Transcripts
1. Introduction: Hello and welcome to my new colored pencil series on Skill Share. My name's Imran, I'm a graphic designer, illustrator and artist, and I've been using color pencils, but many years now in illustration and artwork. This areas is aimed at beginners who want to dive in to this wonderful world of colored pencils, or anybody who used color pencils in the past, and they wanted to get back into the groove of color pencils. In this series, we will be looking at different types of color pencils that can be used for illustration purposes for sketching for creating abstract art, painting, or just coloring in whatever type of artwork you'd like to produce using color pencils, you will learn about pressure techniques, how to apply pressure to create variances of colored layers, creating beautiful, rich and smooth colors. You will learn about blending techniques, how to create dry blending, to create beautiful vibrant gradients and column exists, and you will also learn about how to add light and shadow to your artwork using colored pencils really give you piece of work a lot depth and contrast. You will also learn about tips and tricks on how to use colored pencils, especially looking at how to sharpen color pencils the right way to avoid breakages, and we will also be exploring different surfaces that work best for colored pencil. You will be provided with a pack of free worksheets that you can use alongside this class to really practice and develop your color pencil technique and skills. We will be starting this series with a popular brand of wax based colored pencil called prisoner color premier. These are very popular pencils that have a huge range of colors and a vibrant, and come in many different shapes and set, so grab yourself a drink at cake or a Biscuit. Sit back, relax and let's get started with this class.
2. What are Prismacolor Premier?: Let's go through some basics of what prismacolor premier pencils are. These are soft-core, wax based colored pencils which are good for layering, blending, and shading. They're aimed at beginners and professionals alike. They're artist quality pencils with smooth color laydown and they have high-quality pigments in them which produces very rich color saturation when laid down on a surface. The tins that they come in the sizes and the variations that they come in acquire vast and ranging. They start off size 12, then they go to 24, then it's 36, 48, 72, 132 and 150 sets. I have the 24 and the 72 sets with me right here. I've been using these for many years and I've seen the development over the years from a very high-quality pencil to a more artist pencil used for professionals. However, there are some pros and cons with these pencils as there are with every type of material in this world. What we'll do is we'll cover the pros and cons and the advantages in the next video. In this video, as the result quickly show you the range of colors that are available in these tins that I have. Prismacolor is a brand of pencil. They're based in the USA. They're only actually available directly in the USA and in Canada. They're produced in Mexico and distributed within USA and wider. In the UK over here, it's very difficult to get hold of these because they're not readily stocked in the UK in art stores. Our stores tend to stock more fiber castell, polychromos pencils and Dowen, because Dowen's a brand that's a UK based brand. With the prismacolor, it's very difficult to get your hands on particular pencils and they're not really available on a singles basis. You can only buy them intense in the UK. Really it's online vendors that supply these. I don't know of any in the UK, stores in the UK that actually stock these pencils anymore. I know they used to but they've stopped doing that for a while now. Just quickly to go through some of the main colors. I tend not to keep my pencils in the tens. That's purely because I have so many duplicates and doubles of them because you can't buy them in singles where I'm from anyway in the UK, which is in Manchester, I tend to just store them in my pastel box, which is a great storage system for colored pencil. I'll just bring this down. You can see, I've just got all my colors laid out in the ranges. Make greens and blues and warmer colors on the left here and these trays work really nice. Then there are pastel trays for pustules, we call it pastel old for they work very nice for actual colored pencils to keep them organized and set. What I'll do is I'll leave links in the worksheets for you to download. So do check that out of all the materials and storage and products that I'm going through in this class so that you can have a look at them, read, agreed upon them reviews, and purchase them if that's what you wanted to do. Generally speaking, prismacolors are very good. They were an absolute beauty to work with. I can't emphasize that anymore. But they do have their disadvantages. Like I said, we will be going through the advantages and disadvantages in the next video. But just generally speaking again, they are soft coal-based pencil. The quality is very good. You can use these to do layering, blending, and creating smooth color gradients and shading. We will go through all these techniques in the upcoming videos. I think what we'll do now is we will move on to the pros and cons.
3. The Pros and Cons: Welcome back. Let's go through the pros and cons of these prismacolor from your pencils. Now, let's quickly go through the pros. There are a lot of pros with these pencils. One of the main pros for these pencils are that they're an absolutely beautiful pencil to work with. They are classed as artist quality pencils. They are reasonably priced and they come with many different variations and ranges. They have a very high quality pigment in them, which produces rich color saturation. They're very good for layering, they're also good for blending both in dry form and in wet form. We will cover both these techniques, but will really be concentrating on the dry type of blending because that's one blending the I preferred to do over the wet. They work on many surfaces. You can use these on paper, cotton Canvas. You can even use them on wood because they are wax based. They have that very nice consistency. A lot of people say it's very buttery and I totally agree with that. They do have a very nice buttery feel to them, especially when you lay them down on paper. Again, with any type of material, the best way to determine whether it's something you going to like is to test it out and use it. I would recommend that, if this is a medium that you are interested in or you want to work with in the medium of colored pencils, then do get yourself maybe a small set. Again, that's another advantage that they come in small sets. I mean, the smallest set is size 12. I personally wouldn't recommend this size 12 but I think the color palette is limited in size 12. I personally have never used a size 12. Prismacolor, we started off on 24 in whichever material that I've got and the price differences in a very big, so you get a lot more in the 24 than you would do in the 12th. Working on any surface is very good for blending and layering down color, and they're available online. That means access to them is pretty easy, I mean, we're living in a technological age, unless you don't have Internet access, then you are unlikely to be able to find these depending on which part of the world you from. If you're from the USA, Canada, Mexico, then you is to be able to get hold of these. These should be available in all the stores because this predominantly a USA based pencil, and further pros, that's about it. Let's move on to the disadvantages of these pencils. Now, prismacolor have had the issues of the past and the main issue with these are that they break easily because the core itself is a soft core. They've had issues with the quality control. I'll show you this, demonstrate this on the video. I'll just grab hold of a couple of pencils then demonstrate this. We've got these pencils here and the main quality issue with these were that they were bonded very well and they went centrally aligned. What I mean by centrally aligned is coming out. For example, to show you a dot color, camera show this red. With the core of the actual pencil itself over here, you can see that the color core, so when I'm talking about the color core, it's the actual wax color material that you have inside the pencil casing. The casing is made of wood and the core is made up of the wax bonded with this material to give you that hard, soft color. You can see over here, the issue was with these pencils not being centrally aligned in the casing. You've got that small dot over there of the core and it wasn't centrally aligned, is like going towards one end. That was an indication that the pencil wasn't made very well. What will tend to happen is pencil would tend to crack every time you sharpen it. That was a huge issue with it and we will cover how to sharpen these pencils a correct way or the best way to get the best out in the following videos. The breakages of this soft cause was a big issue with these pencils. Personally, I haven't experienced too much breakages with them. I do get breakages and I can show you an example here. This pencil, I mean, even though that the core is not offset to anything, it is pretty much centrally aligned. It's just the quality of the core wasn't very well. Every time regardless of how I sharpen this pencil, it would just keep breaking. That means that, if you do get that pencil is pretty much a waste and you're not going to get that color again in the particular set that you have, unless you have a duplicate. That was a huge issue with these prison called the premier pencils. Then again, because the nature of these pencils are that they are soft core, they are going to be more prone to break depending on how much pressure you use on them. Artist quality pencil shouldn't really break when you sharpen them. That's why he pay a premium for them because of the materials and the process that they go through to get to you. That's a disappointing disadvantage, if you like, of these pencils that they do break easily. They're difficult to maintain a sharp point as well on this purely because created with wax, it's a soft material and you can get a sharp point once you've sharpened and correctly. Again, we will go through that in the following video, but I'll just show you over here, we've got some nicely sharpen bonds. Then basically this disadvantage in itself, it's not really a disadvantage is just because it's a problem with the material. You can get a very nice sharp point, but it doesn't last very long. That's because the wear down is very fast, because of the material that leads pencils are made of, in comparison to the faber castell, which are oil-based, they have harder lead inside them. Don't really lead, it's the column barrel that's inside. I'll refer to it as lead technically that's not correct, but it's what we know. The lead inside these, they do wear down very quick, so it's difficult to maintain that sharp points and quality issues with bonding and casing, again, that was with the issue of the centrally aligned casing with the actual bonded material that's on the inside. Generally, I think we've overcome that problem now. Their quality control is a lot better. It really affected people, maybe 5-6 years ago when this issue was becoming more and more apparent. Now, if you do purchase these, you're much more likely to get a decent set. Again, there is no guarantee that they're not going to break. That's just the nature of soft core pencils, and especially with the issue that prismacolor premier had, they will probably be breakages but you just have to be really careful with them. Another disadvantage is that in the UK, you can't get singles, but that's just a disadvantage for the UK's. You can't really say that it's a worldwide disadvantage because I don't know what the situation is in other parts of the world. USA, Canada, Mexico, they'll be available as singles, I think online. I'm not sure whether they're available online singles, but they are definitely available in the shops. Europe, UK, definitely not as far as I know, I mean, I've traveled in the UK to see every single or store, but they are generally available with where I'm from, and even by inquiring the main art supplies in the UK, they tend not to stop them. Online is the best bet for UK artists and professionals. Another disadvantage is that they are not very light fast. This is a massive disadvantage, especially if you're looking to sell your artwork. Now, light fast, this is basically the ability of a pencil or a material to withstand light over time and not fade away, ie, they don't fade. If you say that something is light fast, that means it won't fade, and if you say something isn't light fast, that means it will fade. These pencils are definitely not light fast at all. If you're looking to start practicing colored pencils with the aim of selling your artwork to collectors or buyers of art, then I wouldn't really recommend these. I would recommend these for maybe practicing gone or just getting used to call it pencils. However, the disadvantage is that each type of colored pencils, whether it be wax based, oil-based, charcoal based or even paster based on whatever type of colored pencil that you have, depending on the brand, it will feel and work differently. That's all going to go down to your personal preference and taste. The only way you're going to know whether you going wax on this is if you try it. You might be somebody who really loves the feel of prismacolors pencils, but you don't like faber castell, or you might be like myself who actually like all pencil that I just like all our supplies both for me personally, these pencils are absolutely brilliant because of the smooth, buttery texture and color lay down that they have. I don't produce my artwork with prismacolors to sell. I produce my artwork to and designed for children's book illustrations. I intended to go in digitally. That's why I use prismacolors pencils. For my artwork that I produce the cell. I use more light fast pencils such as the faber castell and the current national imminence. We will come on to these pencils in the next set of classes on this series. I think that's a quick little roundup of the pros and cons. Let's move on to the sharpening techniques of these pencils.
4. Sharpening Techniques: Let's talk about sharpening your Prismacolor premier pencils. Now, sharpening is very important because with the nature of colored pencils is that you're going to be using them again and again even if you're producing one piece of artwork, you can have to continually sharpen them. Now, as we mentioned, Prismacolor, has soft core based pencils which means that they will grind down and wear out a lot quickly compared to hardcore pencils like Faber-Castell, or just generally hard core pencils and per se such as graphite pencils or carbon pencils. It's vital that you have the right sharpener and the right technique to sharpen these, especially because these are more susceptible to breakages. My experience of sharpness over the years is that I always prefer to use long based sharpness, so this sharpener that I've got here it's called a long point sharpener, and what this does is this produces a long point on the pencil so that the actual the color core is slightly more extended than the actual standard sharpener that you have, which is a sharpener like this, or maybe a couple of sharpeners like this. I'll demonstrate each of these and show you how to actually hold your pencil when you're sharpening and because your holding technique is important as well, even when you're using a sharpener like this. Let's start off with the basic pencil sharpener. I've got a Staedtler pencil sharpener here. I use this for all for my graphite pencils and even my carbon pencils. Let's just do a quick little demonstration of this one. Again, I've got a Prismacolor pencil, a green one here. The best thing to do is actually show you the actual way that this gets sharpened. Staedtler is very solid brand, they produce decent sharpeners and very good pencils and basically it's just as you would normally sharpen a pencil, insert a pencil in, but don't insert it with too much pressure. I don't know if this can be seen on the camera or not, but you have this area over here where you can see where the actual color-code of the pencil is, so it ends where the gap is between the blade and the actual holder and that's how it generally works when you sharpen. You can see the actual color material, the wax being shaved off as I'm slowly turning this pencil. Now, there's an easy way of sharpening pencils where you literally turn the pencil and turn the sharpener at the same time like this so you've got the pencil and the sharpener turning, and that will maintain a decent cut all the way round. But with this actual particular pencil that I've got here, this green one, we can say that it didn't require too much sharpening because it wasn't all the way down. But you can see that just with a few turns because this is a soft core pencil, you've got a very nice points over there. You got really nice points at the end of that, just using few turns. This sharpener is very good for this. Again, it's just a basic sharper, and it's nothing special. We can get these from most of shops. Again, I'll leave all the links in the worksheet that I leave so do check that out if there's something that you want to have a look at. I've got another color here. I've got this blue color. I'll demonstrate this one that I have here. This is by Helix Oxford. A very good sharpener, there's standard box, standard sharpener, its got the two blades, the two positions you get the big white one and you get the narrow one. Here's a point. Never use these wide sharpeners with these massive, huge, white circle with the Prismacolors, because when you're placing this end, you've got this gap. If you start sharpening with a gap that's moving around, then literally your pencil is going to break. It's just the Physics. It's just not going to work. That big opening is for hard core pencils. A pencil with a harder core, such as a hard H graphite pencil or a carbon pencil. That's why it will work. Don't ever put your Prismacolor pencils in one of these wide circles sharpeners. Go for the tight small fits. If we do exactly the same, you can see that the actual color is just underneath where the gap and the blade end. Again, just turn the sharpener and the pencil at the same time in opposite directions and what you'll see is, you'll see this smooth shaving of your pencil being produced and it just works really nicely so there we have it. You can see with this sharpener has produced a very sharp point. My hands are all getting covered in wax. Let's see if you can see this on the camera. Now, that's a very sharp point, which is exactly what you'd want. I think that's absolutely beautiful. Now remember, when you do have a super sharp point like this, using these Prismacolor pencils, it's not going to really last so when you do tend to lean down on your surface and put a little bit of pressure on that sharp point is going to snap. You're not going to maintain that sharp point purely because it's a soft material, it will break. It's ideal to maybe not sharpen it all the way there. It's probably a good idea to sharpen it to a point such as this where you just have that slight chisel tip at the end because that will maintain the actual structure of that point and it won't break when you apply that pressure. However, with this super sharp on over here, this will break and you don't want it to break too far back that you lose your wax material. It's just a standard technique to save on your actual materials. We have two demonstrations done there with both the sharpeners, and I'm leaving a mess on the table because I'm leaving these open but that's only to demonstrate for you guys to see how the sharpeners work. We have a small little sharpener here. This is just a basic sharpener. You can even use these basic sharpeners. This is no problem as long as the blade is sharp enough to maintain the actual movement of your pencil. Again, I've got slightly bland tip over here. All we need to do is put it in and slowly turn. Now, you can see that I'm not turning in short circles. I'm turning in that full motions like this. The advantage of turning in full motions is that you maintain that smooth, continuous cut on your pencil shaving when you're producing your sharpen. You can see here, a really nice point produced. It's not as sharp as the other ones because this is more of the basic pencil sharpener. Actually, this one I think came free with my blenders. It did come with the artist quality blender so it is produced for artists quality pencil and you can see very slowly, not putting too much pressure on at all. You need to make sure that you grip hold of the sharpener firmly, but not the pencil. The pencil should slowly guide on that blade and produce that lovely color shaving and there we have it. We've got a really nice sharp point again on this pencil and that's just about right that point, it's not too sharp and it's not to chiseled. This is the technique that you want. Now finally, I'm going to demonstrate the actual long-point sharpener over here and how to use this. Now, what I'll do is, I'll just move all these shavings aside so that the camera doesn't lose it's focus. Sharpeners and pencils, and we can just work on the actual long point sharpener. So this is a sharpener that I absolutely recommend for any pencil, pencils or colored pencils that you have, purely because it produces a huge long point. That is what you really after, when you're doing coloring, which we'll come on to in the next videos. So I'll explain the mechanism of this now. This is a sharpener that's produced by a company called KUM, K-U-M. I'll absolutely leave a link in the worksheets for this one because you can't really get these in all shops. I get this online. There are some other stores that store this in the UK, but not all. Now it comes with some extra blades that you can see over here in this little section, which is great, and it comes with that double-barrel. Now this double-barrel is not the same as the double barrel that was on the Oxford Helix sharpener. So it's not like a wide and a small, with this one, it's a small and it's a long. So that's how you sharpen your long point, and that's how you produce your long point, and I'll demonstrate this. So let's grab hold of a pencil that requires sharpening. So I've got, yeah this, this will work nicely. So you can see with this pencil over here. With this pencil we can see that tip is completely blunt and it's a short shaving of a pencil, so it's not a long shaving. Now you'll see how we can produce that long point with a sharpness. So the one on the left over here, you can see that these are numbered. So you can see that on the camera, number 1 and number 2. So that's the order that you need to sharpen these in. You can see that there's a huge gap at the end of where the blade is and towards the end of at this metal part, and that's how you get your actual long point when you sharpening, extends all the way to that part. So it tells you to stop as well, so it will basically tell you to stop sharpening when your wax color hits this area down there, otherwise it will break. So just like before, place the pencil in, really lightly all the way as far as it'll go, hold it at an angle. What you don't want to do is, there is a slight bit of movement, so you don't want to just hold it at this angle or that angle, the best angle to hold it in, is rest it at the bottom part of the barrel. You rest at the bottom part, not putting too much pressure in, hold the sharpener firmly with your left-hand or right-hand, whichever hand you want to use. Slow return in long circle motions, and you can see that what this is doing, it started shaving the actual wood casing. So the wood casing is coming off first now. So this is what this first barrel of the sharpen does. It starts shaving the wood casing. The angle of the blade is done in such a way that the wood shaving is what gets clicked first and this is the mechanism of it. So number 1, what you're doing is you're getting rid of the wood shaving as far down the pencil as it'll go. Once you continue doing this for a while, it will start exposing some of that core material on the inside, the colored material. As you can see I'll just knock that down. The material is getting exposed and you can see that the actual wood casing now is going further down, before we had it only up to here. That's what's going to happen with this sharpener. It's going to literally make that wood casing shaving curvature though all the way down as far as it'll go, so that we can create a sharp with a long point. So just like this and then carry on. What I'm doing now is I'm moving the sharpener and the pencil in opposite directions. So to maintain a nice soft balance on the actual coat, you can see it produced a very nice smooth cut all the way across that pencil. So that's all I'm going to be doing is continually doing this as far as that core will go. So you can see now, I'll show you on the actual camera that core has extended. If you can see this, the actual core itself has extended that point. So I'll just point to it with this pencil. That core is gone beyond that point of the blade and that's what the sharpener intends to do. So if we carry on, it's going to look really silly, when I take this out. When you see this really bumpy, ugly core, it's being stuck and you thinking, what is this all about? This just wasted my pencil, but I assure you it hasn't. So slowly, the key to doing this is you got to do this really slowly. Don't rush this and don't do it fast and harsh with too much pressure, otherwise you will break your pencil. So just like that you can see it's now more of the color is coming off and we'll just remove this. I can say that you've got this funny blobby point at the end of the sharpened pencil, which is the core. So we've got a nice long sharpen, which has made this into a nice long tip. What you can do, is you can carry on with this, but I tend to stop maybe halfway before it hits that barrier, that's down there at the end of the actual metal part. So you can see that the pencil has reached pretty much halfway, it's extended halfway of that distance. I can see that extension of the actual wax core. Now we're ready to move to the second barrel of this sharpener. What this second barrier is going to do is, it's going to start making this thick, ugly, fat point into very smooth sharp point. So very gently put this into the second hole. Cause if you whack this in too hard, then it's going to snap. So gently place that in and you can see that it's not going beyond that point in the second barrel. So just like that, light pressure, slowly to the pencil and you can see now all it's taken off is the color wax, the actual color material. So we just slowly turning this in half circles, and there we have it. You've got an absolutely beautiful, fine, sharp point at the end of the pencil, and that's exactly what you want. You don't want to go too sharp and then we can't carry on with this to really sharpen up that point. But like I said before, a point that's too sharp will tend to break when you apply the pressure on, so I would say that this point right here is absolutely perfect, for what we're trying to achieve. So that said then folks for the sharpening techniques. Generally speaking, even if you can be as careful as you like, you will get some breakages in your sets of prisma colors. I mean, you'll be lucky not to get any. It doesn't mean that you are absolutely going to get breakages, when you sharpen them, but you will get them. So don't be too disappointed, if you do get a breakage. You can easily fix them by going back in to the actual pencil and just using these techniques, or using one of these long extended sharpeners. Now, you can have a pencil that's going to be problematic all the way through depending on how the core has being bonded or whether mid way it's not been bonded very well with the actual casing. That's the experience that I'm having with this pencil here. So this, the color here is, it's light peach. This doesn't mean that all the light peach pencils are going to be bad. It's probably just this one pencil and have sharpened this many times, I've got no use out of it at all. So what I'll do is I'll demonstrate this here. It just constantly breaks, so I'll just quickly do a long sharpen on this and see if that works, you never know why I'm recording this video. It might prove me wrong and actually work. But I can tell already that the color is not going to work on this, because it's pretty much cracked. Again, it's unfortunate because, they're not cheap pencils by no means, you can buy really, cheap pencils and if they crack, then you're not really that bothered. But when you spend, a significant amount of money on something, you really want it to last and get the most out of it. So you can see right now, I've got this here and I think if, yeah, there we go. I've just literally hardly just touched that and it's just popped out. That's a sign of a bad pencil and you're really not going to get any use out of it. If you do have a pencil like this, instead of struggling with it, I just leave it. Or what you can do is you can actually go to the back of the pencil and maybe sharpen the back. So it depends where the breakage of that pencil is. If you go to the back and start sharpening something fresh, so use like a thin sharpener. So you don't want a long bay sharpener for this, if you use maybe this one here. Let's go for the Oxford sharpener, so if we start sharpening at the back, we most likely going to get some usage out of it. So I would say if you're sharpening something and more than on the third occasion, the lead is broken and snapped out, it's more likely that the lead is going to continually snap. So it'll be a good idea to try saving some of that pencil and getting some use out of it, to maybe sharpen the other end. Now it looks ugly having both sides of the pencil sharpened but you really do want to maximize the pencil and get some use out of it. So what we'll do is, I'm just testing this out right now on the camera. I don't know how this is going to turn out, so we'll have a look. So you can see over here, no, see it literally just come out. So it's just about pencil, I'm not going to get any use out of it. There's no point trying to put that core back in and then try to use it because you just going to get frustrated with it. So that's actually a good demonstration of a bad pencil, which is not good in itself, but that's a highlight for you that the pencils are susceptible to breakages and you can get bad pencils. So I think that's all for now on the sharpening of prisma colored pencils and I think we will move on to surfaces and what paper to use.
5. Types of Paper: Welcome back. Let's have a look at surfaces and paper. Now, colored pencils can be used on a variety of different surfaces, paper, board, even on wood you can use colored pencils depending on the smoothness of it. That's really the main point. It's whether you have enough tooth on the surface that you're using the colored pencil on, will determine how well the colored pencil actually attaches to that surface. When I talk about tooth, or generally when people talk about the tooth of the paper, this is the bumps and hills and valleys as people like to refer to them as, that make the texture of the actual paper itself. That is what will determine how much of the pencil will attach to that surface. I can't say that there's a particular paper that's going to work the best for Prismacolor pencils or just generally for colored pencils. Because there's just so much variety and it all comes down to your own personal preference and tastes. You're going to hear me say this quite a lot because ultimately, art is all about expression. Nobody can really say to you that, that's the wrong material to use to get that effect, or that effect doesn't look good. It's really down to your own personal preference and choice. What you can do is you can have a look at the advantages and disadvantages of using certain materials with other materials to get that desired effect that you're after. Now, the ones that I've got here on the table right now, these variants of watercolor paper, normal drawing paper, we've even got Pastel paper here as well. The best way I can demonstrate this series is by actually doing a swatch of color using the Prismacolors on each of these papers. Now, bear in mind, these are not only the papers that I use, I use many more other types of papers, but just to keep it concise and at this beginner level, I've decided to just go with this set of six different papers that I have. Just briefly, the first type of paper, which is this one here, the Langton and the Bockingford and the Reeves paper, these are mainly watercolor papers. Now, watercolor papers work very well with colored pencils because they come in a very nice grain, they come in varying grains, so it gives a good tooth to the paper. But these in themselves, there are many different versions of them, so they are usually divided into two. They are divided into cold pressed paper and they've divided into hot pressed paper. There's also a third which is called a rough paper. Mainly the difference is with the cold pressed is generally a nice thick, heavy texture to the paper whereas with the hot pressed paper, you get a very smooth surface. You do get some texture on it, but you get a very smooth surface which is great work in details. These are the main three types of paper that we can divide the surfaces into categories from a paper perspective. If you want to work on other surfaces such as cotton canvas, or board, or even on wood surfaces, then that really comes into a different category of surface. I'm going to concentrate really on paper purely because this is a beginners' class. What I'm going to do is I'm going to get a little strip of paper from each of these six pads that I have and let's do a quick swatch. Now, what we've got is we've got seven different strips of the different surfaces that I'd like to demonstrate on this class. Now, if you look at this from the left-hand side, I have four of the watercolor papers, so we've got the hot pressed, cold pressed, extra smooth and just a standard watercolor paper here. I'll go through these in much more detail when we will have a look at them a bit more closely. On the right-hand side then, we've got normal cartridge paper. We've got Strathmore smooth Bristol board paper, which is a very good brand of paper. Then we've got a Pastel paper here as well. This is traditionally used for pastels, but you can also use colored pencils on them. I'll demonstrate a couple of colors on each of these, so you can really get to feel for them or you can really observe how these papers work. If we concentrate on the watercolor papers, so the first one that I've got here is the Bockingford Hot Pressed mold made watercolor paper. Now, this is an absolutely beautiful paper. If I bring this up closer to the camera, you'll be able to see that the grain on this is very, very smooth. It's got a really fine grain to it and it works very well with colored pencils. Not only with Prismacolors, but it works very well with other types of colored pencils. Again, we're going to be reviewing quite a lot of different types over the course of this series. I'll probably be using a lot of these papers again in the other classes to demonstrate this. If we just bring this a little bit closer to the camera, I want to really give you that vision of the grain on this. You can see it's a very, very nice, smooth grain and it works very well. I mean, these are traditionally watercolor papers, but as I said before, they can be used with colored pencils, graphite work, any type of material will work. It doesn't mean if something's designed for watercolor you can't use it on anything else. Ultimately, everything can be used interchangeably. That's the style of mixed media absolutely. Secondly, let's have a look at the cold pressed paper again by the company called Bockingford. Now, Bockingford are a UK based company that produce mold made papers. These come in pads, they come in large sheets. I purchase these both in the small pads and I also purchase these in the large single sheets, which are a lot more economical. I wouldn't say they're very expensive paper in comparison to some of the others but it's a mid-range paper I would say. But nevertheless it has very, very good texture. The quality is exceptional. I've been using this brand for quite a while now for many years. A lot of the artwork that I produce is on the hot pressed paper of Bockingford. If we just bring this closer, you can see that there's a lot more texture to this compared to the hot pressed one. This just you've got all these lovely little bumps and hills and valleys that you can really lay down the color on. You got to remember with cold pressed paper, you're going to have a lot of white gaps in between when you're coloring in. I'll demonstrate this when we put the color onto the paper. Now, a lot of people don't like that. Personally, I don't mind it depending on the type of drawing or painting that I'm trying to produce. But it's a lot harder to fill in the gaps on a thicker paper like this compared to a smooth hot pressed paper like this one. You can see right next to each other it's a stuck contrast, isn't there? That's another thing to bear in mind. The type of look and feel that you are going for. Moving on, this is an extra smooth paper by Langton Daler Rowney, and this is a lot more expensive compared to the Walking Foot. But nevertheless, this is a very good paper. The artwork that I produce to sell is done on this paper. I've used Caren Dache luminance pencils on this, Faber-Castell to sell the original artwork. It's acid free. It's got a very, very smooth texture to it, just like the Bockingford did. It works very well in my opinion. I'll just see if I can bring the zoom into this so that you can see the actual grain of it. It's got a super smooth grain to it. It really, really holds the wax of the pencil or the oil of the pencil depending on the pencil that you're using, very well indeed. This is a paper that I would recommend, especially when you get well versed with colored pencils. I wouldn't go and buy one of these straight away because they are quite [inaudible] , and you can't get them in single sheets like you can with the Bockingford paper. If we just compare the three of them, you've got the smoothness of the surface compared to the roughness of the cold press. You can see that they will produce different results. These three papers that I would recommend you give a go, I mean, if you've got local art stores that, they might not have the same brands like this, you might have all the brands, but just have a play around with the papers, most art stores allow you to draw on sample papers swatches. Ask in the store that whether you can have a go with hot press paper, cold press paper, and maybe an extra smooth paper if they have the in store. I mean, that would be a great way to really get a feel for the type of paper that you would prefer. If you move on to the final watercolor paper, this is a cheaper paper by a company called Reeves. This is just a mid paper, so, it's not smooth, and it's not cold pressed, and it's not a rough pressed paper either, it's just like a standard smooth paper. This works very well as well with colored pencil. Personally, I don't really use this for my colored pencil work, but I tend to use this as a swatch paper or a scrap paper. But again, you've got this option as well. It really is important that you use the right paper that will give you effective coverage and ability to use these pencils because if you're using a cheap paper, such as printer paper or really a paper for a £1, it's really not going to do justice to these pencils because you're going to waste all your pencil on them and you're not going to get the desired effects, and you might think that the pencil no good, but actually it's the paper that's no good. So it is important that you get the right type of paper. Let's move on from the watercolor papers to the more cartridge and sketching papers. Over here, I've got the Daler Rowney smooth, super fine, heavyweight paper. This is a great paper to use for carbon pencil from graphite pencil, and even for colored pencil. Personally, I use this for just doing practice work on because of the smoothness of the paper. I don't use this for final artwork but, again, I use this more as a scratch paper, but nevertheless, it's quite readily available, especially online, and in the UK, it's in pretty much every art store, so, it's a good paper to use this one. It's a 220 GSM, so, it's fairly thick, and it's referred to as cartridge paper. Cartridge paper works very well. If you can see that it's got a very smooth surface but it's just slightly thinner than the watercolor variants. That's the cartridge paper, done. This one, this next one, this is one of my favorite papers. This is a paper that I do my final artwork on as well, and this is not watercolor, this is a Bristol Smooth paper by a company called Strathmore. Now, Strathmore do a range of papers. They do Strathmore 300 series, which is this one here, they do 400 and a 500 series I think, and I think they also did a 700 board. I'll bring this close to the camera to see if you can see the grain on this, because this has an absolutely beautiful texture to it. You can see on the focus, you can see that there's a really, really nice smooth texture to this, and I've done quite a lot of artwork on this to produce for final artwork and to sell, and even the ones that go into my children's book series or my graphic novels, I tend to do on this paper because it allows for color mixing very, very well. It is a little bit expensive on the expensive side, especially when you go up to the 400 series, the Vellum series, which is again a very good but I tend to use that more for my Caren Dache, an oil based Faber Castell pencils. Again, it's a very, very nice paper. So this is one that I would recommend that you give a go, especially if you can have a trial of it in one of your art shops close by. I'll just loose the focus on there and get the focus back. Then finally, I've got Pastel Paper. Now, Pastel Paper comes in different grades, sizes, and styles. This one is a very thin one. This is only £75. It's a 160 GSM. This paper, I don't use this paper to produce final artwork. I use this paper, if I'm in the mood of just coming up with a sketch, or deciding that I just want to have a quick little sketch here, or go with pencils, I'll use this. It's a very good paper to use. But again, when I demonstrate this, you'll be able to see the results of it. Pastel Paper generally is very expensive compared to normal cartridge papers. So do bear that in mind. I'll skip it again and give it a go in your local art store and see whether you have a feel of it. It definitely works for colored pencils and absolutely [inaudible] again, it's going to be down to your personal preference. Let's get the zoom back on. There we have it. We've got our seven types of paper. What I'm going to do now is, I'm going to get a couple of colors and just do quick little swatches, and then I'll bring them closer to the camera to show you what that surface looks like. Let's make a start on that. Okay. Now we have swatches on each one of these strips of paper that we talked about earlier on. You can see by just having a glance at this, that the results are very different for each of them. Now, again, as I mentioned before, this all depends on the type of preference you have or the type of result that you want to achieve. For me, I personally like the results of all of it. Depending on the type of project that I do or the next piece of artwork that I'll do, I'll decide which one of these papers I'm going to use purely on my preference. If we have a look from left again, we've got the watercolor papers, the four watercolor papers here, you can see, I'll bring this closer up to the camera. On the left-hand side here, we've got the hot pressed paper. You can see you've got a very nice, smooth lay-down of color. It looks really nice and smooth. It's really easy to apply. On the next video that I'll be demonstrating on, I'll probably be using the hot pressed paper to demonstrate a lot of these pencils. I'll also use the extra smooth Langton paper, because I personally really like the texture that you get. It's like a mid texture. You've got the hot pressed paper here on the left; which is very smooth. On the cold press, like I said before, you're going to get a lot of them wide grains; especially when you just lay down one layer of color, and you've to fill out those wide grains it can be quite laborious task, but I personally really liked this texture that's created. It all depends on the color that you use. If you see the darker colors, will produce more of that wide contrast in the bumps that you get on the paper, whereas the lighter colors you get a lot less. Over here we have the extra smooth paper, which is a mid-range. You've got slight texture on it compared to the smooth hot pressed papers. If we have a look here, if you look at it on a scale of smooth all the way to very textured, you can see that it's really is very different. The results will vary from smooth all the way to like a rough blotchy look, and it represents how a crayon would be on paper. You can create a lot of variances with these different textures using watercolor paper. If you look at the reefs, you can see this is a cheaper paper, and personally, I don't really like this look compared to the cold pressed paper. I prefer that look on the cold pressed. I think you get a lot more lay-down of color compared to the reefs. I just feel it's a bit faded the actual effect on this paper. If this is a paper, it's not bad, but personally it's not one that I like to use. These were the watercolor papers. If we just have a quick look at the results that we got from the other papers, from the cartridge paper, the Strathmore, and the pastel paper. We will move these out of the way. You've got a range of different results. With the Strathmore, you've got a very smooth look which was similar to the hot pressed. You can see over here you got the hot pressed right next to the Strathmore. It's very similar in terms of the results. I always prefer the Strathmore over the hot pressed Bockingford because, with the Strathmore, there's a little bit more texture underneath that you can produce. With the Bockingford, it really is pure smooth. If I'm trying to work on something where I require slightly more texture, I'll go for the Strathmore paper, the Bristol board. If I want something that's totally smooth, then I'll choose the hot pressed Bockingford. Let's have a look at the Daler Rowney cartridge paper. You can see that produces a nicer results as well, so it's a mixed result that it's not smooth and it's not too blotchy. It's like a mid-range compared to the hot and cold pressed papers. If we look at the pastel paper here, we've got that very textured look like we got with a cold pressed paper. But you can see with the pastel paper, it takes a lot of the pigment on, and I absolutely loved that. If we just look at the cold pressed paper here and compare, you can see that when I was applying the actual color. I'll just show you here. When I was actually applying the color, I'm using exactly the same pressure on both, and you can see that the pastel paper is taking that color a lot more. It's taking the vibrancy of the actual wax inside that pencil immediately. Whereas with the Bockingford, I've got to press a lot harder to get that color, and it doesn't seem to be as vibrant. That's the advantage of using pastel papers. They really will bring the vibrancy of your color. If you are after a really vibrant type of look, then pastel paper is probably a good option for you. But do remember that you're going to get a lot of these white bumps, so in order to cover these wide ponds, you going to have to go in with a lot more layers and press a lot harder and burnish. We'll come on to all these techniques in the coming videos. That's pretty much it for the papers. The swatches that we had, you can see that they all produce a nice range of color. Generally, when you starting off in any type of art material, it's a good idea to test something out before you commit to it. We'll just take the camera back and we'll have a quick little overview on what we just learned. A quick little overview of what we've gone through in this video. It all depends on the type of look that you are after, which will determine what paper you should use. Looking at this variance in the color swatches from above, you can see with the watercolor, you get quite vast contrast depending on whether you're using hot pressed, cold pressed, or whether you're using extra smooth or just a standard cheap paper. If that's the type of look that you are after, then I would recommend you get the Bockingford colored papers, maybe the cold pressed and the hard pressed just to get a bit of practice. When you've decided which one you want, or you've got enough practice out of it, maybe you want the Langton extra smooth, but do bear in mind that this one is a lot more expensive compared to the Bockingford in the cold pressed and hot pressed ranged. I would avoid using the Reeves purely because, I just don't like the lay down of color on that particular paper. But if that's the only paper that you've got, I guess it's good to keep that as a scratch paper just doodle about with or just get a bit of practicing. I wouldn't waste your colors on this particular paper. What I'll do is, I'll just move this down and the ones that I'd recommend, I'm going to keep them up on the screen. Coming on to the other papers here, the Daler Rowney smooth surface cartridge paper, that produces a very nice results as well. This is a lot more smoother compared to the watercolor papers. You do get a bit of texture on it, and then we've got the Strathmore. Now this is a paper that I highly recommend. The Daler Rowney , I wouldn't recommend this as your first choice, if you're after a really smooth result. I would go for the Strathmore, or go for the Bockingford hot pressed. But with the Strathmore, that's more expensive grade of paper, and if you're really after that smooth or mid texture effect, then I would highly recommend this one. Then finally, if you're after a rough effect like we got with the cold pressed paper, and you've got a lot of texture in it, then I would recommend pastel paper. I think pastel paper is great for this. But again, it's quite an expensive option depending on the brand that you go for. This one over here, I would say that the pastel paper and the watercolor, the Langton paper, these are similar price range and the Strathmore. In terms of price range, if you put the most expensive on top, and then we bring the cheapest further down, do give them a go in the shops, in the art stores if you can, and If not, I would recommend as a starter maybe get a couple of papers to just practice on some different papers. Hot pressed and cold pressed maybe in the Bockingford range, or a cheaper range, and avoid using printer paper or the pawn shop papers, because you are going to be wasting your colors. I hope this has given you a decent overview of a starter level information on what surfaces to use, and you can see what type of results they will achieve. Next, we'll move onto, how to hold your pencil and the different techniques of holding your pencils to achieve the results that you want.
6. Holding Positions: Let's talk about some holding positions of your prismacolor pencils, and this will apply to any type of colored pencil or really any pencil, so it's generic for all types of pencils. The reason I'm going through this is because I think it's very important that you hold your pencil in a good enough position to get the desired result that you're after, and that is to really maintain the pencil that you have and to avoid breakages. There's three main types of holding positions that I personally use. What we'll do is we'll start with holding position number 1, which is the writing style. Now, this is usually the natural way that most people will hold any type of writing or drawing instrument, it's the way you write. It's just holding it like this in between your two fingers and your thumb and just resting your part side of your hand onto the piece of paper, and then just basically just writing in that writing style. So just like this, this is one of the most common ways of holding a pencil it's a good way to all the pencil, there's no issues with it. However, when you're coloring in, what you want to ensure is that you don't hold it too close to the tip over here because what will happen is while your doing your strokes, you'll see that it's very difficult to maintain a consistent line, and what you'll get is you'll get a lot of these blotchiness and harsh lines coming into your color. What my recommendation is that you hold in this writing position you hold the pencil slightly higher. I would say maybe a couple of finger distances and higher from the end of the sharpen part. What you find that this is that when you actually start layering the color down, you'll be able to maintain a more consistent and looks if we have looked at their box over here. So holding it further back, you can maintain a lot more consistency in your strokes and you'll get a lot less of those harsh lines. We're going to you blending and harsh lines and how to save blend properly in the next videos that are coming upon this class. That's the writing style. So avoid holding it too close to the tip and hold it a bit further down and that would really help in your color creation. Looking at the second method, now this is the vertical method. Now, that basically means you're going to hold your pencil completely vertically and you little you are going to coloring like this. Now this is good for going in really minute small details. However, this method is something that I do use depending on what parts of the painting or drawing I'm coloring in or drawing out. But I would avoid using this too much. Just use this maybe when you've got really tight pocket of detail that you just need blank coloring in. It's not going to be good for branding method because you're going to and really hard from the get-go. It's that vertical point, and with the vertical point you're going to have to hold the pencil writes at the end over here. If you hold the pencil midway, then you're going to end up paying a lot of pressure on it. That could wobble your hand and you could end up breaking the tip. If you're going to do the vertical position, use it only on certain areas where you just need dark maybe flat color and you don't require too much branding, and it will work quite nicely for those details. The final way of holding the pencil, the way I do it is the sideways at hold. So with sideways hold it's like typically holding it like a paint brush, you're holding it like this. I'll show you the underneath of the hand states like that. It's very close to the actual papers if you can see over here, there's not much of a gap in the distance between my thumb, the pencil, and the paper. It's really maintaining the side hold, and just with slow motions, really gently layering down that color. You can see you get a complete different effect with this. I use this quite a lot, especially when I'm trying to have a lot of coverage on the drawing them trying to do. You've got that and you can see I'm holding the position of the actual pencil is quite further up. It's not too close, but you can't get closer at this. If you want to go in a little bit harder with a bit more detail, you can see I'm using the circular motions to create a texture. It works really well. I mean, I use a combination of all of these three methods, I used the writing style, the vertical style, and the paintbrush style, the shading from the side, and I think whatever you're comfortable with will work with you. But you just got to be careful that you don't put too much pressure on the pencil itself because that will ultimately break the led, the color led on the actual pencil itself. These were the main three techniques, and I wanted to just quickly go through, and I think what we'll do now is we will move on to some other pressure techniques that are involved in coloring pencils.
7. Pressure Techniques: Welcome back. Let's talk now about different pressure techniques. Now we can divide pressure techniques into three main areas. We can talk about light pressure, which is very faint pressure that you use to apply your color. Then we've got the next level, which is the medium pressure. That's a little bit more than the light pressure. Then finally, we've got heavy pressure and we refer to the heavy pressure as burnishing. What burnishing is is really going in very hard from the get-go and flattening out that texture of the paper, that tooth of the paper, and going in very hard. So we're going to demonstrate all three of these textures and these techniques and come up with the advantages and disadvantages of each, so let's get started with this one. Firstly, let's look at light pressure. When I'm talking about light pressure, I'm talking about really holding the pencil either you can hold in the writing style like we discussed in the previous video, or you can hold it in the color brush style that the side way hold. If you hold it like this, it will allow to demonstrate both ways. So the first way is the writing style. You need to make sure that you hold this quite further up. Because in order to get that light pressure, you got to maintain a nice gradual, very gradual movement with your hand. What you want to do is you don't want to be moving your arm. You want to just literally move the fingers that are holding the actual pencil itself. You can see over here I'm going again in backwards and forwards motion. You can see that because of the color, it's so pigmented, and that's a huge advantage of PRISMA color pencils that they have a lot of pigment in them, that you really don't have to spend much time pressing down to get color on. Which is again, it's another sign of a high quality console. If you have a look at this, you can see I'm slowly adding this color swatch over here, just going backwards and forwards with light pressure. Now, it's nice and even because I'm repeating this a couple times and we're adding in some layers, and we're going to be discussing layers in more detail in the next video. You can see, I'm just using a slightly textured paper over here. You can see some of the texture coming out from the bottom. What I'll do now is, I'll look at the other stroke that we have using the side held as you would hold a paintbrush. What we can do is, underneath it, we'll just do side hold. Really light stroke, swatch over here. Again, like you can see, I'm barely pressing down on this, on which we just hovering that point of that color light right above the surface of that paper with hardly any pressure at all. You can see that the color is coming off very easily. This is the light pressure. Now you'd use this light pressure to really lay down your color. If you're doing background, we're trying to fill in a large area, this is the technique that I would recommend that you use going in really light upon emphasizes anymore because it really is that important. You can see I've gone in where we were really going backwards and forwards and you've got a nice little swatch of color over there. Moving on to the second technique. Now let's go back to the position of the writing style. Now we're going to be adding medium pressure here. So for medium pressure, previously, we held the pencil around about this point. It wasn't at the center. You can't hold it at the center for the light technique, but I would say for the medium, you'd want to really go halfway between what you had held its light and the edge of the sharp and parts of the pencil. I would say halfway is round about here. Now I've got a decent firm hold. I'm not changing the position of my hand. The hand stays the same. We're just going to use our fingers to move up and down. Now you can see that the color automatically is coming off a lot more stronger. Now I'm not applying any more pressure here, I'm is just the changing the position of the pencil of the hold of the pencil that is causing more pressure to be put on to the actual pigment in the wax so it's coming off a lot more easily. You can see that with hardly any effort, with medium pressure, you get a lot more deeper color and you get a more heavier lay-down of wax or pigment. It works really nice. Again, I'm just going backwards and forwards to just add in to this swatch. What you can do is, if you want to continually add to this, you can just literally press down a little bit harder with your thumb and what that will do is that will add a little bit more pressure, but just keep it at that steady movement and then you'll get no harsh lines that will appear. But again, we'll come into layering, an outside layer and blend the color in the next videos. We've got a medium pressure technique, swatch turnover here. Let's move on to the other hold, which is the side hold. Again, I'm holding the pencil at the original light position which was here, round about here so I'm just going to hold it a little bit further, but instead of moving my entire hand forward like this, I'm not going to move my entire hand forward here because I don't want too much pressure on. I'm just going to put my finger a little bit forward. It's just going to be pressing down on the fingers. As you can see, the whole underneath is like this, holding in-between my thumb and my other fingers, and the first thing that I have over here, my first finger. I'm just moving that slightly down so that can increase the pressure. You can see over here, the color is coming off a lot more heavier than the first swatch, and it's just that continuation. Remember to make sure that you're comfortable in the position that you are holding a pencil. You don't want to end up getting cramping your hands because art is not about paying, art is about enjoyments, isn't it? Make sure you're comfortable in whichever technique you use, whether it's using light pressure, medium pressure, or heavy pressure that we are going to come to the next because you don't want to hurt yourself. Again, this media of colored pencils, it's a very slow media and it's not something that you can do quickly. You've got to take your time where there really is one of those quality time, quality mediums, a few like. All I've done here is again, I've just added that medium pressure in the same movement cited first time in this secondary hold, and I'm happy with that. You can see that it's nice and smooth. I mean, you can see those wildly all spots in the middle, but we're going to come on to the next pressure technique to get rid of them. I quite like that texture. Some people don't like it. They don't like the white little bits coming out of the surface of the paper. I personally don't mind it depending on what I'm trying to achieve. If you can see, we've got medium over here, and now we can move on to the next one. We're looking at number 3, which is the hard pressure. For the hard pressure which is also known as burnishing, all you need to do is you need to hold the pencil as closer to the tip as you can. Now you don't need to go in all the way here because if you go in right there, you handle most likely slippy, you might break the nib of the pencil. So hold a comfortable position where you can hold it steady, because that's the key really with the position that you can hold it steady and is the one that's going to work for you. Let's start off with this. What I'm doing here is I'm actually leaning my hand. This parts of my hand, I'm leaning this forward, I'm tilting this a little bit forward compared to what I had over here where I was just resting on the side. We're not resting on the side anymore, we're just holding the hand on the side and we're putting the pressure on this part of the hand. The pressure is on this part of the hand. Now all we do is we go in and we are going in with hard pressure. You can see the color is coming off really nice and do this in slow motions. Don't do it too fast because you don't want a horrible harsh lines to show up in your coloring. If we just have a look at this over here, they'll just go backwards and forwards with some hard pressure. Now, I'm not going super hard in this, but you can see that it looks really nice. It looks very neat and smooth in portray. Again, that's the quality of these pencils I absolutely love. What I'm doing is I'm using the circular, oval type motions to lay down that collectors. I don't want to completely damage the tip of the paper. As I'm doing this, my hand is slipping down, getting closer to the end. All you've got to do is just slightly adjust, move your figures back again or just the positioning of your hand and you can add in some more layers. There's our hard pressure burnish. Now to completely remove the white spots, what you can do is tilt your paper and you can start going in the opposite direction. If you see over here, I'm going in the opposite direction and you can see that the pressure that I'm applying is exactly the same and it's getting rid of those spots. What's happening here is that the gaps that were left in the first position that we tried, we are able to color the gaps off with the pressure. It's literally getting rid of all of them and it's just absolutely gorgeous swatch of color. Turn it back around. There we've got our burnished hard pressure. You can see the tip of the pencil it's gone quite flat now, hasn't it? It's not very sharp. That's why again, it's very important that you maintain a sharp tip all the time because if you don't maintain a sharp tip, then what happens is that your actual layering of the colors, the lay down of the colors gets very blotchy and you'll get harsh lines. While there is, I'll just demonstrate the side hold and do the burnish with the side hold. So again, this time with burnish, I'm going in really close to the tip over here. I'm holding it with my finger over there from underneath about not much distance and I want to put the pressure facing this way. Again, we just go in and we start putting a little bit more pressure. Now here's a tip. If you're ever going to do burnishing in large amounts of area, then I would recommend that you don't go in straight with burnishing and I'll explain why. Because once you start going in with burnishing really hard right at the beginning, then what happens is that tooth of the paper gets completely flat and you can't add any more layers to it. It will be very difficult to fix or blend out, especially if you're just doing dry blending and we're going to come to blending techniques in the coming videos. Like I said, what I'm doing here is I'm gradually building up that hard burnish. You can see, I could have gone in really hard. I'm building it up slowly. I'm just using the pencil and what I'm doing is if you've noticed, I'm slowly rotating that pencil. I'm not keeping it to one position and the reason I'm doing that is so I can maintain this tip. If you can see here, I'm just slowly rotating the pencil. You can see the PRISMA coalesces turning around as I'm doing this, and the reason for that is that I want to maintain that tip of my color so that it doesn't break or become too weak. That's a really good technique to really maintain your materials while you're actually using them. As you can see here, we've got a very nice burnish and we don't even need to go across the other way to get the whites out because we've actually got rid of most of the white spots. This is a great technique to use if you want to get these amount of color pigment on your paper. That's pretty much it for the pressure techniques. I guess what we can do now is we can apply these techniques into the layering process and that's where it becomes important how much pressure you add. Let's move on to that one.
8. Layering Techniques: Welcome back. Let's talk now about the layering technique. Now, layering is a process of adding color over another color to create a desired effect. This is typically the method that's commonly used when you're generally just coloring in. Let's go through a couple of reasons why you would be layering in the first place. Number one, it's to create an even spread of color. The reason you want to do that in layering technique is so that you maintain a consistent spread of that color. Eventually, that will become smooth and textured according to how much pressure you use. Now with prismacolors, the key and one of the main advantages is that it's a softcore pencil. It's very highly pigmented, so the layering is very easy, and you don't need to apply too much pressure. That's one of the key points which you need to understand before you start layering. The pressure that you apply has to be very minimal, especially in the early stages of layering. I mean, you can add in as many layers as you want to get that desired outcome that you're after. Secondly, another reason that you'd be layering is that it adds depth by creating shadows and light in areas, by adding different colors, complementary colors, or even colors that are from the same family. We will comb more onto adding shadow and light to your artwork using colored pencils in one of the following videos. I will go into a lot more depth in how to select the type of color that you should use. Finally, the main point for layering is to create another color. Now you might have a limited palette. You might only have a set of 12 pencils, or you might only have a few pencils left out of your tin because you've run out of the others. You can even create colors with layering. That's the advantage of using artist pencils over cheap grade pencils like kids' pencils that you get in those free packs. Let's start off with a demonstration of creating an even spread of color using just one color. Again, what's important is that you need to keep very, very light pressure. Your holding technique, as we explained in the previous video, should really be either in the pencil as in the standard writing technique. But you should hold your pencil as further back as is comfortable and is possible for you to maintain a consistent movement. I would say for myself. I'm comfortable holding this pencil in about this position here. I mean you can hold it further back, but if you're not going to be able to maintain a consistent movement, then I would say come in a little bit closer where you've got a decent grip of the pencil, but you don't want to be putting any pressure on it. You want the pressure to be on the side of your hand, and you just want to move in backward and forward motion. Let's demonstrate this. I've just drawn these couple of squares here to just give you a demonstration. We're just going to start in the top corner here. I'm just going to gradually with hardly any pressure, keep doing this backward and forward motion to just color in that area as light as I can. I'm going back and forth, and this is still considered as the first layer. I'm going to fill this squaring with a very light layer of color. You can see with hardly any pressure a pigment is just coming off and going on to that paper. Now, on that first layer, it's not very much, but now the advantage is that you can go back in and start your second layer. Using pretty much the same pressure and you can see those gaps that's left in the paper, in the tooth of the paper that's already started getting covered up with the second layer that you've just applied. Now that's absolutely brilliant for when you want to do large coverage of larger areas in your artwork. What I'm doing now is again, I'm just applying that third layer. You can see that I'm adding that consistent color movement to this square, and you can see it's filled in very, very nicely. Now, if I put too much pressure in from the start, it would have gone to a direct burnish which is what we talked about before in the other video. Thus you won't be able to create the smooth, consistent, even spread of color. This is a very good technique to use. Again, I'm just going in with another layer. You can go in with as many layers as you want. There's no hard rule saying that you can only do five layers or 10 layers. You can go in with as many layers as you want until you reach the optimal desired effect that you're after. Now an advantage of this is that you can turn the paper around, and you've seen me do this in the previous video, and you can start layering from the opposite side. What this will ensure is that you've got a nice even coverage of those white spots that are showing underneath the colored spread. If you want to completely get rid of them with your layering technique, all you've got to do is slowly keep adding these layers on, turn your paper around, try changing the direction of your coloring in position, and you can see you've got a very nice smooth coverage of papers. I'm just slowly rotating my paper. I'm using all the sides of the square to slowly and gradually bring the color in and to really smoothen it out with the pencil, and I am maintaining a very light pressure and a very light hold on the pencil. That's the key. Again, I can't emphasize this anymore. You've got to go in and really lighten this. If you just turn this back around, what we have here is we've got a really nice colored hidden square with the layering technique. Now, what you can do is, you can vary your colors. You can add a little bit more pressure on one of the layers to add a little bit of variance. I'm just adding a little bit more pressure right now. I would say it's not medium pressure is just slightly more pressure than what I had before. You can see the colors coming off, even more, you're getting a lot more of that pigment wax coming off. I'm just going back and forth in this one half of the square to really show you how you can vary using these ways. Again, I'm going to go back again, start again from the end, and just keep layering on that color in stages. You always get that smooth transition. Now we're going to be going onto blending techniques in the next video. You can really apply that same principle using the layering technique. They go hand-in-hand, and we'll demonstrate this when we come to that next video. But you can see right here we've got a really nice smooth coverage of this one single color, going from dark into a little bit of white. It really adds that depth and smoothness to your coloring. Do try this out especially try this out on the worksheet, which I'll come to right towards the end of this class. We're just going to slowly add in a little bit more, and I think we'll leave it at that. That was the first technique of layering with just a single color. Now let's move on to the second, which is adding depth by creating shadows and lights and using two colors. Now, the two colors I am going to use are these purples here. Our first color, I'll just read out what that first color was, that I demonstrated with that was a poppy red. That's the number, PC 922 if that's the one that you want to follow in this class. For the second demonstration, I'm going to be using a PC 933, which is the violet-blue. I'm going to accompany that color with the parma violet, which is an absolute beautiful color. By the way, it's one of my favorite colors, which is why it's always used up, and that's PC 1008. With this, what we're going to do is we're going to create layering with two colors, and we are using colors from a similar color family. That's quite important as well.You need to have an understanding of how colors work and how colors will blend into each other when you're layering. We'll come onto more blending on the blending technique video. But just generally, if you just pick two colors out of the blue and try layering with them, you might not always get that desired result. You might end up getting a horrible brown or really dark color that you didn't want to get. What we'll do is we'll just slowly start adding the lights. That is another point. then I always prefer to add the light color first, so this is a light shade. So again, all I am going to do is I am just going to go into a corner over here, will start again from the same corner.i am just going to layer this color on with very, very light pressure, and then what we we'll do is we'll add in that second color give that real depth and vibrance to our coloring in, and you can use this in so many different types of art, pieces of work. You can use this in coloring books if you are into coloring books, adult coloring books, you can make your own. You can also just literally draw and sketch with these colored pencils. They are just absolutely amazing. So what I am doing now is again, I am just going to add that color on as I did before, I am going in different directions, so I'm maintaining the directions. It is always a good idea, if you are going to change direction, make sure you complete your directional flow from one end to the other. You do not start doing it from here and then moving in the middle because that will create that inconsistency and you will get them horrible lines coming up. So that is the second to third layer. Down we'll add maybe one more layer, and then I am going to add in that dark purple shade that I had. So we'll get the light shade in first, and then slowly as we build on this we will get some a nice bed depth going up. So now we have got this darker color, this violet blue color. What I am going to do is I am going to start slowly from the top corner again. I am using exactly the same pressure and you can see how the color is actually attaching to the paper over that color. Now what we do not want to do is we don't want to blend the colors because that's just another technique and my aim isn't really to blend, it is to layer. It's just to literally place that color on top of the other color to create that desired effect. But you will get some elements of blending purely because the pigment and the wax is so soft in these pencils, you will get some type of blending and you may end up getting a third color being produced, but that's nothing to worry about. This is really just to add depth to your coloring art work so you can see already with that very light bit of as dark purple that I have got going on. It is already created a bit of variance, hasn't it? So I am just going to carry on doing that in the other direction, but I am not going to go all the way to the end over here because I want to maintain some of that lighter purple. You can see it just created a beautiful blended effect, even though it is not blended, the color is not blended, it is literally just a layer which is placing more and more pigment on the tooth of that paper in different stages in layers. So if we go back with the lights of the pencil and we just tell the paper. It is always a good idea to tilt the paper when you coloring again just to maintain a comfortable position on your hand and wrist. I mean, you might be able to color in using one position. You might be able to do that. I personally always like to tilt the paper. Just added that other layer on, I'm going in towards the top. You can see we have got a really, really, really nice variance with that layer. Now we can add in a little bit more of pressure. If we add in a little bit more pressure, it is going to create a slight burnish. So I am not going to add in too much. I'll just go in a little bit harder with the lighter shade and then you will be able to see that layer is really, really coming out, that transition and coverage is really, really, really coming out. So I am just going to carry on doing this for a few more seconds. Let's add in a little bit more pressure with the darker purple and just to close off the color at the bottom. Striving as needs as we can [inaudible] , is not my idea is not really to call it a square in perfect, just to really demonstrates here how these pencils work using this layering technique. So I'm just going to go in a little bit darker with the darker purple on top. You can see that it creates a really nice looking effect. You can use this so well in some of your pieces, You can use it on architecture like a bricks, and on leaves, and on any type of structure, whatever you like. I mean it just creates that real, real nice looking effect. So there we have it. We have got the dark and purple creating depth and interests. So finally, let us demonstrate how to create a new color. So you might be in the situation where you only have a couple of colors in your palette. Layering, you might want to create another color, so let us go for the standard primary colors. We have got yellow, blue and let's create a third color. So what we are going to do is again, with the yellow, this yellow is a Canary Yellow PC916th from the set, and all I am going to do is I am just going to add this layer on as I did before. So all I've doing is added maybe three or four different layers very, very lightly with this yellow, and you can see it has got some nice smooth coverage on that square. All I am going to do now is add in this blue, which is called True Blue 903. Just with exactly the same pressure, I'm going to just add this blue in. You can see already the moment them strokes are going on that a square where it is picking up that pigment, it started creating that second layer. We all know that with blue and yellow, you mix them together, you get green. Absolutely. So just like that, I am just going over, as I did before really lightweight to create this new third color. This works really nice when you are coloring again, maybe leaves or coloring in something like interesting parts of your artwork. Really to add in that depth and you avoiding looking too flat. So you can see I'm going in with light pressure and what I can do is I can even increase that pressure to create more depth like we did with the purple. It really is that easy. Well, I say it is easy because you do not have to really press down too hard in terms of being able to color the mixes that you would like to produce. That is going to take a bit of time for you to get used to. So it will take a bit of practice and again, that is how it is with anything, isn't it? You just need to practice and explore and you will realize that there is just so many things that you did not know a tool could do. So I would really recommend you practice these techniques with these colors if this is what you want to get into. So I am just going in back with the yellow. So we just intensifying that green color now with a little yellow. You can see it's turning into a yellow green. You can just keep adding that layer on and on until you really achieve that desired effect and color that you're after. So it's such a great technique, this layering technique, and it is a slow method, but you can get such beautiful results. You just need a little bit of time, practice and a bit of patience. If you would like to get the result really fast, then colored pencil probably hard for you because this is a very slow medium, as we explained before in the other videos. It's not a fast medium, so it is difficult to get results very fast. I would call it a relaxing medium. So you can really, really, really relax to it, put a bit of music on, sit back. Relax and just do some coloring in or do some sketching or create some artwork. It really is that good. So you can see now, I have added some decent layers on here, and we've got a very nice green color that we've produced using just the yellow and the blue. So that's pretty much it for the layering effects. I would give this a go, give this a practice. We will be moving now on to the exciting part of blending. So we are going to go into dry blending and then we are going to go into wet blending. So I will see you on the next one.
9. Dry Blending Techniques: Welcome back. What we going to be discussing now in this video is the exciting subject of blending your color pencils. Now, there are many different ways to blend color pencils. What I've done is I've divided this into two types of blending styles. I've got dry blending, which is what this video is all about, and then we have wet blending as well. Now, I personally use dry blending more than wet blending in my artwork. As I find that it stays more true to the look of dry colored pencils because that's what it is essentially is. It's a dry medium. That tend to avoid the wet blending techniques. However, the wet blending techniques do have their advantages and I would use them sometimes and we'll move on to that on the next video. Let's get started with the dry blending techniques. What I've got here is I've got four circles here and I've got these labeled as burnishing, white pencil, colorless blender, and burnisher pencil. These are some of the common ways that color pencils are blended. We've already spoken about the first one which is burnishing and what I'm specifically talking about here is using two colors and the colors I'm going to be using are crimson red and standard orange. They have the numbers on the prism colors if you want to follow. As I was saying, what I mean by dry burnishing here is literally what we spoke a little bit about in the previous video of layering. What we're going to be doing here is we're going to just layer the pencil as we did before in slow steps. Starting off with the light color and then adding in the dark and we're going to try creating that seamless blend from one color to another to effectively create a gradient. We're going to use the pressure, using the pressure techniques that we discussed to really, really go in in stages increasing that pressure and effectively burnishing out that color so that it smoothly covers our surface area of our paper, so that we have literally no spots of paper underneath. Let's get started with this. What I'm going to start off doing is I'm just going to add a small layer of orange, starts off with lighter color. I advise you to always start off with a lighter color is because if you start off with a dark color, sometimes you might end up applying too much of that color and then it's quite difficult to blend out, especially if you're using dry blending methods. One of the advantages of wet blending method is it's a lot easier to blend out. We will come to that in the next video. All I'm doing here is just adding in a very, very light layer of orange from the top half of this circle and I'm just slowly easing in that color into all of the gaps and I'm going to do this for a couple of layers. We'll just continue adding maybe two or three more layers to this and you can go in the opposite direction as well, like we discussed in the previous video, which is always a good way to cover off those white spots and get that even blend smoothened out. As you can see, I've covered a bit more than half of this circle with the orange, and I've just pretty much used just two layers. I'm using a very light pressure and we're holding in the writing position here. I'm holding it quite down because I want to eventually increase that pressure. You can see over here that the color of the pigment is coming on really nicely as we expected and what we're going to do now is we're going to switch to the darker color. We'll just put that pencil to the side. Let's switch to the crimson red and we're going to do the same starting on the other side. If we just slowly apply that crimson red and you can see with the darker color, it looks so much more prominent and it comes on so much more quicker, it's absolutely amazing. What I'm doing is I'm slowly, slowly adding in that layer. I'm not going over this orange area that I've covered yet. What I'll be doing is I'll be doing that from the second layer. You can see now I'm applying a second light layer of that crimson and now what I'm going to do is I'm going to go over this orange area to about just over half mark on that circle. You can see that there's a distinction now between the orange and the red. This little area that we have here is where the color is overlapping. This is what we're going to try doing, we're just going to keep overlapping that color, switching from the lighter color to the darker and then we're just going to go in from the edge. It's always important to blend inwards. What I'm doing is, I'm blending inwards from the edge of the circle rather than starting here and then blending out. The advantage of that is that you will be able to maintain that smooth transition from one color to another and that will become more apparent when we start burnishing and going in really hard. We're still only maintaining a very, very light layer and light pressure. You can see already we've got a nice little difference of color, a nice little gradation going on over here. I'm going in with the red again, the crimson red, just supplying a little bit more pressure, taking it to that point and just continuing beyond that orange line. You can see we've got really, really nice bits of layer. Now, this is just blending using just the layering effect. We've not actually blended anything out, or anything in yet. We just literally overlapping that color as many times as we can before we start the actual burnishing. Now, the burnishing is the final stage. It's where you're really putting as much pressure as you can onto the pencil to really get that color out. Again, we're just going in again to really bring out as much pigment as we can in the most smoothest fashion. You can see the more layers that you keep adding on the smoother that blend becomes, and it's absolutely beautiful. It's probably one of the best effect you can get. The best method of blending in terms of vibrancy and effect because the pencil pigment is staying true to as it comes off the pencil and what I mean by that is it's not getting diluted or is not getting whites and out, which is going to be the next method when we use the white pencil. It's really is that pure pigment that you're getting on the paper. Now I think what we've got to do now is we're ready to stop burnishing. What we're going to do is we're going to add in a little bit more pressure, so start intensifying that color. You can see I'm adding just a bit of medium pressure now and I'm just bringing this over to that mid point that we had before and I'm going to stop there. Again, with the orange supernova and we just adding a bit more pressure so that we've got the orange coming across that crossover section. This is the key. It's really that crossover section that you want to concentrate on. You don't want to go in too hard from the center. It's always best to go in from outside in. That's from my experience, that's how I like to burnish. You can go from the center onwards, but I personally think you'll lose control of your actual blend and it goes a little bit all over the place. Again, what I'm doing now is I'm going in a little bit more harder. You can see we've got an absolute beautiful blend going on over there. Again, with the orange going in a bit more harder. This is definitely a time consuming method because you're going to go in and out in as many colors as you like. Now, what I'm going to do is, I'm going to turn the paper slightly the opposite direction. You've seen me do this a lot of the other times. Just get a bit more coverage over the entire objects that we're coloring in whatever you've decided to color in. I'm just bringing that orange in from the edges. Now, I'm going to do exactly the same with the red in the opposite direction. It's just to fill in all them gaps and make sure that there's no gaps there. Now, you don't have to do this. If you liked having some of that paper being showing through from underneath, then by all means leave it in if that's effect you want because it leaves them little crevices and little markings, if you doing textured work, maybe you might be drawing the moon, a planet, or something that has texture on it. That'd give it a pretty decent effect like you can see over here, I am just going back and forth. Another important thing to remember is, when you are burnishing or coloring in and blending, it's always a good idea when you're coming across the two colors, when they're overlapping, use circular motions rather than just straight up and down motions because what that will do is, that will give you a nice, rounded blend where the colors meet. You can see over here, it's going in really nicely. All I'm doing is adding that medium pressure. I have not added too much pressure at this stage. It really is just medium, but thing is, sometimes you don't need to add so much pressure on prism colored pencil purely because of that soft wax that they're made out of. Again, with the orange, I'm just going in in the circular motions making sure that the entire surface area is covered, and we've got an absolute beautiful transition of color, a beautiful blend. It's just so vibrant from red to orange, and then in the mid tones, in the middle, you create all this other new type of warm colors. It's just beautiful, nice. This really is my favorite type of blending method purely because of the results that you get. Finally, I'm just going to finish this one off. I'm just going to add in a little bit more pressure on the end there. You can see we've pretty much completed this one and there's hardly any of the old speckles of whites showing underneath. I'm happy with that. If we just take a step back and we have a look in, just analyze, you can see that the color is going from red all the way to orange and this produces a nice gradient a nice spectrum of reds merging into oranges and that's exactly what you want when you're blending. That's the burnishing method. That was the first method of the dry blending techniques. The second method is using a white pencil self with your Prismacolor set that you have. Whichever set you get. I think it's true for the size 12 sets as well. You should get a white Prismacolored pencil and it's Prismacolor 938, the number is PC 938 blanks white and you're going to be using this pencil as the burnisher. Again, what we are going to do is, I'm going to use the same colors. I'm going to add in really light layers of color like I did before I went in for the actual burnish itself. We will just stick to the same position and what we'll do is we'll just do a quick time lapse on this so that we've got exactly the same point that we had with the burnishing. What I'll do is, I'll do this for all of these three circles that are remaining so that we have a similar layer so we can move on to the actual blending. Just sit back, relax and watch the speeded up video. [MUSIC] Okay. What I've done is, I've just added the same amount of layers, three or four layers of each color on each side as I did with the burnishing one and I've repeated this for the other three types of blending techniques. Now, this is so that we can compare how the final result looks. The next technique, in the dry blending, is the white pencil. As I said before, it's a Prismacolor PC 938 pencil. Now, with this, this stage that we've got these three at the moment, we've just layered. We've just layered the color on. You can see there's a slight blend going on naturally from the colors mixing while you're layering them over each other but we've got a lot of that white speckle. If you can see right in the camera, we've got a lot of white speckle, very grainy. It's not smooth and velvety like this. What we are going to try achieving is that smooth velvety burnished outlook using a white pencil. All we've got to do is, we've got to treat this as if this was the final burnishing layer that we were going to add and we're just starting at the end over here. Just in circular motions, with good amounts of pressure, I would say medium to heavy pressure, we are just blending this color out. You can see immediately, as that white pencil is touching the wax, because there's still a little bit of surface left on the tooth of the paper, it's attaching to that white. It's allowing that white to attach. What we're doing is, we're craying these circular motions and it's spreading that layer that we have underneath, that layer of orange and it's just nicely blending that up. You can see now it's looking a lot more smoother. Now, probably the best way of doing this is using the circular motions because that way you avoid having them horrible, harsh indents or lines that appear when you do try and burnish over with another color. You can see now that the colors are blending out really nicely. With this technique, the advantage is that you don't have to use up all your colored pencil because you are effectively burnishing with a white pencil at the entity you're blending. This works really nice but there is an immediate difference that you can notice. The fact of the matter is that because you're using a white pencil, that white pigment is pretty much covering up the colored pigment. I mean, it's blended out very nicely just like the first one, but the look of this will be slightly lighter. It will have like a cloudy look to it, like more of a pastel look., so do bear that in mind. If that's not the type of look that you're after, if you want something that's really vibrant and bright, then it's going to be better off with burnishing the colors. Well, you can see that the actual burnishing part of it with a white pencil is pretty quick. It didn't take too much time and it really didn't take too much pressure. I'm hardly applying too much pressure on this. I'm going in light, then I'm doing medium, then a little bit of hard and I'm just going backwards and forwards with these circular motions. You can see we've pretty much got rid of all that white. What we've got here is, you can see that some of the wax of the pencil, some of the wax dust little pieces, they crumble over. Well, it's just a property of waxes [inaudible]. The more you use, it's going to grind down and that wax dust, if you like, is gonna go on top. The best way to get rid of that is, you can navigate your paper and just give it a little shake like this. Avoid using your hand to wipe across because what you'll do is, that wax, if that was colored wax, it will just smear over the paper. You don't want to smear over that paper. As you can see, we've got a very nice blend but you can see the difference. It's a lot less vibrant and saturated than the burnishing look. We'll just clear that off and let's move on to the colorless blender. The colorless blender, the technique is exactly the same. Instead of using the white pencil, we're going to be using a colorless blender. Now, a colorless blender is basically a pencil without color. Instead of the pigment inside the material that's on the inside, we have just the bonding materials, and in this case it's wax. Now these come in different brands. Prismacolor have their own colorless blender. I personally tend not to use them because they're not readily available for me. I have used them in the past. I might have one lying around somewhere but I think it's pretty much used up. I would probably say that the Prismacolor one is the best in terms of quality to use with Prismacolor because it's always best to use the same brand with the brand of pencil that you are using. However, I use the one from Derwent, the UK Brand Derwent and this is part of their blender pack. You can buy this as a blender pack with a blender, burnisher, sharpener and an eraser or rubber and we will come on to the burnisher pencil in the next technique. Let's focus on this one here with the blender pencil. So you can see the point of the pencil, I've purposely not made it too sharp. The reason for that is because when you go in with a sharp point, it's going to end up breaking. So what I've done is, I've rounded this off. A good technique to round the point off is, just get a bit of scrap paper, a bit of rough paper and just round that edge off so that you've got nothing that's going to break on to it. Cause there's nothing like you've spent so much time doing the coloring and the moment you apply a bit of pressure it breaks and it creates an indent into your paper. That's the last thing that you want. If you just use like a bit of sand paper and just round off that edge, you'll see that you've got a very nice rounded effect. With that, we can start on the actual blend. Using that same technique that we did with a white pencil, we're just going to go in from the top and we're going to start blending this up. This is much more effective than using the white pencil because you're not putting any other color pigment over this. You can see, I'm hardly using any pressure with this and already, it started smoothing out that color. You've got to remember one thing. The burnisher and the blender pencil and even the white pencil, you're going to get the best results if you have enough colored layers underneath. That's one of the top tips of blending. Ensure that you've placed enough layers of color in your layering underneath before you go in and start blending out using the colorless blender or the burnisher pencil that we're going to move on to next. You can see over here, beautiful circular motions creating that gorgeous, gorgeous blend. It's just so easy. This way you won't have an aching hand using your pencils for the burnishing and you're getting a nice vibrant blend. The end result is not going to be as vibrant as the actual burnisher, because effectively, you're just spreading out that color. You're not putting more color on. But there is no reason why you can't actually add that color back on. So once you've burnished, you can still go on and add more color if that's what you want, to get it a bit more saturated, a bit more vibrant. I think this is one of the most effective techniques to use. A burnisher pencil is an additional tool that you need to get this done. If you've just got a pack of colored pencils, Prisma colored pencils, then you are going to have to purchase this separately. However, I think it really is worth it. I think the results are absolutely brilliant if dry blending is something that you really want to do. It's one of my preferred methods, second to the actual burnishing itself. You can see over here, we've blended out that color. It looks really, really nice and smooth. We've got no blotchy white marks in there at all. You've got an absolutely beautiful bit of blending going on there. What this blender is actually doing, is it's just adding a translucent waxy coating over your actual color. It just creates a matte gloss type look. It's more of a matte look than a glossy look. The glossy look is actually produced with the next technique that we do with the actual burnisher pencil. What we'll do is we'll finish this off right now and let's move on to the next. I'm happy with that one. Finally, the final dry technique is to use the Derwent burnisher pencil. Now again, as I said before, this comes in a pack and it's really worthwhile getting that packet if this is the type of blending that you want to do. This is very similar to the actual blender pencil, but you can see that the actual material on the inside of the pencil, it's got a slight glossier property to it. It's colorless. It doesn't have an actual color to it but what it does is it achieves a gloss look. If we go back to this and start doing our blending, you can see that with the other three, the raw burnishing gives you the most vibrant look. The white pencil gives you a faded out pastel type of look. The colorless blender gives you a nice, decent, vibrant look, but not as saturated as burnishing. With this, this gives you a similar look like the colorless blender but with a slight gloss to it. Now again, you need to ensure that you have enough layers underneath in order for this pencil and this method to work. Because if you don't have enough layers, there's no way for the actual pencil to push the pigment on the paper. What I've done here is, I've left some of the pigment away from the edge to demonstrate this to you. You can see that I'm trying to burnish this out now with this burnisher pencil and I can't get any more color in there. But if you want to add an effect, if you want a light burnish going into a dark burnish, then that's a good way to do it. It's another technique to leave some of the area on the edge and it will give you a slight lighter color. So if you can see over here, all I'm doing is exactly the same. I'm just burnishing all that color out. The actual burnish itself is not as easy as it was with a colorless blender, because the material inside this is slightly more firmer because of the properties that it has inside. So you've got to apply a little bit more pressure than you did with the colorless blender. Do bear that in mind. Again, what we're getting here is we're getting a really nice blend of color. It's just that slight bit glossy. It's a slight glossy look. I don't know if you can see that on the camera, but when you do come to use this, if this is what you want to do, you will notice that there's a slight glossiness, especially if you move the piece of paper around in some light. What we are doing here is, again, we're just using them circular motions to really, really blend out that color, get it mixed up on the paper, cover up them white spots. We've pretty much finished on this one as well. I personally don't use the burnisher pencil that often. I'd probably use it maybe to add in some highlights in the blend, but mainly, I just tend to use the original burnishing method and just go in with a bit of colorless blender. That's my method. I avoid using the white pencil unless I want to add some lighting to the overall effect. There we have it then folks, what we've just done is the four techniques of dry pencil blending with Prisma color. Just to quickly recap, we did the burnishing with the two colors as they were, which produced the most vibrant saturated look. Then the second one we did was white pencil, which produced a pastel type of faded look. The third one was using the colorless blender from Derwent and this produced a nice even consistent blend. Finally, we use the burnisher pencil which produced a slight glossy blend, but was a lot more difficult to apply in terms of pressure. That's pretty much it for the pencil blending techniques from the dry aspects of things. Now we can move on to looking at the wet techniques. What we'll do is we'll use the same colors and we'll apply a couple other techniques that I have used in the past and the ones that I would probably recommend for you to use. So let's move on to the next one.
10. Wet Blending Techniques: Welcome back. Let's now look at wet blending techniques. Now previously in the last video, we covered four different ways of doing dry blending. Now we're going to be moving on to the wet blending techniques. Now, there are quite a few different methods of doing wet blending. I personally use these three. However, I don't usually do wet blending very often because I personally just don't like the look of my colored pencils looking like paint. That's not usually the effect that I like to go for. I like to keep it raw pencil. Again, that's one of the reasons I love this burnishing effect over here because it keeps it really natural and raw. However, sometimes you may need to blend using wet blending. Well, I sometimes need to use wet blending and it's one of these three methods that I use. The first method, we just talked a little bit about is using a solvent. Basically, what solvent does is, it dissolves the binder that's holding the pigment inside the actual pencil. Because this material that you have, as we explained in the previous video, that this is made up of the color pigment and it's made up of a binder that binds it all together into this solid form. What the solvent does is, when you apply solvent to the layers of this, it breaks down and dissolves that binder, and it leaves you with just the pigment so that you can spread that pigment out and effectively spread that color around on your surface. There are quite a lot of different options for solvents, Gamsol is one popular one that people use. There's Mona Lisa odorless paint thinner. Effectively, that's what solvents are, they're just paint thinners. However, these types of paint thinners and solvents, they have quite a long negative aspects to them in the sense that they're flammable, they're toxic, they can be very dangerous, they can have fumes and you can't really use them in closed environments effectively. It's not safe to do that. Personally, I don't use them at all. I use an alternative called Zest It. Now Zest it is an effective and efficient solvent for oil paint generally, but it can also be used for blending wax based pencils, blending ink, oil pustules, and also cleaning brushes. It's made of a natural substance. I'll just show you on the screen here. This is the Zest it bottle that I use quite regularly. Now, on it says oil paint dilutant and brush cleaner. Now this is packaged differently for pencil blending. However, the product itself inside is exactly the same. You might find one that says pencil blender on it, and you might be thinking, hang on a minute, why is it using the oil paint dilutant? It's exactly the same. If you go on Zest It's website, they clarify this in the FAQs, the frequently asked questions, where they literally clarify the fact that the product inside these two bottles are exactly the same. Wherever you are in your area, if you're asked or only has the oil paint dilutant and brush cleaner, then get hold of that because it's exactly the same as the pencil blender. If you do have the pencil blender, get that. It really makes no difference. It's just a difference in packaging. Now with this, you get quiet a Zesty smell. Quite a zesty fume coming out of this. On the actual bottle itself, it does say, repeated exposure can cause skin dryness, cracking. Obviously you don't want it contact with you in your eyes or swallow. It's not naturally good to drink or anything like that. Do keep it away from children. It is effectively a chemical solution. I would treat this with caution wherever you're trying this out. Just make sure your kids are not running around if you have kids or young children in your house, or in your studio, or wherever you're practicing this with. Do be careful when you do use this. Now, what I'm going to be doing is, I'm also going to be showing you how to use colorless markers. These are alcohol-based markers, and you can use whichever brand you can get your hands on or whichever ones you prefer. I personally use these two right here. These are the Winsor & Newton Promarker, and the brush marker. These are alcohol-based colorless markers, and they're used for blending actual markers, but you can also use them to blend colored pencil. I'll just show you the tips of these. The promarker here, it's got a nice fine tip over there on one side, and on the other side, it's got a chisel tip. These I feel, work quite well. I don't use these all the time. I would say I use more of the Zest it than the actual colorless markers. Over here we've got the brush marker. These have their advantages and disadvantages in the fact that you don't need extra apparatus or instruments to actually use to blend. They are ready to use. You do however have to clean them once you've used them. Otherwise, you're going to ruin the life expectancy of your marker. Because once you've got that pigment color on it, and if you haven't cleaned it, then it's going to stay there permanently. That's something to bear in mind. I'll go through all that when we demonstrate these techniques. The last one is baby oil. Now, you might be thinking baby oil. How can you blend pencils with baby oil? Well, it is quite an effective method. I just use whichever baby oil I have lying around in the house. I'm a father with kids. I've got a little baby, a one-year-old baby, so we have these type of things in the household. I tend to use baby oil but very rarely. I don't really like the effect of it. Maybe if I've run out of my Zest it solution, I'd probably go for baby oil. But I will demonstrate all three of these for you so you can have a look for yourself and decide what you want. Now, before you blend anything, you're going to need to have some color on to blend. The most important, the most vital thing when you're doing wet blending, even when you're doing dry blending, is that you need to have enough layers of color. Because if you don't have enough layers of color, once you start applying these wet mediums, it's going to literally spread out that minimal color that you have, and it's just going to leave horrible, patchy, diluted, horrible, messy work on your lovely paper and that's what you don't want. The first thing to do is to start adding in your layers. That's exactly what I'm going to do. In all these three circles where I have the Zest It, the colorless marker, and the baby oil, I'm just going to add in the color as I did with the dry color method that we did before. Let's make a start on this. I've just layered three or four different layers of color over each other like I did with the ones on the top for the dry blending. Now we're ready to apply the wet blending. Another important thing to remember is, again, this is vital, when you're doing any type of wet blending, you're effectively adding liquid onto your paper, so you've got to ensure that your paper is able to take liquid. Whenever you do wet blending, always use a watercolor paper or a watercolor board, or something that can really take water. Because otherwise what you're going to get is that the liquid's going to seep right through the paper, and it's going to eventually make your paper reap. I'm using hot pressed watercolor paper by Bockingford. This is one of the papers that I demonstrated in the earlier video. Just ensure that you do have a decent watercolor paper when you're doing this. I'm going to start off with the Zest it oil paint brush cleaner. You can apply this in a couple of different ways. You can apply this with just a normal paintbrush, because effectively what you're doing is you just want to add this really, really gently over the pigment so it starts breaking up that binder of the pencil and starts releasing the pigment feeds to spread. However, another top tip for wet blending techniques is that you must, and you must absolutely not over drench your brush or whatever tool that you're using to apply your wet solution on. You've just not got to over drench. It just needs to be very, very light. Otherwise, you're just going to have blotches of solvent or oil or alcohol, and it's just going to look horrible. It's going to be a mess. You can use a brush, that's one way. You can also use cotton buds. I like using cotton buds. I think they're great, they're just so easy, they're disposable, you don't have to worry about cleaning them after. I always prefer to use cotton buds. In actual fact, I'm going to be demonstrating using cotton buds, I'm not going to really bother with the brush. However, with the brush, you do have that extra bit of control where you can create strokes. With a cotton bud, you're effectively just going to be pressing down and just putting that color across the surface of the paper. Let's make a start with this. I'm just going get a nice clean cotton bud. You can see I've just touched that pigment and it's already started coming off on the cotton buds. Do be wary of that. Again, remember that this is a wet medium, so you are going to be more prone to making a mess with this. Do have some tissue paper or some scrap paper on the side just so that you don't make a make a mess all over your table or have droplets coming on your actual paper. I'm just going to show you. What I'm going to do is I'm just going to put this in like this. I'll actually really just to use this side. You've got this side here. I'm just going to lightly dab this inside, quick light dab. Then what we want to do is, we want to get rid of that excess. You can see, I'm just turning that cotton bud, and I'm getting rid of that excess on the edge there. Getting rid of that excess because what we don't want is we don't want lumps and blobs of this solution all over the place. You can see that I've just dabbed it out and we're ready to go. Just move that on this side. What we're going to do is, we're going to slowly apply this. Now, what I'll do is I'll get the camera at an angle for you to see this. See, if we just bring the camera a little bit closer, you can see all I'm doing here is, in light circles, just going round, and you can see, as soon as that is touching the color, it's already started effectively melting that binder and it's like paint, it's effectively become like a water-color paint or even a gouache paint. You can see how lovely that becomes, and I really do like the effect of this, it works really nicely. See, just slightly dabbing it, I should have stilts and knocked off a little bit more from there, because there still is too much liquid on there. So if we just get a little bit of scrap paper over here, and we just rub this away on a bit of scrap paper, and we can continue. So you can see, just slowly, circular motions applying this solution, zest it, and I'm just blending. You want to make sure that you do this very lightly. You don't want to put too much pressure on it, because you don't want to move the pigment completely off the paper. You're actually pushing the pigment into those crevasses and the tooth of the remaining whites that you've got left, and you can see you've got a really beautiful blend there. Absolutely gorgeous that, isn't it? And another tip is to keep turning your cotton bud, if that's what you're using so that you can really get a nice spread all over. So I've got a nice little spread over there, and I think we're done with that, because you don't want to over blend. If you over blend something, you'll keep moving that pigment away, and another thing is that the pigment's going to keep coming off on that cotton stomp. So, you are losing some of the pigment. So that's a disadvantage of using wet blending techniques because your pigment isn't all staying on the paper, some of it will be coming off. So, you do need to bear that in mind, so let's move on to the next one. You can see over here, we'll move the camera back on to this flat. You can see we've got a really nice spread of color there and it really gives it a really nice effect. What I'll do is I'll bring this closer to the camera. You can see that we've got a bit of a bleed there, and that's because I added too much of the zest it on, and that's why you've got to really maintain a light swab of it really, when you're applying this, and that's the disadvantage of having a cotton bud, so if I had used the brush, there would've been a bit more better control with the brush. Whereas with a cotton bud, it's difficult to get into all the areas. With a brush, you can actually, what we'll do, is we'll just slightly add, just bring this to the camera, and we'll just go in and just lightly dab that in and I'm just going to remove some of the excess of that on the side, and I'll just go in with the brush lightly, now you can see, there you go. So you can easily paint over this a lot better, and you can see that you're really in control of where to push your pigment, but however, if you over blend then the pigment's just going to keep moving and spreading around and you don't want to leave white patches. So, that's about it for this. That's pretty much all that pigment's spread out, blended and it is really nice and velvety. I mean, if you compare this directly with the burnishing, you can tell that with the burnishing, it's dry, with this, you do get a slight gloss, a glossy feel, glossy effect at the end. So, if that's what you really like, then give this one a go. I mean, I could give this a go anyway it depends if you can get a hold of zest it. I mean, it's made in the UK and it might not be available where you're from, but generally, you can get this online and I will leave links and all the worksheets I have of all the materials that I've demonstrated. So, let's move on to the next one. Let's just change the camera. Okay. So the next one is the alcohol markers, the colorless markers. Now, out of these, I would prefer to use the brush marker, because with brush marker, you can spread the actual pigment quite well, but you can see, as I showed you before, you can see that there's some pigment on there. You just got to make sure that if you do have pigment on there that you wipe it off. So, you just get another bit of scrap paper. Just make sure that before you apply the marker, that marker is clear. You just got clear alcohol coming out of there because that's all it is. So that's clear, I'm happy with that, and then what we can do is we can start blending this out now. If you notice with this, I'm going in really slowly. Now, what I love about blending with markers is, you don't need another tool, another bit of apparatus, you don't need a brush or a blending stump or anything like that. You only truly just go in, and with light circular motions, it just start blending. You can see it's already started blending there. It looks absolutely beautiful. I absolutely love it, but, the thing with markers is, obviously you're going to have a strong alcohol smell. You might like in some cases, I personally don't, but, you can just see that I'm hardly applying any pressure, and it's just taking off that pigment and it's just spreading it out nice and evenly, and it works a treat. I mean, like I said, I don't use wet blending techniques that often, but sometimes it'll just be if I'm in the mood of doing wet blending. Sometimes I'm not in the mood, I just like to do dry blending, purely because of the therapeutic value of it, but with the wet blending, it's just great, you've got a of control and you overall effect is like a painted look. So, sometimes you might not even be able to tell whether you've used colored pencil or not. Now, you can see a lot of that pigment's gone, soaked into the tip of that marker now, and what I need to make sure that I do is, get that piece of paper, that scratch paper and just rub that marker off, because, as I said before, if you don't do this, then your marker's going to get ruined and you won't be able to use it again. You've just got to keep doing this this until you've got a clear streak of alcohol coming out of there. That you've got no color. Once that's done, you're pretty much done. So, there we have it then. We've got the marker, I mean, you can use the chisel-tip part of the marker, but personally, I think that's pointless. I like to use the soft tip of this brush and I think it works really well with the blending. It mimics a paintbrush. So that's the marker blending done, and we can move on, finally to the baby oil. Now, I'm going to apply the baby oil with a brush so, you'll be able to see how it actually works. So, the actual brush that I've got, I'll just make sure I clean all the zest it from it, and let's get some baby oil. So we'll just open up this bottle, and do be wary of baby oil, although it is a cheap alternative, and I've just spilled on the table. This is what I was trying to warn you about and I've gone and done it myself. Look over here, can you see that, I've made a mess already. I'm supposed to be telling you not to do this and I've gone and done it myself. So, let's just get the camera back on here. So, yes, with the baby oil, again, you've just got to make sure that you only put a little bit of it on. You don't want to be drenching your brush with this oil, so make sure the excess is all coming off, because you're going to have that same problem like you had with the solvent, with the zest it. That if you put too much on, it's going to start bleeding to the edges. So, with this now, we can just go in and slowly start moving that pigment round. Now, you will notice that with the baby oil, you've got to work it in a little bit more, because prismaple is a wax-based, they're not oil-based, so it's going to take a little bit more time for that oil to activate the separation of the binder. So it takes slightly a little bit more time, whereas with the zest it, as soon as you touch the surface of the pigment, it starts blending and melting away, and another thing with the solvents are, with the zest and the odorless minerals and the spirits, they dry very quickly, whereas with baby oil it takes a lot longer to dry. So that's a bit of a disadvantage of using baby oil. It's going to take a lot longer to dry, it's more likely to bleed on the edges and if you spill it, it's very difficult to clean, and that goes same for the odorless spirits and the zest it. If you spill it on your paper, it's quite difficult to clean it up and you could ruin your artwork if you've got parts of your artwork where you didn't want that to happen. So do bear that in mind. The smell of baby oil is lovely, isn't it? It's like you get that fresh powdery type smell, don't you? It's really nice and naturally pleasant compared to the Zest It which just smells like strong lemons and citricy and very sharp. You can see over here, I've just done the blending, it took hardly anytime at all. That's one of the major advantages of using wet learning techniques that you can blend in no amounts of time. Whereas with a dry blending methods, it takes a lot longer, it can be very difficult, complete a big piece of art work just doing dry blending, especially if you're doing burnishing. These are all things to bear in mind. The whole points of showing you guys this is that, so you get overall feel at this beginner level. Because for the advanced level coloring, there are a couple more techniques that you can do when it comes to it, especially when it comes to dry blending. But because this is a beginner level class, these are the main techniques that I would recommend you try out. Do give these a go and let me know how you get on with them, just in summary, what we'll do is summarize these blending techniques and the positives and negatives of all of them. For burnishing, dry blending burnishing is the most long method, it takes the most amount of time and it can be quite strenuous on your wrist and on your hand. However, the results are the most vibrant when it comes to dry blending. The white pencil blending again, it takes time. It doesn't take as much time as the burnishing does, because you're burnishing the coloring to each other, with the white pencil effectively you're doing a layer of burnish all in one go so it takes less time. However, it can produce pastel like effects and you're not going to get that saturation and vibrance as you did with the burnishing. It's going to be slightly dough and pastel like if that's the look that you want to go for, then I would try that out. Number three, we had the colorless blender pencil and that was great because, it took a lot less time than the white pencil and the burnishing. Because all we needed to do was literally just go over the pigment that we laid down in layers, and it blended its inactive burnisher effectively. However, it's not as vibrant as the original burnishing method, but is much more vibrant than using a white pencil that's an advantage of it. Another advantage is that you're less likely to use up your colored pencils because effectively you're saving your colored pencils by using a colorless blender. The fourth method that we went through was the burnishing pencil. Now the burnishing pencil in my opinion, personally, I don't use it very much. I always prefer to use the colorless blender. The advantage is pretty much the same, it gives a slight glossier, silkier feel. The actual blending itself is pretty much the same as a colorless blender, is nothing to worry about if you can't get hold of a burnishing pencil, because you might not be able to get it from where you're from, whichever part of the world you're from. There's nothing to worry about on that, if you can give it a go, you might like the technique or the feel of the burnisher pencil. However, the burnisher pencil does be a little bit more stiff in the material that it's binded with. Whereas the colorless blender is more like the actual pencil itself, the wax-based pencil, these are the summaries of the dry blending techniques. Moving on to the wet blending techniques the wet blending techniques that we did in this video, we started off with using a solvent which Zest It, and the advantages of this are that, you can use it, it's very quick to use. It's more environmentally friendly and it's not flammable, so it's less dangerous and it can be used indoors in studios, you can apply it with various tools, you can apply it with a brush, with cotton air buds, you can also apply it with compressed paper sticks like [inaudible] , like you use for pencils, so there are different methods of applying it. However, it has a wet blending method, you've got to ensure that you need watercolor paper for it. Whereas with the dry blending, you didn't need any. It makes no difference about what paper you use as long as it's a decent enough paper with good teeth. For the wet blending techniques, you need specific paper, you need paper that can take wet media. Then we moved onto the colorless marker, now the advantages of the colorless marker was that you don't need any additional tools to apply it, so you can apply straight out of the marker if you like, and you've got a lot of control. You can get many different types of colorless markers, I used Winsor and Newton pro-markers. You can use the Copic markers, Copic Kio or the Copic sketch markers. There are many different brands of markers that you can use, and they're cheap and readily available. I would give that one a go, that's a really good way of blending. The final way is using just common baby oil, and you can use applying a brush or an air bud just like you did with the solvent and Zest It. If I show you the back of the paper where we did the wet blending, you can see that with the wet blending, you do get some seepage that comes through, especially with the Zest it and with the baby oil. That's something to bear in mind that if your coloring something in, if you're using a coloring book, then I would avoid using the wet blending technique purely because it's going to see through to the next pages and leave a horrible, smudgy mark, greasy mark on the other end, and that's the last thing that you want on your lovely coloring book. That was the overall blending techniques for this beginner's class. Generally, I would advise you to do dry blending first, get used to it, and if you really want to try the wet blending techniques, maybe just try the Zest It, if you can get your hands on it and colorless marker. I think that's all for the blending parts of this class. Now we can move on to how to add shadows and light to your art work using Prisma course.
11. Adding Shadows and Light: Welcome back. Now let's look at shadows and lights. Whenever we're trying to do a colored pencil, a piece of artwork, whether it be in the form of realism, abstract work, illustration, whatever type of artwork you're trying to produce, whatever style you're producing your artwork in, in most cases, you're going to be looking at adding darks and lights to your work. What I'm going to do now is I'm going to cover three of the main ways that I add shadows and lights to the work that I produce. By all means, these are not the only ways to add lights and shadows or the only sequence of adding lights and shadows. These are just the methods that I find that I like to use and I would recommend these especially at this beginner level class. Firstly, I'm just going to highlight the three methods and then we're going to go into them and demonstrate them. Number 1, to add highlights and shadows, what we can do is we can use different values of the same color. Now by value, I mean darker or lighter shades of a particular color. Over here, in this demonstration, I've decided to go with the color green and I've decided that I'm going to add in some darks and some highlights on to this green color. The first step that you would need to take is select the color that you want to go ahead with from your Prismacolor set and find a lighter shade of that color, a midtone and a darker shade. This is how we're going to create those shadows and lights, varying into the blend of that particular color. Now it can be any color that you decide to choose. Prismacolor usually have quite a lot of variances in the values of each color. However, this also depends on the size of set that you have. If you've got the 12 set, then you're going to be limited. If you've got the 24 set, 36 or the biggest sets, then you've got more options to do this and choose from. But generally, that's what we need to do. I've decided to go with green. With green, I've got this midtone color here. Midtone basically means it's like the middle value shade of that particular color and that you can also find a highlight color, lighter tone of that, and also a darker tone of that. I've got these three colors here. I'll go and say exactly what these colors are once I've quickly run through the three methods. That was the first method. The second method is using complementary colors to add shadows in and also to add lights in using just general white. Complementary colors coming into the more technicalities of color and the color wheel and more color theory, this probably isn't best for the beginner stage but I've decided to go through this because I think it's good to have a slight understanding of how color works. We're going to come to the descriptions and how complimentary colors work in the color wheel when we come to that second option. That's the second option, to use complementary colors to add in shadows. The third option, the final option that I'm going to be demonstrating is to use the standard black or different gray tones to add in that shadow. Again to add in light, we would just use white. These are the three main methods. You can combine these methods so you don't have to just limit yourself just to the three of them in isolation. You can combine them and that is what I often do. The end result is always going to be different for each of these methods. I wouldn't say that one is better than the other or you should only do it this way because as I said before, art is about expression and it's really expressing who you are and what you want to achieve. If there's a certain way that you want to do something, to achieve a certain result, then you should go ahead and do that. I'm not going to say that you can't do it this way or you have to do it this way, these are just three options that you can try and see if you like them and combine them to however you want. Let's start off with the first option. We're using different values of the same color. As I've explained earlier on, I've decided to go ahead and demonstrate this with a green color. I've selected my midtone. The first instruction today is select your midtone. We have our midtone here. We've got this as a grass green. This is a nice mid-level green that will work nicely as the base midtone color. Then we need to select our highlight color so the lighter shade and value of that green. I've gone for this color here, it's called a true green. That's the Prismacolor number, PC 910. The other one was PC 909. If you want to follow this actual tutorial and you'd use the same colors I'm using, then just pick these out from your Prismacolor set depending on which set you've got. I have the 72 set and so if you've got that set and then you'll be able to find these colors from them. The darker shade of green that I've got here that I've selected, it's actually called dark green and that's PC 908. These are the three values that I'm going to use for my green shading. Let's make a start with this. I'm just going to demonstrate this. Again, like I said, the sequence of how you do this, it's entirely up to you but this is the preferred sequence that I like to do. I always like to add in my midtone value first. That's what I'm going to do here on the piece of paper. I'm just going to add in my midtone value. Well, let's just add in a nice layer of this midtone. Now coming to the layers again, when you're adding shadows and you're adding lights, you need to still ensure that you have enough tooth of that paper for that pigment to add a touch on like we described and illustrated in the previous videos. If you go ahead and burnish straight away with your midtone and follow this sequence, then you're not going to be able to get much of that shadow 1. I would suggest just doing maybe three or four layers of your midtone and spread it out evenly. Then you can practice this yourself before you actually start your artwork or your class project. I've just laid out this midtone value of green, the grass green, just keep that to the side over there. Now secondly, again you don't have to do this in this order but this is the order that I prefer to do this in. The second tone that I'm going to add in, the value, is going to be the lighter so I'm going to add in this true green color. I'm going to add in my lighter value on top. You can see all I'm doing is just adding that layer, overlapping the edge of the midtone and adding in another layer on top. You can see that differentiation. I'll just wipe away that excess wax that's come off. I'm just going in slowly in circular motions and you can see here's the overlap. You've got this overlap, over here, overlap of color. That's just basically blending that color in as we did with the blending techniques in the previous video. We're just going over it and I'm stretching this overlap more into the midtone with another layer, going in again with another layer. Just like this, we're just building this color to effectively add in this highlight. That's what we're really doing, we're adding more light with a lighter value of that green. You can see, I'm just slowly blending this in, adding more and more layers to it. Once I've reached maybe halfway down that midtone sample that I just did, then what I'm going to do is I'm going to go back in with the midtone. I'm going to lightly fill those circular motions starting that midtown back end. So you can see what that's doing is it's literally blending out that color, and it's looking a lot nicer and smoother. So you've got from midtone, mid value, to lighter value, then going back in with mid value. You can do this in stages as we did with the layering process and with the burnishing; can go in as many times as you like, but try keeping it light. Always starts off light because then you'll be able to maximize the amount of laser you can put in. So we've gone from midtone to light and I will gone back to midtone. Now I'm going to be adding in the shadow, the darker tone. So the darker tone is this dark green color. I'm going to do it exactly the same like I did with the highlight. I'm just going to start off at the bottom, and just cover the same amount of that midtone value as I did with the lighter tone, and we're just going to work this in. Now, if you've noticed, I've got my pencils very sharp, and that's another important thing that we need to maintain. That, if you don't have sharp pencils, then it's going to be a lot more difficult for you to do this technique. It's generally going to be difficult for you to do any technique would call it pencils, if you don't have them sharp. They're just not going to groove into that tooth of the paper. You really need to push that pigment in, and you're only going to get that pigment pushed in with a sharp pencil. So you can see now, I'm just doing exactly the same thing. I'm just overlapping in circular motions, using light to mid pressure. We've got a nicely old blend going on there. You can see that we've got dark Gray, going into a mid green, going into a light green. So it's created a very nice gradient, and I'm just going to go back in with that midtone, just like I did with the light color. I'm just going to go over the overlap. Then, I'm going to go over the midtone, really to blend it out with circular motions. So this is effectively burnishing this out. I'm adding again, more and more layers, to get that nice smooth transition. What you can do is you can add in, if you want to go and blend this out with some wet blending, and that we discussed in the previous video, you can use your alcohol marker. So just go over, and I'm going to keep it dry because I like to keep my blending dry. There you go. So I've just added back some of that midtone. So you can see the paper's still taking it because I'm going in light to medium pressure, and I'm building these layers in gradually. So we've just got into the midtone, switching back now to the dark green, to the shadow, which is going in a little bit more harder now to get that last bit of burnish in the circular motion, holding the pencil and the writing style. Now I'm applying medium pressure, am not applying hard pressure yet. I'm applying medium pressure, and I'm going a little bit higher, if you can see into that midtone value to really bring out that blend. Now I'm going to do is just turn back to my highlights color and did exactly the same on the top. I'm just going to go in with medium pressure, and in those circular motions am burnishing this down. So we're going in a circular, oval type motion, and we'll just bringing in that light to dark, and we're pretty much done with that. So you can see this gradual gradation, this gradient being created in this area here. So we've got dark, mid value, and we've got light. Just like this, what we can do is we can just add some depth and interests to our coloring in, so maybe your coloring in a leaf, or maybe your coloring again. I don't know, a tree branch or something like that, or even a brick of a house. You can add so much depth and interest using this technique. It's fairly easy, it's fairly quick. It won't take that much time. So that was the first method that we covered. So it was using different values of the same color. Now, the second method is using complementary colors. So I'll bring up a nice little graphic on screen, and we'll explain what complementary colors are. So complementary colors are basically colors in the color wheel, that are on opposite sides. So you can see on the diagram, we've got green, and at least slightly the values of green. The opposite side of the values of green, are more values of red tones. So you might be thinking red, how can you use red to add on to green.That don't really make any sense. Well it actually does because what red is it's a complementary color of that opposite color. So what that will produce is a slight earthy tones, so we will produce like a brownish tone. So let's demonstrate this. So what we're going to do is we're going to add, we're going to get the midtone again, the grass green. We're going to produce exactly the same swatch that we produced before. So we're going to start off with a swatch of that midtone value. It's bringing in slightly towards the bottom. You've got to remember with this because we're going to overlap this with the red, where we don't need space at the bottom because that red is actually going to effectively add our shadow on. So I'm adding this much area unlike before. What i did was I only had this much for the actual midtone and I added the dark at the bottom, the more dark. We don't need to add row red into this. The complementary color of green because we don't want it to be red, we effectively want it to just darken the green. So we've got our midtone value. We have added maybe three layers of this midtone. We just lie, to medium pressure. So you got nice coverage that, and now I'm going to add in the light. So let's add in the lights again like we did before. So again, adding that highlight green color, blending it in, nice round circular motions, overlapping over that midtone value to really creates a nice blend of color like we did before. I'm going to do exactly the same process before I add in the shadow color. Now, let's just go back and forth and lightly add in that green. Really blend it out and make it look really submitted in reality. Again with Prismacolors because they so soft, it's a soft core pencil, It just makes this process so much easier. Sometimes, when your pencils are a bit blunt or if you're using or more heavier pencils and not soft based, then this method is quite difficult to do. It's not that easy to achieve. So generally speaking, with Prismacolors, these techniques suggest, so much easier and you'll come to know this when we demonstrate the other types of pencils, the oil-based pencils and maybe some other styles of pencils in the upcoming classes in this series. So now, we're going to use the complimentary color and the opposite of the green on the color wheel is shades of red. So over here, I've got a crimson red, which is like a nice deep dark red. So what we're going to do is, we're just going to slowly add this on right at the bottom here. You can see that as we're adding the layer of this on, it's actually producing that dark, earthy tone. You can't really see much of the red on it because we're going in really light and it's producing effectively a brownish shade and that works so nice. When you use these complimentary colors, it's more natural looking. So if you're doing some blending on maybe a tree on some leaves, it's probably worth having a look at this technique to add a complimentary color instead of using a darker value of that same color. So what we're going to do is go back in with that base mid tone. So we're just going over that shadow, to really blend it out. You wouldn't even know that this is a red that we've used. It just looks like a darker green. It just looks so much more natural, doesn't it? The original green that we had here look great as well. This is just another way of achieving that result. So if you've got limited pencils, so for example, if you bought 12 set or 24 set, and you don't have three values of a particular color, then it's always a good idea to look at the complementary color because you always going to have the primary colors in your sets. Most sets come with the primary colors. Then you can easily use the complimentary colors to add-in that shadow. So either way you've got options. Obviously it's going to be a great way to add in some values: dark values and light values. But if you don't have the option, then you've always got the option of doing this. So all I'm doing here now is just adding in the layers to really blend this out nicely and now I'm going in with that medium pressure to really get that garnish on and you can see it looks really nice and beautiful. It's just amazing how color works in real life, it's just absolutely amazing how color works. So there we have it. We can move on to the final one. The final one, after this complimentary color method is to just basically use black or great sounds. Now, some people say you shouldn't use black or you shouldn't use black at all, it doesn't look natural. But seriously, it doesn't matter what you use. If you're after that particular effect and you like using black, then go ahead and use it, nobody can tell you, you can't do this and you can't do that. Art is free expression and it's all about what you like and what your texture is. What people can't show you and that's the purpose of these videos and these class is to show you options of achieving different results. So if you've got an option of doing it three different ways, why not try them all? You should always keep your options open but in the end of the day, it's entirely up to you. You might like to add black, you use pure black to get like vivid dark results. I personally like it in a lot my drawings. So I would advise that you use whichever technique you like and whichever results you can achieve from that technique. So again, all we're doing right now is we're just adding in that base mid tone value of that green and I'm going to do exactly the same as I did before. I'm just going to add in the highlight really to keep it consistent and so we can compare the results. We are just going in with the highlights in the circular motion and just adding in that layer, with medium pressure. I think we're pretty much done full that side, I would just go in and add another layer on it's own value. Try this out with different colors. You don't have to do it in this green. I mean, you can follow this class and use the greens and the colors that I'm using if you've got them at your disposal, otherwise, try it with something else. Try it with blues, maybe oranges or reds, whichever colors that are available to you, try them out. This technique will work on all colors and just give it a go and you'll be surprised with the results that you achieve. So we've a nicely [inaudible] going on there from light to dark, light to mid tone and again, all we're going to do now is we're just going to use a black Prismacolor pencil. So we've got the standard black pencil 908. We just going to lightly go in with the black. So we're just starting off at the bottom. Just remember if you are trying to darken a color don't go in too hard with a black straight away because if you want a nice blend, then you want to keep that pressure very minimal. So you can see I'm using very light pressure. I'm going to hold the pencil even further back so that my pressure is even lighter. So you can see that we're adding very light pressure to this and it's gradually darkening. So it's looking pretty good and you've got a lot of control. That's a great thing about using colored pencils, in my opinion. I think the control aspect is absolutely brilliant because it's a dry tool, it's a dry medium and you don't have to worry about something spilling on the side or your color bleeding into another color, it just works really nice. So you can see I'm gradually building that dark value at the bottom with this black. So there's no issue with this at all. Obviously the results are going to look slightly different and you can also do this with different values of gray. So in the biggest sets of Prismacolor, you get different gray tones. So I'll show you some great tone values that I've got here, so we've got a 50 percent gray hair. This is PC 105, it's a 50 percent warm gray, and then underneath we've got a 50 percent cool gray, which is PC 1063. So if you've got these pencils, try it out with these. You can overlap it, you don't have to stick to just black. So what I'm going to do is just add this gray on. You can see that even with the gray, you can get a nice differentiation of tone and value and dark in a slightly different way. So if that's the type of result that you want to achieve then go for it. So it's always a good idea to practice with a couple of different colors. Do so more swatches and there's going to be more of this on the worksheets. On the worksheet I provide you with a template with little boxes on these to practice. So sometimes if you don't have a template to color it on it's a bit difficult to just mess about on a scrap piece of paper, it just gives you a bit of guidance, doesn't it? This pencil is not a very good one because it's all coming apart from the edge, but not to worry. Nothing is ever perfect in this life, is it? No, it's not. So let's add in maybe this darker gray to warm gray this. As you can see, I'm just lightly adding in that gray in the circular motion. You can see that it's dark and [inaudible] that bottom parts of the college strips. So you've got dark shadow going into a mid tone, mid tone going into the highlights. So that's pretty much it for the shadows and highlights. I hope it's given you some idea of a couple of different methods of how you can do this. Again, if we just observe each of these methods, they produced a slight different result with the different value that we had on the first option. We've got more of, I would say, more of a natural blend compared to the other two. With the others., we've got more of a, I would say, a gradual blend, more contrast in the blend where we were using complementary colors. That will work for different scenarios. But again, it's entirely up to you, which one you want to go ahead and use. Then the final one, adding in the black, you can see that it's a slight difference in the structure of that gradation. But again, I'm going to keep saying this throughout this class, it's not about doing it the right way or the wrong way, it's about whichever way you prefer to achieve the results that you like. So you use these, practice these three methods I have discussed, use them alongside each other, use them individually, use them in isolation if you want, or just use a combination of them. You could start off using different values here or you can even add in a white pencil. That's another thing we could actually do. We could lighten up the area with a white pencil. So if you want to add a little bit more highlight on your actual color, you can add in a white pencil. If you remember, this is power of the white burnishing. So really we lighten a color you can add in a white pencil and you can do that over any of these. So I'm just going to do that with a white pencil, just like effects burnishing, but we're also lightning that color at the top. If that's what effect you like, then go ahead and do that. We'll do that on this one as well. So that's why it's always great to experiment with these colors because, every color and variation is going to give you something different and you can utilize that in your own work for whichever type of result that you want to achieve. So that's about [inaudible] for the lights and shadows of Prismacolors, I hope you practice this in your worksheet and in your artwork. I think what we'll do now is we'll move to doing a complete sketch using all of the techniques that we've done in these previous videos to come up with a nice summary of what we've learned so far. So I'll see you on the next one.
12. Worksheets: Welcome back. Before we start our complete full sketch using PRISMA color pencils with all different techniques that we've learnt over the last couple of lessons, it would be a good idea to have a go at these worksheets. I'm just going to quickly go through the worksheets that I've provided in this class. Now I've specifically designed these to follow the techniques that I've discussed in the previous videos in this class. There's three worksheets in total, they're all on a PDF. What you can do is you can just either view the worksheets online on your screen, or you can print them off on some decent paper. Cartridge paper or one of the types of papers that we discussed in the earlier lesson, and just work your way through them. Now, I've tailored these so that you can specifically follow the class lessons. We'll look at the first one here. We've got the PRISMA color premier worksheet. Now on this one, I've labeled this as pressure, blending, and lights and shadows. These are the three main techniques that we've learned. If you remember, we learned how to vary our pressure and create lights and dark tones of layering. We also created blending techniques, we went through various blending techniques. We went through the dry blending techniques, and the wet blending techniques. Do remember that if you're going to practice these wet blending techniques, then you do need to print the sheets outs on watercolor paper. That's really, really important because if you print them out on say, just normal sketching paper or cartridge paper, then your wet medium is going to soak right through and it's most likely going to reap your paper and you're not going to be very happy at the end of it. Decide which type of blending you want to practice. I would advise that you go for the dry blending first and give it a go because you can print as many of these out as you want. Give the pressure ago using different layers as we did in the layers lesson. Have a go at the burnishing, the white pencil, the blenders if you have them or just by layering, you can burnish as we demonstrated and also adding lights and shadows. If you can recall what we did with lights and shadows using three different variances, where we used color hues, we used the white pencil, we used gray-black pencils. You can try these and work, experiment with all the pencils if you like. It will give you a bit of a first hand experience on it. Over here what I've done is, I've divided the blending parts, into different steps. I've given you some indication of the types of colors you could possibly blend. You could maybe blend some read into blue. I divided the boxes in, so that it just makes it easier for you. We can just color in the actual color itself. We've got blue here, so if you lightly add in some layers of pure blue, you can just carry on over that complete square, add it in as you would normally do, take your time with it. Then on the third square here where we've got blue, you just carry on exactly the same and then you get your red color, which is the second step. Then you're going to go where it says red, you just going to lightly go over with red. You can see we're creating that nicely all blend of colors. Give this a go practice. Use different pressures when you're blending. Go into layering, go into burnishing. If you can get yourself a colorless blender try that out. If you have watercolor paper try it out on that. You don't need to print these off, you could just use this as a template and draw these boxes yourself if you like, just on your normal watercolor pad. Then moving on, I've given another example here with some different colors, so vary the colors, mix some primary colors together, mix some secondary colors together, and see what results you get. It'll give you a real feel for what you're trying to do. Or if you just want to follow the ones that I did using the oranges and the reds, then go ahead and do that. You don't have to use these working sheets because we've also provided you with just blank squares, so this could make it quite handy for you to actually do this type of burnishing or layering, experimenting. Again, print as many of these out as you want, and print on the right paper depending on the type of medium that you use. I thought I'll just quickly run through these three worksheets. We have the one with the actual steps on them with a bit of instructions and some guidance on what pencils and what colors to use. We have one that doesn't have anything, it just has box just like little template boxes for you to practice in. Then the third one is actually the same as the first one, but I've just not added any indications of colors or different steps. I've just left them blank so that you can decide by yourself how you'd like to use the pressure and I've added more squares to give you more options. Light and shadows, add your own light and shadow, do it with dark pencils, black pencils, whatever you like. I'm really trying to open this [inaudible] up for you to make it as easy as I can, because I know sometimes when you want to try something out, it's always nice to have a template to follow or use. That was the reasoning why I decided to design these up for you guys to just make this journey a lot easier for you. By all means you don't need to use these at all, if you're comfortable just trying out the methods just a normal inside a watercolor book, then go ahead and do that. That was it, that was just a brief reminder of some of the techniques that we did, and the worksheets that we've provided in this class. Let's move on to the exciting parts of creating our own sketch by incorporating all these techniques that we've learned in the next video. I'll see you on the next one.
13. Checklist and Complete Sketch: Welcome back. Now we are ready to start our first illustration or drawing or sketch using prismacolor pencils. Now at this stage, you would have practiced all the techniques that we've discussed in class up to now, and you would have completed the worksheets if you wanted to follow the sequence of the worksheets or if you didn't want to follow sequence on the worksheets, you could have just practiced those techniques on pieces of paper as we recommended. So at this stage, you should have a nice little first-hand experience of doing the techniques using pressure, using different techniques such as layering, burnishing, using some solvents or wet blending techniques or dry blending techniques. You would have had a nice little practice of that. So now is the time to start your first piece of artwork using prismacolor. Now before we start, there's a couple of things I would say have a checklist of these things before you actually start. This is just planning and preparation before you actually go ahead and start putting some artwork on the paper. So number one, the most important thing is to sharpen all your pencils. Now you should select the colors that you're after in your artwork or in your composition. Select all the colors before hand and sharpen all the pencils as we illustrated in the sharpening pencil video and make sure the pencil that you've got hasn't broken or it's not cracked or anything because there's nothing like using a pencil and then sharpening it and then it cracks and you can't continue to use it again. So make sure you give all your pencils a sharpen, even if they are quite sharpened already and they're ready to use, I would still give them a little sharpen because what that might do is initially show you whether that pencil is good enough and what you don't want is to start with a lovely color on the pencil, get really into the groove of things and then when you come to sharpen it, it's cracked and broken. So it's identify the bad pencils from the start. So get all your pencil sharpened nicely, get all your color combinations ready for the next step. So the next step would be to select the type of paper that you want. Now this will depend on if you've made your mind or if you're going to do wet blending or dry lending. So for this sketch that I'm going to do in this demonstration, I've not decided 100 percent yet and if you're in the same position, you don't know whether you're going to do wet or dry or a combination of both, I would recommend you go for the wet color paper. So by that I mean is the watercolor paper. So treat it as if you were going to do wet color blending. That way, if you're in kind of motion of doing your artwork and the coloring and then you decide, oh I should actually do some wet blending here, then you won't have to have that worry that, oh no I've used the wrong type of paper and I can't use wet blending. So to save yourself that hassle, it's probably just best to start off with watercolor paper. So that even if you don't decide to go ahead with wet blending, you can still go ahead and do it if the need arises. So I'm going to go with my hot pressed Bockingford watercolor paper and I'm going to do an A5 size piece of art and that's coming on to the next point. Ensure that this first sketch that you do, the first illustration that you do is small. Don't go and do a massive A4 or an A3 sketch and then later on be disappointed because you really getting into the groove of things there because this is just a beginner level stage and this is going to be your first or maybe second drawing with colored pencils. So just grab yourself some paper and again I'm using an A5, but I'm not going to completely do the A5, I'm just going to make a small square on the A5 as a border and then I'm going to illustrate in that and that's another good idea to do, don't worry about illustrating all the way to the edge of the paper. Just grab yourself maybe an A5 sheet or if it's smaller, maybe an A6 sheet and just draw something, do a sketch in the middle of that sheet using some realistic creates a border. That way you're working small and it's a lot easy to complete something that's small and if you make a mistake and you can't go and correct it then you're not going to feel too bad about losing all that pencil that you've used and another point, and this is an important point is to have a piece of scratch paper. So just a small bits of paper of that same paper that you're using just to test the pencils out on as you're going along. It's a good idea to test the pencils before you start your sketch so you can have a bit of the plan. If you don't test your pencils out and you start using them straight away on your illustration and they don't turn out the way you want, then you can avoid that situation by really testing out the color ranges that you've picked and it's always to have a good scratch paper next to you to really practice on that before you start or during your illustration on our work. Another important point is that you should make sure the sketch that you do, do it in light pencil. Don't go in with a very hard pencil, like hard marks on a pencil. So I would recommend you use maybe HB pencil or a 1H, 2H these are hard pencil leads. So they fairly light, they won't make dark marks. Whereas if you use a 4B or a 6B or an 8B pencil, they'll have very dark marks and what that will do is it will blend into the color of the pencil while coloring in. So avoid doing that, use a very light touch to do your sketch and use a putty eraser. So this is a putty eraser over here, these are really cheap to buy and again I'm going to have links to all these materials in the worksheets as we explained in the first one and also in the descriptions of the class. So do check these out, these are really cheap to use and you can use this to just lift off all that graphite work from your sketch to keep your illustration really light because it's important that you don't want those murky marks of graphite going into your coloring in. It will just spoil that clean look of color. So grab yourself a putty eraser, or even if you haven't got putty eraser just a normal eraser and lightly kind of erase out those marks, so you just had a faint sketch that you can follow. So make sure that your sketch is also correct. So spend your time getting your sketch right because once you sketch is done and you start applying color to the paper, then you can't really go back, it's very difficult to remove color from the paper and if your sketch isn't right,or if you're not happy with this sketch then once you colored it in, it's not going to be right size, then you're not going to be happy and you'll just be disappointed. So ensure that your sketch is right, spend a bit of time in your sketch, make sure it's right and don't over-complicate things. If you make a sketch really complicated in these early stages, these beginning stages, then you're just going to get frustrated because you are going to have to apply so much detail and color. Just keep your sketch really simple and that's why I'm going aim to do in this demonstration. We're going to keep it very simple, so I can use simple blending, simple colors and contrasts. In my coloring in and that way you can slowly build more complexities as you get used to this medium of colored pencil and PRISMA color especially for this class. Also keep your sharpeners close by so that you're going to use to sharpen because once you've run out, you're going to obviously have to replenish that with sharpening. It's always good to have all these things handy so that once you start, you can continue to do it. That's pretty much it. We just need to start our sketch. Again, we've gone through the main points which I'll bring up on the screen here. What I'm going to do is I'm going to start to sketch and then we'll move on to the coloring stage, so let's make a start. We have finished our sketch, and it took quite a bit of time to complete on this speed it up video. Obviously, it's going really fast and I thought, what I'll do is just really quickly little review of the techniques that I did, and these are all the techniques that we went through in the previous videos in the class. Basically, it took around about 2.5-3 hours. Now, that is a lot of time to do such a small piece of artwork. However, that's just the nature of these type of medium. With colored pencils, you're always going to spend a lot more time going in and out, building up those layers. I really started off this with the blue on the bottom parts of the scene and it was really going in with a base color. Again, when you go in, initially try avoiding burnishing straight away, like we discussed in the burnishing video. We want to really build up those layers. That's what I was doing. I was using different blues to build up that layer and really bring out that vibrancy and depth into this part of the drawing. Then I slowly moved onto this bush's areas, these mini little hills going in with the green and using the technique of going in lights, going in with a mid-tone and then going in with dark shadows as we did in the shadows and lights video, so we call it layering. We call it shadows and lines, just in these early stages over here. But remember, again, we did the sketch using a pencil. I did it with a H pencil. I think it was a H pencil or a 2H. Just to do a rough outline of what I wanted and until I was happy with that, only then, I went in with the actual color layering. That's the most important thing I would say you need to encompass before you decide to call it a paper, if you like. Again, just solely building upon these a little elements in different stages and then just layering the coloring. I was using a very light hold and very light pressure throughout the whole thing only when it came to the burnishing and maybe the third and fourth layers where I was increasing the pressure, that's when I decided to go in a little bit dark. However, you must have noticed that the actual background of the top area of this drawing, I laid out quite a lot of color with the layers. Then I went in with the promarker. It was actually the bushmarker not the promarker that I went in with. I went in with the brushmarker to blend out that color. You can see in the video while I was doing this, it was really lightening up that color. Again, this is a good point to mention that once you do use a wet medium, such as a promarker or zesty, you can still go back in. That's what I did. I added more and more layers with the darker tones and the pink shades to really bring out that vibrancy. You can do this in stages. You can add more layers on with the pencil, go back in with the red medium, then admiring until you're really happy. Then once I did that, I did the final burnish of the background, and you can see you've got a really nice transition going from dark all the way to light. It brings out a lot of interest in the drawing rather than just having a complete flat color. Then with the details on the house, I just went in really light for the undertone and then brought out a lot of the colors and contrast and shadows with different values of those colors. Right at the end, what I did was I outlined the entire piece using a black PRISMA color pencil. What that does is it really makes it pop out really. That's my style of illustration anyway. I like to illustrate with a lots of dark lines. That's why I ended up doing it. You can see some of the details over here, you can see that I've actually added in detailed work over the blending. That brings out some of that sketchy type detail using the black PRISMA color and the dark green colors. Again, the details using the bricks, using just a light orange and brown, then at the end, once I've finished and I was happy because to be honest with you, you can actually keep going on and on and on forever really until you've run out of color pencils. But, I thought it's the right point to stop. I just did a little border all the way round with an ink pen. Then what I did was I used the a gray PRISMA color with a ruler to just add in this background just using a ruler to give a border effect. That's pretty much it then for the sketching paths using PRISMA color is. I hope you've picked up some skills and some techniques in the videos that we presented in this class. What we're going to do now is let's just do a nice little summary round open some final thoughts on the next video. I'll see you on the next one.
14. Final Thoughts: Welcome back. This is the final lesson of the class, and we're going to just do a quick little round-off summary and some final thoughts on the Prisma color premier class that we've just completed. We learned pressure techniques, we learned how to apply different layers and how to increase and reduce the pressures and the saturation of the colors. We also learned different blending techniques in the dry form and in the wet form. We also learned how to add shadows and light to our art work, and at the end of this entire process, and I'm going to recommend that you do give the worksheets ago that we went through in the previous videos. If you get these worksheets and go and practice all of these different techniques and methods, and remember to keep your pencils as sharp as you can and to also vary the pressure and try different colors and variants, you will really get that firsthand experience in producing different marks with these pencils. Then once you've practiced a couple of different variants and practice the techniques using these worksheets or just practicing them on just normal paper, then you'll be ready to produce your first piece of our work. Now remember, as we said in the previous video, keep your first piece of artwork small. Use watercolor paper rather than using cartridge paper just in case you change your mind, whether you want to go with dry blending or wet blending and really give this a go and flesh it out in your drawings. I hope you've enjoyed this, please do try out the class projects and also download the sheets, the worksheets where you can have a look at all the supplies that I've gone through in this entire class and you can read up on the reviews on these materials and products. Now, as I said before, this is a series of colored pencils, so we're going to be moving on from the Prisma color pencils to another type of pencil. It's going to most likely be the Faber Castell Polychromos, which is an oil-based pencil. Then after that we may even go into some charcoal pencils, some pastoral pencils, even really high-end pencils. Do stay tuned and make sure you follow me on Skillshare to get the latest information of all these upcoming classes that I'm going to be creating. Also follow me on Instagram where I post daily, the type of classwork that I do and the artwork that I do in my day-to-day life as a graphic designer and illustrator. Also stay in touch within this Skillshare portal. Send me any questions that you have regarding this class or any upcoming classes, would be more than happy to reply to all of your questions. Thank you so much for your time. Thank you so much for your patience and hopefully, I'm sure you're going to enjoy this new adventure of colored pencils. Give this a go, try it out. I hope this journey is really good for you, any questions, let me know and hopefully I'll see you in the next one. Take care of yourself, keep sketching, keep coloring, and peace.
Imran Mughal, Graphic Designer & Illustrator
