How to Create Lifelike Colored Pencil Drawings (Start to Finish Process)

In this video I'm going to share with you my entire colored pencil drawing process from start to finish so that you can start your colored pencil drawings with more confidence and just have so much more fun instead of feeling overwhelmed and frustrated and running into lots of mistakes. There are going to be so many juicy tips in this video and that's why I have created some cheat sheets and a checklist to go along with this video that you can download. There's there's a link to it in the description, completely free. It includes a checklist of basically everything that I do before I start my colored pencil drawings and so that I run into way less mistakes. And it also has cheat sheets for all of my favourite colour pencil techniques that make my drawings way more realistic, including how I blend my colour pencil drawings and also my different texturing techniques to get those really fine, realistic details. But anyway, let's get started. The first step that I do in any colour pencil drawing is the sketch, but I'm not going to go through how I sketch in this video. I'm gonna save this sketching tutorial for another lesson because that's our whole topic in itself. But that is one of the first things that I do whenever I'm doing a colored pencil drawing and I just use graphite. Now, I'm a big believer that you don't have to have perfect colors for your colored pencil drawings as long as you get the value spot on. value basically means the lightness or darkness of your colours and that's why before I dive in with my colours I actually like to create a black and white version of my reference and I like to do this really small value thumbnail sketch and basically just take a black colour pencil or anything like that and just do a very quick sketch and sort of establish where all of the different values are in your subject so that when it comes to colour you can also keep the values at the forefront of your mind and I even like to sort of swatch out all of the different values in the reference to get a clear picture of where they are and the sort of range of values I need to cover in my colour pencil drawing and it also helps me when it comes to picking colours know what values I need to make sure each color matches. We've got our sketch down and we've really looked at our reference or our subject and picked out where the different values are and even done that quick thumbnail study to get a clear idea and map out where our light should be and where our darker value should be in our drawing. And so now that we've got that in like the front of our mind we can now dive into picking our colors. So let me show you my process how i picked colors for this drawing so before we start coloring in this flower the next thing we've got to do is actually pick which colors we're going to use for this project and you can see that i've started off by swatching all of the main colors that i can see in this reference and you can do this yourself using Microsoft Paint which is totally free i use Photoshop for this and this is really great because you're able to pick the main colors and create these large swatches to just get a really quick idea of the different colors you need to include in your drawing and look it gives you a really nice idea if you go from light to dark all of the different values you need to hit and we can see that we're going from really light tones to really dark shadows down here so our colors need to make sure that they range between these values i basically gathered a whole ton of my pencils from my Faber-Castell Polychromos set i have the 120 set and i basically just got all of the colors that i thought could work for these swatches and you can see there's a lot here it's very overwhelming and for our drawing projects i like to actually just try and use the least amount of pencils i can to get the job done so that it's not super overwhelming especially if you're just starting out looking at these tones i can see that the light values have got more of a pinky purpley tinge to them but then as we go down here it's a bit more orangey and you can really see that coming through in this part of the flower the more orangey tones and then with these shadows it's more of a browny red and then for the greens we can see that the light green is quite muted and what i mean by that is it's not super vibrant it's quite a desaturated type of green and then we've got a very vibrant green here for our mid-tones and then some darker greens and even this darkest color looks almost black and then for the stem we've got more of a brown color we're going to start by picking the colors for these three here and i'm going to actually work on all of these in one go and the reason for that is because a lot of of the time when we are working between these different values we're going to actually use the same colors we're not going to use completely different colors for all of these so i've grouped together all of the pencils that i think could work for potentially these three colors and i'm just going to swatch them out see what i'm working with a lot of the time the colors look a bit different to the actual pencil so we're just going to do a quick swatch of them and i'm making sure to keep them in this order so that I know which is which and so they don't get all muddled up. And another colour that I'm adding on is like a very light grey because I thought that that could work potentially for this colour here for these that are a bit more muted. So when I swatched these I have used just a normal amount of pressure but we've got to remember that you can do light pressure so you can get lighter versions of each of these colours or you could apply lots of pressure and get dark versions of these colours. Now I'm not going to say the names because it doesn't matter what the names are I just want you to go into your set of colors and just pick out all of the colors that you believe out of your set can match this first of all I kind of like this color because that has got more of that purpley tinge to it so I'm just going to swatch that out a bit more I think this one could work really nice it's like a very purpley magenta color and I think if I pair that with this sort of cool gray it's very light cool gray then that can get us close enough to what we need for this color and remember we do not need it to be exact close is good enough what is more important is making sure that you're matching the values so I really like that for this for this color now for this one we've got to get a bit darker and a bit more pinky so that one could work also this one both of them could work but I think I'm going to go for this one because this has more potential to go a bit darker and I'm just going to carry it on from here and just kind of build up a gradient and remember I said that I want to work on these together because a lot of the time we're going to be mixing the colors we're going to be using the same colors for multiple areas so there we go and I'm happy that that gets me close enough to that tone now moving on to this orangey color so this is a bit darker and it is a bit more orangey any of these three could work really because there are some areas that are even more orange so I'm using this color it's called sanguine and once again I'm just continuing that gradient because we'll probably be layering it in with those other colors and you can see this has given us a really nice version for this color and if we want it to be a little less orangey we could just go back in with the other color we picked this is called coral and i'm just using this to go back over that orange and you can see it gives us a lovely color that matches this one so i've picked four colors here that work together really nice to create us this gradient from our light value all the way down to our more mid-tone orange and that means i can discard all of these so now we're we're going to move on to these bottom two. I'm starting by swatching out these darker reds and then moving on to the browns. Look at how similar these are. It doesn't really matter which one you pick. All of these can get your drawing looking realistic. It's not going to make or break your drawing if you pick this red over this one or if you use this brown over this brown because it's value that is more important. Have you got it the correct lightness and darkness? Out of these I believe that this red probably works better for this because it has more of that orangey tone and for the browns these two are probably the best they're going to get me a darker value i'm going to go with the Van Dyke brown and just test these two colors together see if they'll get me what i need for these last two colors so you can see that these match these swatches pretty close this is probably a bit more orangey but we can always take the other color that we've picked for up here and just add a bit of that orange in and you can see that makes it closer to that color already so here's the final colors for this side so you can see we haven't got a huge list of colors that we're using just using six pencils and so that's the same process that I'd then go through with the green and I've already done that process and I'll just kind of show you which colors I've decided on for this section and why so the first color I chose was this one here this is permanent green and because it really matches this middle color it's just a really nice vibrant green and because I wanted to try and use the least amount of pencils possible I also just swatched it really lightly with very little pressure to see how close it would get me to this one and you can see that it's fairly close but it's still a little bit too vibrant so then I tried to use this grey that we've picked for the flower and I just layered that over that green and you can see that it mutes that green down as well as keeping it nice and light and it gets us much closer to that colour. So if possible I like to overlap colours that I've used for different areas to just keep it easier. And then for these darker colours I picked the pine green. It's a very dark sort of bluish green so I just found the pencil in my set that matched it the closest. You can see it gets a really nice dark value and then because this is pretty much black all I'm going to do for that darker colour is just layer in some black but I'm always going to finish it off with a layer of the green the same pine green as I've used here just to make sure it looks like a dark green and not black and you can see we've created a really nice range of values that really closely matches those swatches and then for this brown tone down here well I'm going to make it easy and I'm just going to use the same brown that we used for the darker parts of the flower and so here you can see all of the colors we're going to use for this drawing I am also going to add a white in there because it's really good for blending out and lightening up some of the highlight areas. I always just love to add a white in for my drawings but you can see that these colours are going to help us achieve this beautiful range of hues and values for our drawing and picking your colours first and planning them out is really going to help you make sure that you are picking colours that help you achieve all ends of the value scale. Now that we've picked all of our colors we can actually dive into drawing this flower see how we haven't dived straight into the drawing we've actually done a lot of planning we've created swatches of our values and even done a little study of them and we've picked our colors by creating those swatches and really doing a process of elimination to pick the best colors for this drawing and just doing this little bit of planning it's just going to set you up for so much success when it comes to actually building up those layers blending and working on that final drawing because you're not going in blind you've basically created a plan you've tested your colors you know which ones are going to layer together really nicely to get the color and value that you need and you have an idea where those different values are how light and dark your shading should be so now we're ready to start the final drawing before i start adding color to my drawings the first thing i always do is take a kneaded eraser and i try to lighten up my graphite sketch as much as i can without actually stopping myself being able to see the sketch you still need to be able to see it but just try and erase as much of that graphite as possible so that your colors don't get muddy and so that those sketch lines don't show through your color pencil shading and then what i'm basically doing is i'm trying to establish the shadows within the the top part of the flower so i've got that darker red color before going in with one of those more lighter pinks which is a great sort of base color that i can use for the majority of the flower but i'm not going to put it in some of those really light areas because they are really light in value and this pencil is a bit too dark so i will leave a few bits quite white or just apply a very very light layer of shading to these areas and this is one technique you want to do quite a lot when you're using color pencil is vary your pressure on the pencil to create different values you can actually use one pencil for many different areas just by switching up how light or heavy your pressure is i also added a bit of that sort of pinky purpley tone before going in with this darker orangey color that we picked to add in those more orange saturated tones within the flower and I really like using small circular motions when I'm actually shading with my pencils it helps get the sort of pencil layered into more bits of the paper because your paper is going to have a bit of a tooth to it it's going to have texture sometimes it has a lot of texture sometimes your paper will be really smooth depending on what you pick but if you've got a very textured paper which I don't really recommend for this type of colour pencil drawing but the more texture you have the more you've really got to try to work that pencil into all of the nooks and crannies of the paper which is why I like to go for a paper that is a bit more on the smooth side it has got a little bit of texture to sort of grip onto all of these layers of colour pencils but for the most part it's pretty smooth and that's going to help you avoid that grainy look in your drawing and get smoother more rich colours. Another key part of getting really rich smooth vibrant looking colour pencil drawings is doing lots and lots of layers. You can see here that I am going over the same area multiple times with different pencils really building up those layers because every layer that you add you are basically blending it a little bit each time and it's getting smoother and it's filling in more of the white grain of the paper and the colors are fusing and meshing together more and more with each layer that you do and one trick that I love doing to really blend all your layers of color pencil together is I love going in with a really soft waxy color pencil I am using the white Luminance pencil by Caran d'Ache and this just really helps to smooth everything out and give you that really pro looking finish you don't get any graininess and everything just looks very smooth and polished and then I go over the top with my pencils at this point I make sure that they're really sharp because at this stage we are focusing on those final details I like to crispen up any edges that need to be quite sharp edges that are meant to be hard edges and I also just add any textures or details that I need to. For example, I might add little veins to each petal. And then I also tweak any colours that I need. Is there any areas that need to be a bit more purply toned? Any colours that need to be muted a bit more with a grey pencil? Stuff like that. So at this point, I'm checking to see if all of my values are accurate. Are there any areas that need to go a bit darker or is there any areas that are too dark and I need to lighten them up so I'm looking at the values you really want to make sure you're getting your darks as dark as they need to be and I'm also looking to see if there's any areas that I need to define a bit more like I said sort of sharpen up the edges and also any areas that need a bit of detail or texture and then I'm going in with an electric razor because I was feeling like I needed to add a few finer details to these petals some of the really small petals and I find that the electric eraser is a great tool for color pencil drawings as well you can use it for graphite drawings but you can use it for your color pencil drawings it's a great way to lift up the color pencil and you can even go back over the top with a white pencil to lighten those areas up further and then I'm just working on the shadow now and adding shadows especially when you are doing a subject or an object against white paper getting in these shadows really can help with that realistic illusion of a 3d object it just really transforms the drawing when you give it this shadow on the paper so for this shadow I did light layers of brown and I made sure to lighten my pressure towards the edge of the shadow to give that illusion that it's darker right by the flower and then it sort of blurs out and then i blend over it with a white pencil before just making it a little bit darker in certain areas and i even layered in some colors like green because i find quite a lot of the time that when you look at a shadow it's not just gray there's a few other colors in there like in the reference if you really look there's even like a more yellow tone as well and then I'm moving on to actually colouring in the stems and the leaves and I'm just using those very few basic colours that we picked and I'm starting out with that darker green and just once again establishing the shadows. I do this quite a lot with my coloured pencil drawings I find that it can be really useful to sort of get in some of those darker colours because it can be scary going dark especially if you're a beginner i always find that a really big struggle with my students that i have inside my color pencil course the color pencil academy is that if their drawings look a bit flat like they're not popping and they don't have much depth it's normally because they don't have in those darker values and their colors just they all are very light or very mid-tone they don't have those really dark intense dramatic colors and this can come a lot from fear of ruining your drawing scared of going in with those darker layers in case you ruin it and you can't go back you can't remove those darker colors and I completely get it it can be really scary but honestly if you practice maybe on some lower pressure drawings where you can just experiment and just practice going darker and you will see that it makes such a massive difference to the realism in your drawings your drawings will have so much more depth and they will really pop as you can see here adding these darker values to get it to match your reference is just gonna just take it to that next level it transforms it it really makes it stand out so I can't stress enough how key it is to keep focusing on your values and checking that they are accurate and that's why it's also really handy to have a black and white version of your reference on hand just to keep checking where your darkest values are and where your lighter values are because it's that contrast that sort of variety of lights and darks in your drawings that will make it pop and stand out and not look just flat or cartoony so one thing that i really want to make sure that i mention is that if i ever use black to darken up a color for example with those darker leaves i used a layer of black i never like to finish on a layer of black i always like to go over the top with the green to make sure that it looks like a dark green and not just black so i like to sandwich the black in between my other colours just to get it darker in value but you can also use a very dark brown or like a really dark navy blue as well to try and get it darker if you don't like using black but I found that as long as you add other colours over the top of it it doesn't make your drawing look flat or unrealistic or muddy in any way and so you can see that I'm finishing off this drawing by smoothing out some of those lighter tones with the white pencil and you can see how I really didn't use too many colors with this drawing but you really don't need to use a whole bunch of different colors for your drawings as long as you are covering the full range of values then your drawing can look realistic and once I add in this shadow it's really going to just pop and transform this drawing and I'm using the light gray for this i'm using that brown again and i'm even going to use a bit of black just to darken up the shadow in a couple of places but yeah you don't need a whole bunch of colors and you don't even need to get your colors a hundred percent accurate just focus on those values and also focus on defining any of the edges that need to be sharp but also leave certain edges more soft and blurry if that's what it needs to like for example if I did a really hard edge for this shadow then it wouldn't look like a shadow the whole key to giving it the illusion that it is a shadow is to make sure that it's very soft and blurry at the edges and so when you're doing your color pencil drawings it's it's really useful when you are sort of working on the edges to look at your reference and see does it need to be a very crisp line a very hard edge or is it something that's softer and more of a gradual change also one thing that I really wanted to show with this drawing is that you can create a really realistic looking drawing without using tons of different tools or different techniques I've kept it very simple with my techniques I've just used my pencils and paper and I did use an eraser but I haven't used all of the techniques that I usually use for my portrait or animal drawings I haven't used exacto knives or solvent and blending pencils and indenting tools I didn't use any of that because I wanted to show you that you can start off with a smaller set of pencils and your paper and still get really realistic looking results even though you can create really realistic drawings with just simple techniques like just using the pencils to blend and basically get by with minimal tools there are so many really great techniques you can use for colored pencils that actually will give you more realistic results and faster and i've also seen that creating really frame worthy colored pencil drawings is something anyone can do it's a skill set that you learn it's not a talent that you are born with and this skill set is exactly what i teach inside the colored pencil academy my course which basically teaches you everything you need to go from a beginner to a color pencil artist that's creating really realistic drawings that you are proud to put on your wall there's over 4 000 students in this course and it has got amazing reviews so i'll leave a link in the description if transforming your color pencil skills and going to that next level is something that you are interested in and i really built the lessons to build off of each other and start with the basics so that you're never feeling overwhelmed and you are building your skills naturally it's all about giving you that skill set to be able to create those color pencil drawings of your grandkids pets family you know that you want to hang on your wall or as presents to your loved ones so if creating realistic color pencil drawings is something that you really want to do then check out the link in the description where you can find all the details about the color pencil academy but thank you for watching this video i recommend checking out this one next it's about the color pencil exercise that changed my life if you are struggling with picking colors for your drawings then this is a must watch it's basically the ultimate color theory guide for color pencils check it out and i'll see you in the next one bye everybody