from Stonehenge. And what I've done is color some white on one side so you can see the difference. Some pencils, this is not one of them, are opaque, which means the color will show up more on black. If you have a color that doesn't show up on black, you can put some white under it, so do an underpainting basically with white and color anything that you want to show up in that color. In order to know whether your pencil is opaque or not, you need to test it out. So that's where printing a chart on black paper is going to help so that you can actually know which colors are going to show up on their own and which ones need white underneath. Now, this is my technique for blending colors and it's the reason why I love color pencils so much and it does take a long time, but I love that I can get these really soft transitions from one color to another. And what I do is make a blend from left to right with one color and right to left with the other color, letting them overlap each other. That means many layers of color to keep intensifying the both colors that I'm using. And you can see that I get a soft blend in between the two. And I'll show you an example of how that applies in a little bit. This, however, is a technique a lot of people use. And I see it all over YouTube and I scratch my head. I am not good at this when it comes to actually making a drawing this way. But people will take a very heavy, heavy pressure with their color pencils and then go over it with white and try to get the white to blend it or some kind of blending pencil and then go back over it with the other colors again, so I'm adding more of the purple and more of the red to try to get some kind of blend going. Now, I happen to be using a warm red here, which is not the brightest idea. You'd probably have more success with a cool red because there's a yellow content in that red pencil that is making the blue and the red and the yellow together turn into brown in the middle. If you've taken my any of my basics classes, any of my jumpstart classes, I talk about color theory, so that will explain it if you take one of those. However, I just don't find this technique very helpful for me, except in very minute circumstances or sometimes when I want a really nice, heavy, rich area in a particular drawing for something that I'm doing. So it's good to have a lot of techniques in your hat that you can pull out to use in different ways. But next, I'm going to show you some much quicker ways to color, not using my technique, but using mine, I guess, as an underpainting under color beneath everything, the better you do this stage of it, the better off your blending is going to be later. But I'm trying to make these two colors roughly go together, but I'm not really worrying about making anything perfect. I'm going to use blending solutions and I'll do two of them. Gamsol is one lots of people use. There's some brands of it that have a funky smell. So I started at the time that I had a smelly bottle of Gamsol. I started using baby oil and I found they both work about the same. So you can use either one. And what you do is take a little bit on your blending stump and apply it on top of your color. Now, I try to segregate my colors a little bit. So I'm using one end of my blending stump for the red and one for the purple. Being aware that I need to have some color blending in between. So I'm going to be making a weird mud color between these two. So I may need to do some cleaning of my blending stump in between. Just be aware of that when you're doing this, because you can easily transfer colors that you don't want onto the other ones. If you want to keep a color pure reserve one end of your blending stump for it or just buy a big pack of these, they're really cheap. And then you can have ones for all your different colors. And it works the same for all the different brands of pencils. It'll work the same with Gamsol and baby oil. They're both about the same. They're an oily product. One of the problems with this is that if you're trying to blend something from a color into white, you will end up in the white area with the greasy looking stain. You can use that to advantage sometimes if you're trying to do, you know, a cloud of dust or something, you might find that an oily stain looks good in the, you know, in a cloud of dust behind a motorcycle. You may also find that that's really distracting and horrible. Test it out before you do it. Test whatever colors you're going to do and how you're going to blend them from one end to the other on the paper that you're going to be doing it. One of the fabulous parts about using any of these blending solutions is you can go over them and layer them again. Remember, I said you can't do that if you're just coloring really heavily with a white pencil. You can still work on them if they have the Gamsol or the baby oil in them. They're reworkable and the color goes on even darker and even richer over top of an area that's been treated already with that blending solution. So this is a little sketch that I did of a bird and what I'm doing here is adding some purples to it. I'm adding purple and yellow. I'm using my luminance set and it's got a limited color selection, much more limited than the others. Remember, they have, you know, 150 and 120 colors and I'm only using the 72 set right here. So I'm blending colors and layering them and getting a really soft look to it because I'm using a very light. Very light pressure and in my color pencil jumpstart class, we do a whole lesson about pressure and how heavy your pressure should be for different effects and it's something really important to figure out for yourself what effects you need for the kind of artwork you do, what kind of effects you like. If you like a softer look or you like a heavier look, it's entirely up to you. Here, I'm layering on a flesh color on top of a yellow for the belly because I didn't like the color selection I had. So I wanted to match something else. I'm adding a yellow into some of the areas on the head and in some of those browns because I wanted something a little bit brighter. If I were working with some other types of techniques, I might not be able to get those really subtle effects. But now for his belly, I switched to using a blending stump and Gemsol because I wanted these feathers, these reddish kind of feathers to blend in a little bit better into his tummy. I'll use a little bit of the blending solution as well on the branch. And that gives me yet another texture in this drawing. So I have a nice variety across the whole piece. So when I'm all finished, I and sometimes throughout, I use my brush to knock off any of the excess pencil dust. And a lot of times when I'm doing a drawing where my hand is going to be laying on color, I put a piece of paper there so that I don't smush things around before I'm finished. And when I am done, I'll get out the can of Delacroix fixative by Sennelier. And you hold it, you know, I guess about a foot above the surface and give it a light coat, let it rest for an hour and then add another light coat. It's better to do several light coats than one heavy coat, but it's non yellowing and it'll help to keep it from smudging. I don't necessarily fix all of my greeting cards that I send, but I do with my finished art and my sketches. If you want more information on colored pencils, I have a whole page full of colored pencil basics videos on my blog. There's a link to that in the description down below. And if you're somebody who likes things a little more sequentially, you can take my colored pencil jumpstart class. And that one is one where you'll end up getting a lot of information about color theory, about techniques to apply the pencils and each lesson builds on each other. So it's not just a collection of my random YouTube videos. But they're actually meant as a class. And sometimes that's a little easier to learn from. All right, that's it for me today. Links to everything are in the doobly-doo down below. I will see you again very soon. Take care. Bye bye.