This GENIUS Colored Pencil Hack will Save You Time

I have an idea for a hack that I really think is gonna solve some of the biggest colored pencil problems. I promise this is gonna be a hack you'll want to use. Let's get into it. Normally when you're shading with colored pencils, you have all of these tiny white dots which are so hard to get rid of, which means that you have to spend hours adding so many layers of colored pencil, slowly even this out and get rid of all of these tiny dots or even push hard on the pencil as you can see here. And this can take forever and it also damages the paper because you're pushing so hard to flatten it out. By the time you've actually added all of the layers of shading that you need to, it's actually really hard then to add other colored pencils over the top. They just don't show up. This can really limit you when you're trying to do a drawing where you need full coverage but also lots of details and textures. It was actually charcoal drawing that first put this idea in my mind. One of my favorite techniques for charcoal drawing is to actually sand the charcoal pencil and then use a brush and dip it in the powder that I create and actually use that to apply the charcoal to the paper. And you can see that that gives me a really smooth, even base of this sort of tone. Biggest thing that I love about this technique is that it really speeds up my charcoal drawings and that is probably one of the biggest problems with colored pencils. They take so long. Anything that will help speed up the process is a big help. Look, it fills in all of the grain of the paper so fast. Just brushing that on that we can easily build on top of. How amazing would it be if I could do something like that with colored pencil? Is it gonna work? Let's find out. Okay, let's try this. Ooh. Okay, so it's working but one thing that I can see straight away is that it's pretty light. That might not make it super useful for drawings where we need to get some darker tones. So maybe some of these other blending tools will get us a darker coverage. I've created some powder of this really dark brown color. I'm gonna try out all of the different blending tools to see which one is gonna be the best at getting it the darkest. You can see that the middle one is the clear winner. I used the blending stump for this one. This one was the cotton bud, this was the tissue and this was the brush, which was by far the lightest. I definitely think there's a place for every tool within the drawing process. One important thing is, can we lay on top of it? Yes, we can. We haven't damaged the tooth of the paper. It can still take all of those layers of colored pencil on top. No burnishing to flatten the tooth of the paper to get rid of all of those white specks. Can easily get rid of the white specks of the paper, add a base layer in like five minutes and then add details over the top. Look at this. One of the massive problems with colored pencil is once you add loads of layers, getting those white highlights back or if you make a mistake, erasing it. Look, it just erases just like graphite would. Look how good that is. Imagine if you were doing like fur and you wanted a whisker and you could just do that. And what's even more amazing is that the white shows up perfectly over the top of this. So you could go in with your white pencil and look at that, perfect white whiskers. But there's no point in knowing all this unless you know how to actually apply this technique to a drawing and the steps to follow to get the best out of this hack. So let's jump into a drawing. Before we move on though, I do need to make a confession. The blending stump wasn't actually the method that I found got the darkest shading. There was something else, but there are risks that come with it. Anyway, let me show you. The thing that really gets the darkest shading is using your finger. But the problem with this is you got oils on your fingers. It might not erase as easily, but you can see it does get it really dark. And so you might wanna use it for areas that are super, super dark that you even can't get dark enough with the blending stump. I'm gonna try and avoid using this method because just using your finger to blend in general often gives you a patchier result. It leaves you with greasy smudges sometime and it's a little more unpredictable. I'm gonna try and draw this reference. I've got the sketch down and I'm gonna see how long it takes to do this portrait. Like this is one of the last color pencil drawings I did. I think this took about eight to 10 hours-ish. So I'm really interested to see whether this will speed up the drawing process. And I really think it's going to. So I'm gonna set a stopwatch and count how long it takes to finish this portrait. I wanna work on the skin first. And up until now I've only really been working with one color at a time using this method. I'm trying to mix cream, white, darker brown and then like a pink. Cause it's a bit more of like a light beige sort of skin tone. And it may look like I'm using a lot of the color pencil to actually sand this down. But think about how big of an area it will be filling. If it fills the whole of the skin for the portrait that's pretty much most of the drawing that you're adding a layer to. My plan is to go in with the brush first and I'm gonna use it to try and just like add a base layer of this powder all over the skin. Once I've done that, I'm gonna go in with the tissue and try and smooth this out and make it look a little bit more even. I think I'm gonna use the tissue with a little more pressure to just sort of give a slight bit of shadow to the areas that need it. Get in some of those shadows, try and create a bit of structure to the face. Then I'm gonna go in with the blending stump and I'm gonna use that blending stump to create those smaller shadows, really getting the structure of the face to make it look 3D. And I was a bit worried that using this powder would just completely obliterate my sketch outline, but I was really happy that this doesn't seem to be the case it's actually still showing up pretty well. I'm also gonna add a bit of the dark brown to the eyes, to the irises. That's basically gonna be it for the face. Really, I just wanna get a base layer down, just cover all of the paper with some sort of color. I'm about 20 minutes in and you can already see that I've got a nice full coverage on the skin and I'm gonna start to add a base layer to the hair. And then once I've done these areas, I'm gonna just jump in with the colored pencils. But you can just see, you would never think that this is colored pencil that you've added to the skin. Look at this, it's so smooth, so nice. And that highlight on the nose, oh my God, I can't wait to just erase that colored pencil off to create a really beautiful highlight. When I started adding the details, they just layered on top of that first layer of the powder colored pencil so well. It was like there was nothing on the paper, which was great for doing the details like eyebrow hairs and the eyelashes and all of the details in the eyes because you're able to get those details to really show up nicely. And it's like you're working on a fresh sheet of paper. And it was really easy to erase little details like the highlights on the nose. It was just so easy to get those details in and those lighter tones and lift that colored pencil right back off the paper. Very much erased, very similar to how charcoal powder or graphite would. I did find that it was hard to get it really dark for the hair without using my fingers. When it came to adding all of these details in the hair, I just pretty much had to add a whole layer, probably sped it up a little bit for the hair because you can't see any little white bits of the paper showing through. It would just be like a dark gray. So it probably wouldn't have saved as much time as it would doing the skin. So I've been working on the hair and I've done a really annoying mistake. You can see here on all the highlights, they've gone gray because the side of my hand has got all of the black from the hair on it. And I accidentally just sweeped my hand across the face. I'm not quite sure how I'm going to fix this. I'm thinking maybe I could go in with the kneaded eraser and try and rub that top layer off. Ooh, that could work well. But it's going to just pull off loads of the colored pencil around it and that's still going to be gray. So I'm not quite sure what I'm going to do about that. That's really, really annoying. I also found something else out, which is another great thing about this technique is that when I go over it with more colored pencil like this you can go straight in with a tissue and just blend that out as well. And it will blend out really, really nicely. And so that's great that that sort of pastel layer means that extra layers of shading just blend out too. I actually managed to fix this problem by using this eraser to remove the top layer of colored pencil. And then I went back in and I just sort of blended over it again with the powder to just sort of like go back to how it looked before with just the base layer of that powder on it. And then I lifted up the highlights again and added a bit of white where I needed it. Adding all these details really quickly has transformed this drawing. At the start with just that powder layer, it looks very messy. When you just start adding a bit of definition with those pencils, everything just really comes together really quickly and it really has saved a lot of time. How much time? I'll reveal that at the end. I think the biggest problem that this hack helps to solve is time. It really speeds up those colored pencil drawings. It's a lot easier to erase any sort of mistakes and lift that powder off the paper. It doesn't damage the paper so you can layer lots over the top of it. It's like you haven't added any colored pencil to start with even though you completely covered the paper, which is crazy. But there's other positives too. It's just fun and different to work in this way. Sometimes when you're working with a medium for so long, it can get a bit boring, a bit stale, and it's always fun to try something new. Even if you prefer your normal methods, I would recommend giving it a go because it's just fun to try something new. I've just finished up this portrait and I am so happy with how it turned out. This technique worked perfectly. The real question is, how long did it take? Was it faster? It actually took me two hours and 40 minutes to do this, which is so much faster than any of the drawings I have done before. And I think it turned out really nicely. I'm really happy with it, especially for the first attempts because obviously I've not used this technique before. I'm actually surprised I didn't think of this hack sooner, especially because I've been using colored pencils for so long. But if you're just getting started and you're not sure what supplies you need, the techniques to use and all that stuff, check out this video next because it's a complete guide on everything you need to know to get started with colored pencils. And I'll see you in the next one. Bye everybody.