 Hi there. Welcome to my YouTube channel. My name is Sandy Olnock and I am an artist. I love however not just making art but teaching others how to make art to help you get to the next step in your journey, whatever level you're at. If you'd like to do that then join me on this art venture and subscribe to this channel. All you have to do is tap the bell that's right beside the subscribe button and tell it to send you all videos from this channel so you don't miss anything on Tuesdays and Saturdays. Today I'm going to be comparing something that I really hadn't thought about very much as much as I've used both mediums. What's the difference between color pencil and watercolor pencil both in the items themselves the supplies you need and how they work? Let's get started. Somebody asked me to do a video sometime on whether or not you can use watercolor pencils instead of colored pencils and I forgot entirely but I was reminded of that when I was working on my website recently because I'm trying to revamp the category pages for all the classes. They're not all done but I'm working through them and I was working on the watercolor pencil and realized there were so few classes it didn't really warrant its own page so I combined them with colored pencil and since they're both going to be on the same page I wanted some content at the top of the page explaining the difference between them and I wanted to make a graphic for it so I'll be making that graphic here in this video and on the website there's going to be a short tight version of some of the stuff you'll see I'll get a little chattier and blather a little bit here but there's some commonalities and some differences. One is that watercolor pencils have a watercolor binder in them and the others don't so one is waterproof one is water soluble but let's go to the commonalities first the things that are the same they're pencils like you've used a pencil since you were a kid and that's what pencils are no matter what kind of pencil you can hold them the same way and draw lines the same way they have high quality and low quality so artist grade and craft or student grade and it's always best to get artist grade if you can afford it storage you can store pencils any old which way they can be in boxes and bags and cups in zipper pouches whatever you want to store them in just don't drop them if you drop them you could shatter the leads inside and then have a heck of a time sharpening speaking of sharpening there are handheld sharpeners the kind that you twist there's hand crank ones there's electric ones and what I found is the little ones are the ones the cheap ones are the ones that I like the best but you do have to replace them periodically because the blades go dull the long point pencil sharpener is cool but you don't get super sharp points on that you have to use sandpaper to do that compared to the tiny pencil sharpeners that's why I like the little ones there's erasers out the wazoo there's kneaded erasers and gum erasers and stick erasers that write like a pencil or an electric eraser like that one I just showed lots of different kinds and they work at different phases of a drawing based on whether or not you've already done any wet blending but let's talk about supplies because they're different for both colored pencil you need a solution of some kind for wet blending a gamsol or a linseed oil or something you need something to move it with a brush or a blending stump and you need a stump sharpener if you have a blending stump you'll need for dry blending q-tips cotton balls soft things to blend with you can also blend with the blending stump tea strainer for creating the like powdered pigment that I like to use and for papers I like stonehenge for white paper but you can also use colored papers with some of the more opaque shades of colored pencils you can't really do that with watercolor pencils so watercolor pencils only need water and brushes and the better brushes you get the better your art comes out but you can use any kind of brush with them you can use a tea strainer with it I'll show that in just a few minutes you need baby wipes if you're going to move just a little bit you don't want a lot of water on it paper you want to use good watercolor paper and you need to tape your paper down to a board of some kind because you're using water and water tends to warp paper so there's a few more things that you need but they're not really big deal things compared to like getting the blending solutions and tools it's just water and a brush so let's talk about the application of color and what's different or the same can we do the very same techniques with both kind of pencil and on the right will be watercolor pencil on the left will be colored pencil and I'm going to start off with powdered pigment the tea strainer is used to grate the pigment and to turn it into powder and then I'm moving the watercolor pencil powder with a baby wipe and I'm using a baby wipe not a brush because I'm working on drawing paper so I could have this whole thing on one piece of paper rather than half watercolor paper and half drawing paper on the left side is colored pencil and I can do dry blending with that and dry blending with a cotton ball is just really sweet makes a very nice soft kind of vignette shadow for application of the color on the image itself it's the same for both pencils you can just scribble if you're going to use blending solution it doesn't really matter the smoother you get that before you start doing your blending solution the better because it'll be easier to do here I'm using linseed oil and a blending stump I keep my oil in a little plastic jar thing with a cotton ball in it so my blending stump isn't dipped into like liquid and get all drippy and on the other side I'm going to scribble color just the same for the butterfly with watercolor pencils and kind of messy scribbling just so you can see that these colors do blend when you just kind of scribble them on they're very forgiving in that way if I were to use a brush here I could make it all splashy and watercolory as well but again drawing paper didn't want to get all wrinkly you can also add another layer on top of these and another layer and another layer the color pencil will get more intense than watercolor pencil watercolor pencil just keeps lifting as you work that's why your water gets dirty because it keeps taking everything off of your paper and putting it in your water jar or on your baby wipe in this case so just be aware of that but it's not a super noticeable thing in many cases I'm using colored pencil on the left to draw the black and on the right using watercolor pencil and then a brush with just barely any liquid in it to smooth out the pencil on the right hand side and then blending solution on the left and then I'm drawing with the blending stump itself just drawing those very soft little antenna on the butterfly so this is now on my website with as I said a short version of this video that section and then the rest of the website has all kinds of great information on how to get started with the medium and then listing the classes by groups so I have them you know in in different ways for different mediums trying to figure out the most sensible way to help you navigate through the classes because they used to just be a giant list that was not very helpful for anybody so now I'm going to jump into two speed pencil paintings and they're going to happen at the same time and yes I said pencil paintings that's what lots of people call them so we're going to call them pencil paintings this is the reference photo from paint my photo that I used for this one and the top is going to be colored pencil the bottom will be watercolor pencil my biggest concern for this picture was trying to keep that yellow and gold and and orange colors keep them from getting muddied by the the purples and the blues that I was going to add so I did them first so that I could be in control of where they are and how much color is there first and then as I add the other colors I'm just needing to stay away from the center as opposed to trying to draw the darks in and then fit these in between them because when you start mixing yellow blue and red which you'll notice all these colors have some yellow blue and red in them you start getting brown and I wanted to stay away from getting turning kind of neutral colors so I just started building the darks little by little leaving some white in between because I hadn't really put necessarily enough oranges in there but I didn't want too much orange under the purple either I was really sensitive to trying to figure out how to keep that glow and as I started using blending solution I was just staying away from the orange glow the places where I wanted it to be bright and then added more pencil and started working in tighter into each of the areas leaving that white in there so that I could fill it back in later because this was just layer after layer after layer after layer after layer now if you are wondering if you could see this slower because I know it's moving fast it was a lot of work but the full video is in the new class that just launched that's called sunrise sunset the sunrise sunset class is a level two class this is not a level two drawing but this is in the bonus lesson and there's no voiceover in it so you just get a few words on the screen here and there with what I was doing at each phase but you can watch it much more slowly and see what I was doing and not just like have it fly by this way but I did want to at least show you some ideas on how many layers you can get with the pencils in comparison to watercolor pencil because on the bottom I'm going to do the watercolor pencil section and that will give you a good visual on the difference between the two and of course if you take the class then you get to see the other once I finished all that negative drawing into those poofs of clouds I started adding more oranges and reds in there you can keep layering over and over again but just remember when you put purple over orange or orange over purple you'll get brown in the mix so be aware of that if you're trying something like this so for the watercolor pencil version I began first with using a baby wipe to blend because I didn't want to get the whole thing sopping wet quite yet so that first pass on the sky was just baby wipe and then decided okay I'm just going to throw in water and go from there I was drawing it in between a lot of different phases because I was very worried about this getting out of control too quickly so I would kind of do the drawing and then do some water and then dry and then drawing and water and dry and I had fortunately already done the color pencil one so I had some idea of where I was going to be putting all of those sections of purples and blues and it was just a matter of figuring out the technique and once you start in on skies if you take the class you might get hooked on them and you'll figure out your own way for what's the best method for going back and forth and adding in your darks and your lights every sky is different and when I was putting the class together I had to abandon some of them because they were so difficult to figure out I couldn't even explain how you should do it so I picked ones that would be a reasonable attempt for a level two kind of person in color pencil and or watercolor pencil so you'll see each one in class like this with the color pencil on top and the watercolor pencil down below but you can take it in either one or both whatever your preference is but you'll still watch them all in one video like you're doing for this one so at least I saved you from the oh my gosh it's a beautiful sky but how on earth do you create it because this was this was a challenge for me so I wanted to make sure that at least anybody who takes that doesn't feel obligated to you know to try that and depressed if it doesn't work because it is a challenge so I kept trying to fuss with the water and getting that really soft edge was incredibly difficult because every time you work with watercolor pencil everything underneath of it lifts and then you have to deal with whatever lifted and made a bloom it's just kind of a constant thing but adding the scene at the bottom the silhouette scene is always the fun part in in this kind of thing for me because then I get to fuss around with the detail and it gets so punchy and dark that it creates some nice contrast and pulls the foreground forward and everything else just kind of fades in the back and you can see my lighting was a little off in the original in the video section this is from my phone which tends to pick up a little better color and it's not tidy pencil but when you pull back from it it looks fantastic so I was still happy with it in the long run so never judge your work by how close your nose is to it because nothing looks good at that level so sunrise sunset I'll give you a preview here of the class what you'll be making in it there's five different of these scenes and I've picked ones that had nice silhouettes in the front so you'll learn how to draw the silhouettes as well the boat the trees the grasses all that kind of stuff and the skies that will do first in behind them even a cruise ship yes we're doing a cruise ship more trees and it's all done with 11 pencils 11 colors I did it all in favor castel so that I'd be matchy matchy on the colors but you can use whatever brand you've got unless it's ink tense pencils and if that's the case then come back on Saturday because I'm going to do a video on ink tense pencils alone and some of the properties and some of the adjustments you need to make when you're working with those kind of pencils thanks so much for joining me for this journey into watercolor pencils and color pencils I hope you learned something and if you did hit the subscribe button so you can come back for more I hope to see you in a class or back here on YouTube very soon take care and go create something every day