They are soft and submissive. Among its beautiful colors are vibrant blues, sunny yellows, rich greens, brilliant purples, and juicy oranges. They come in handsome tins, sporting nylon cases, and polished wooden crates. They smell good. Their enamel bodies fit well in your fingers and respond to paper with an arrangement that excites inspiration. These are good quality colored pencils, not your normal pencil in any way, shape or form. Grasping one, touching its tip to the paper is, well, a sensual and artful experience.

Do you like to draw? Do you doodle? Have you thought about taking art classes but didn’t want to spend a lot on materials? Colored pencils are the answer!

A WONDERFUL ART MEDIUM

Maybe you’ve spent some time drawing, not much: cartoons, Disney characters, doodles, etc. Maybe you’ve even gone as far as investing in a drawing pencil. If you did, you found that a drawing pencil is quite different from a regular pencil. His lead is smooth and creates deep blacks, solid mid-greys and ethereal light greys.

Maybe then you started thinking about color, wishing your drawing pencil was colorful too. Could be! There are good quality colored pencils on the market today that respond well to shading, layering multiple colors, blocking solid colors, and creating sinuous, expressive lines.

The added attraction of colored pencils, beyond their smooth, strongly pigmented leads and good response to paper, is their price. A can of twelve, good quality colored pencils, and a good quality 9″ x 12″ sketch pad will cost less than twenty dollars. And you’re well on your way to producing beautiful, brilliant, richly colored drawings that will retain their permanence and color integrity for decades.

ONE TWO THREE

Now you have sharpened your colored pencils and have your sketch pad. Whats Next? Start with a doodle. On a new sketchbook page, take a color (it doesn’t matter which) and draw swirls, lines, dots, dashes, whatever comes to mind. Cover the entire page of the sketchbook. Just take a minute to do it.

Now look closely at the doodle you’ve made. See what you can find. Trees? Birds? faces? Whatever you find, outline the image by going over the lines of the image making them darker. Okay! Now choose another color of colored pencil to complete the image(s). Now think of the surrounding area of ​​the doodle as a background or environment for your images.

You need to choose certain areas to fill with various colors. For example, if you found a shape that looks like a fish in your drawing, color the fish, then color the area around the fish with various colors. Keep in mind that you want to emphasize the image. How can you do this?

IMAGE’S POWER

To emphasize the doodle image, you can do several things. You can make the image very dark and then fill the surrounding area with light colors. Or you can make the image very light and fill the surrounding areas with dark colors. Or you can use contrasting colors, eg red image, blue background – look closely to see that the image stands out from the background. I recommend that you choose the option that is most fun for you!

SHADOW AND HIGHLIGHT

You’ve already done the scribbling and are starting to learn what your colored pencils can do. If you haven’t experimented with making certain areas solid colors or playing around shading multiple colors together, now’s your chance!

With any colored pencil (color of your choice) draw a circle on a new sketchbook page. You can use a compass or a small plate or other circular object as a template to make the circle. Now imagine that light falls on the page from the top right corner. You’ll want to start shading the circle with a dark color (blue, purple, brown, black) where there’s no light, that’s the left side of the circle. Start slowly, filling along the left line of the circle. Remember that as you are shading and moving towards the light source (upper right corner), your shading will be less. Why? Because your shading, in drawing terms, represents shadow and the white of the sketchbook page represents light.

Surprisingly! You can see it? The circle is turning into a lit sphere, just by shading. Isn’t it amazing how we can reproduce the illusion of light and shadow in a simple way by shading and highlighting a simple geometric shape?

EXTRA CREDIT

You’ve come this far and now you see how cool colored pencils are. You have harnessed your imagination through the scribbles and now you have produced the illusions of space and consequently time. How cool is that? Now go one step further. Where you have produced light by not coloring much, bring a light colored pencil color (yellow, orange or white). Now color in that area that you left in the shading. Miracles You’ll see the lighter color take over the role of light, taking the place where the white of your sketchbook page left off!

YOU ARE A BETTER PERSON

If you’ve made it this far, you’re a better person. Why? Because you have tuned in to your innate creative powers that nourish your entire body and mind. You have learned a new drawing skill and most importantly, you have beautiful colors to use to visualize any image or dream that comes to mind! The colored pencils are there, waiting for you in their beautiful little tin, nylon case or wooden box. All you need to do is put some of the day’s work aside, sit down, open your sketchbook to infinity on a clean white page, and dip your fingers into the rainbow of colored pencils. Magic!

Or maybe you want to put your sketchbook and colored pencils in your backpack with a bottle of water and a sandwich. Then go out into the world in search of the right scene or location to shoot with brilliant colors and artful, sensual lines.