How to Blend Colored Pencils: Realistic Drawings for Beginners

1. Introduction: Blending colors together is an absolutely crucial skill that I use in every colored pencil drawing that I create. But you might be unsure of where to start. I want to show you today that, actually, it's always the same process that I use in every one of my drawings, and the process is simpler than you might expect. My name's Gemma Chambers, and I've been making online art tutorials since 2020. I've helped tens of thousands of people improve their art on my YouTube channel. But today, I want to be quite specific. I want to cover one of the absolute core techniques for drawing with colored pencils. Let's go through how to blend. Now, I will go through all the materials that you'll need, as well as going through this core technique, and we can cover this technique by drawing this fun and bright gradient. From here, I want to show how this technique can be applied to actual drawings. And we can do this by drawing some colorful ice lollies. I'll show you the full process that I use to create these. So let's get blending. 2. Class Project: Now today we have two different class projects. There is the colorful gradient and the ice lollies. The gradient is amazing for practicing the techniques, really getting a feeling on how this works. And then we can put that into practice with the ice lollies. Now, I've chosen, particularly these ice lollies for a few reasons. First up, I really like the colors, particularly the rocket lolly is so lovely and vibrant and all of the colors blend really nicely from one into another. Not the only place colours are blended, though they are blended throughout the drawing. Generally speaking, everything here is very smooth. We don't really need to worry too much about any texture, focusing on how to mix these colors together. Now, I will show you everything you need to create these eyes lilies, including how to make the sketch. But if you want to use my sketch, I do have a light sketch line and a dark sketch line version. The light sketch line is so that you could print the sketch directly onto your drawing paper. And the darker sketch lines are for if you want to trace. Also include details of all of the colors that I'm using in this ice lolly. When you've finished either the gradient or the ice lollies, please do upload them to the class projects. I would love to see what you've done. Let's talk about the materials that you'll need. 3. The Material You'll Need to Blend Colored Pencils: Let's think about the materials that you need to blend colored pencils together, and the most important material is colored pencils. Now, I'm drawing both the gradient and the ice lollies with polychromos colored pencils. These are professional colored pencils. But you don't need expensive pencils like these. You can create beautiful drawings with something like crayola. Now, I'm drawing this with pencils from the set of 60 polychromos. Whatever you're using, I would recommend getting a pencil set of at least 36. It's just a bit easier if you've got more colors to choose. What's actually much more important than the pencils is the paper. We'll go through this in a lot more detail in a second, but essentially the backbone for blending colored pencils is to build up the colors in a series of light layers. And what we need is a paper that's able to take all of those layers of pencil. So we won't be able to use something like printer paper or sketch paper. It's just not going to be possible to build up all of the colors. I like working on something called bristle board. This is a very smooth paper, and it's almost thick like a card. If you are only to invest in one thing, definitely invest in the paper over the pencil. Next up, the final thing you need to create a soft blend is a pencil sharpener. It is absolutely key to work with a really sharp pencil. Now, I use this hand crank pencil sharpener. I particularly like that I can change the blade when it gets blunt, but you don't need a pencil sharpener as fancy as this. Anything that creates a lovely sharp point on the pencils is what you need. So those are the three tools that you need to draw the gradient, but let's also talk about the extra materials we'll need to draw the ice lollies. And the first item is actually an optional item, a jelly roll pen. This is a white gel pen that goes amazingly over the top of colored pencils. It's really good for adding small white details in a way that we can't with just colored pencils. This is a pen that I use at the very end of the ice lollies to add in all of the little light glints. I do think the drawing still looks lovely without this jelly roll pen. So if you don't have one, don't worry. Next up, if you want to create your own sketch for the ice lollies, you will need a pencil, eraser, and a ruler. And from here, the next material you'll need is actually not something you can buy. Is something you'll need to make. This is a set of color swatches. So for every set of pencils that I own, I make a set of swatches. What I do is draw out a grid and go from as light as I can to as dark as I can with every color, and then I label it. And this shows me what those colors actually look like on the paper, the kind of paper that I'm going to draw on. It stops me from relying on the barrel of the pencil or the lead, which don't tend to be very accurate. Hear me refer to these swatches a lot. I am going to use them to compare to my drawing and my reference photo to see which color needs adding and generally find the most appropriate color. Now, the final thing you'll need is some way of looking at a reference photo. For every drawing I create, I always work from a reference. I find this is the best way to create a lovely realistic drawing. Now, I like doing this on my iPad. I particularly like that I can zoom in to see all of the details. But you don't need an iPad. You can always print out the reference photo. Those are the materials you'll need not only for the initial gradient, but also to draw the ice lollies. Let's talk about how to blend. 4. How to Blend: Let's think about how to blend, and the whole process of blending relies on something called layering. I did talk about this very briefly in the material section. So layering is where you gradually and lightly build the pencil up one color on top of another rather than just pressing really hard with the pencil. What this does is gradually allows the colors to mix together and generally makes a much softer color. So let's look at using this and drawing the gradient. Generally going to start here from the left and work my way towards the right. And what I'm going to do is just put down each color one at a time to kind of map everything out. I want to work out how big each section of color needs to be. So I'm starting here with a very dark red, and as I mentioned, I want to be putting this down really nice and lightly. So the first thing I'm doing here to help me with that is holding the pencil much further back than you might expect. Rather than holding the pencil really close to the tip, I'm holding it about halfway down the barrel, and that literally stops me from being able to press too hard. I want to put down the pencil as smoothly as possible, so you'll notice that I'm working in some kind of circular motions or oval motions rather than just scribbling back and forth with the pencil. And that combined with pressing lightly creates a really lovely soft color that we're going to be able to build on. Now, the final thing is that it is so important to work with a sharp pencil. The pencil is going to go down much smoother and more consistently with a sharp pencil. See that I'm just blocking in the very left hand side, kind of fading it out towards the right a little bit. It doesn't need to be perfect. I just want to be getting something down, so I can kind of work out where all of these colors are going to go. So once I'm happy with this first dark red, I'm then going to do exactly the same with a slightly more orange red. So you can see me fading it out towards where the edge of this section is going to be, and I'm also going to use this color to just slightly go over that darker red kind of overlap the colors a little bit, so they begin mixing together. Let's work all the way along going through all of the different colours, so I'm building up the orange here, again, overlapping that red a little bit and fading it out towards the right hand side. And the same with the yellow here, working in circular motions, holding the pencil nice and far back, so I'm pressing lightly and going over the orange color to the left. By the time that I've gone over all of the colors, I'm left with a very, very faded and muted section that looks like this. And then all we're going to do is keep going over it. So I'm going to work from the left to the right to the left to the right and back and forth until what I have is a really lovely and vibrant color. That's literally it. And I want to keep doing that until it looks nice and bright. Now, I will get to a point where the colors are looking vibrant, but I can still see some little white spots of the paper showing through. It's not a completely solid, perfect blend. Generally speaking, up until this point, I have been pressing really lovely and lightly throughout. But as I get to the end and I want to get rid of those white spots, I can now start pressing more firmly. So I want to finally blend these colors together, applying a bit more pressure. I'm not applying full force, but I am applying more pressure than I have been up until now. Generally speaking, what I want to be doing to apply this pressure is I want to be using the lightest color in each section. So right now, you'll see that I'm using the orange pencil, and I'm using this to press firmly not only over the bright orange section, but also over the red section. I don't want to use the dark red pencil to try and blend the lighter red because I'm just going to end up covering up that whole color. The orange section's going more towards the yellow, I just want to smooth that out. I'll lighten up my pressure here so that it's nice and soft towards the edge. But where I'm going over the red section, you can see I'm pressing much firmer just to finally blend these colors together. But I won't do this until all of the color is looking very bright and vibrant and it's pretty much all been built up. Do note that I'm holding the pencil closer to the tip here so that I can apply that pressure. I can then do exactly the same with the yellow pencil blending out the edge of the orange section because this is the lightest color that I've got here. What that leads to is this really nice blend. Now, I think it's very important to firstly note that the light pressure for the vast majority of this is so important. It's going to look really harsh if you just press really hard. It isn't until right at the very end where there's just the smallest white spots showing that I want to be applying any sort of pressure. Also remember that you don't expect it to be completely perfect. You're not a printer. So that's the general method that I use for blending colors together, particularly focusing on layering. Let's now use this same technique to build up the ice lollies. And what I want to do is work through the process that I always do to draw a picture. So let's start off by looking at the reference photo. 5. Studying the Reference Photo: No whenever I'm drawing anything, I always work from a reference, as I mentioned earlier. But what I like to do when I've selected my reference photo is just take a minute to have a really good look at it. I want to think about the main things I'm going to bear in mind. So let's look at the ice lolly reference photo and you'll see a bit more what I mean. Now, the first thing that's particularly standing out to me is all of the patches of light. There is light coming from the left hand side, and then there's a bit more of a shadow on the right. And there's all of these light glints all along each of the ice lollies. So here the light is in kind of strips going down and on this Ill, it's in patches on this left hand side with some lines in between, which is similar to this one. Now, it is worth noticing that these patches of light aren't actually white like you would imagine. This patch of light here, for example, is a light blue. This one's a light yellow, this one's a pink. They don't so much look to me like white patches, and adding those light colors on here is going to give this an extra little dimension. Also noticing how vibrant all of the colors are. So looking at these lollies one at a time, this lolly here. Even the kind of creamy yellow sections, it's pretty bright, even on the right hand side on the shadow. It's kind of a greeny gray yellow here. This is quite a dark, rich green. But on this lolly, look how bright this red, orange, yellow and green are. There's some darker shadowed areas, particularly around the edge and on these dips along here. On the most part, we're going to want to build up some pretty bright colors. I'm also noticing on this lily here that weather, particularly blue meets the yellow, for example, there's kind of a slightly green line down here where those colors are mixing, and you can see it here as well. It's a little bit orange here. So these colors do kind of blend together a little bit. You assume that they're just going to be standalone strips of color, but they're blending a bit more than maybe it might appear at first. These ice lollies are on a plate. I actually think it will look better if we don't draw it on a plate. So I'm going to draw just the ice lollies and kind of try and make up a light shadow from underneath. I just think it's going to end up looking odd if we draw it on the plate. So those are the main things that I'm bearing in mind to begin with. Let's create our sketch. 6. Create the Sketch Outlines: Let's create our sketch. And to do this, I like to use something called the grid method. This is where I draw a grid on my drawing paper and on my reference photo, and I only draw what's in each individual square. This stops me from trying to draw an ice lolly and just focuses on drawing a series of shapes. Instead, I create a much more accurate sketch this way. I've created all of my sketch, I can then use an eraser to erase the grid lines. Now, the most important thing here is that you press really nice and lightly. In my sketch lines here I've pressed firmly. That's literally so you can see it on the camera. Actually, you'll see that my lines are a lot lighter than this. You can barely see them. That's what we want to do or it'll end up showing through at the end. Now remember, if you don't want to create your own sketch lines, you can use mine in the class resources. Let's now get started with drawing. 7. Build up the Base Layers: Going to start this drawing in the way I usually would, working from the lighter colors gradually towards the darker colors. And I want to begin by building up the lightest color that I can see in each section. So let's start off by looking at the ice lolly on the left hand side. And I'm looking at the lighter strips, these kind of creamy strips. Want to compare this to my color swatches that I've got from my set of colored pencils and find the closest match to this light color here. And I'd say it was close between this being a cream, so a yellow or this color that I'm actually using, this is the lighter warm gray. I don't think either color is a perfect match for these light strips on the ice lolly, but I think that the gray is a slightly closer match. So what I'm going to do is just block this color in and go along all of the strips, putting down this color really nice and light. As I say, the most important thing is to get this color down lightly, and you'll notice that I'm not holding the pencil really close to the tip. If I hold the pencil a little bit further back, it literally stops me from being able to press too hard, and the pencil goes down much lighter and therefore more consistently. Now, I also want to be putting this pencil down as smoothly as possible, so I'm working in light little circular motions rather than just scribbling back and forth with the pencil. Also put this color on the stick of the lolly. Once again, I don't think that this is a perfect match for this lolly. I think the lolly is going to be a series of colors all mixed together. But I do think that it's the closest, lightest color I have right now and we'll be able to mix together those other colors. So let's block in all of the ice lolly sticks. You'll still see I'm holding the pencil not close to the tip. I'm not holding it as far back as you sometimes see me do, because I do need to be reasonably accurate about where this pencil's going. I want to make sure that I'm staying within my sketch lines of this ice lolly. Let's just shade in this last lolly. Once again, working in these circular or Oval motions to try and get it as smooth as possible, pressing nice and lightly. It's also so important to always have a sharp pencil. The pencil will go down much more consistently if you do. And from here, I'm going to move on to the next section. So I once again want to be looking for the lightest color I can see in the next area. So I'm looking at these lightest patches on the lolly along here. This it doesn't so much look like a light green to me, and it's certainly not a white. It looks like a very, very light blue. So I'm going to use the light ultramarine pencil to just put a little bit of this color down roughly where those patches of light are going to be. I'm not going to worry about blocking this in over the whole of the green strips. I'm just going to put it where that little patch of light is, but I'm not mapping out the shapes perfectly. I just want to put basically a very light blue blob where each light patch will be. Also just put something down a very light patch of blue where this blue drip is down the bottom here. And I'm going to do the same on the blue strips on this ice lolly on the right hand side. So you can see how lightly I'm working along here. This is so important. And I am literally just on those blue strips blocking in this color on generally the left hand side of that strip. Worth bearing in mind that there are so many different vibrant colors within these ice lollies. We are going to be working through a whole host of different bright colors and kind of flitting a bit between the colors. But I think it's going to be easiest if we focus on filling in all the blue, for example, and then all of the yellow and working one color at a time. So now let's fill in the lightest color on the red section. So as I mentioned, on the patches of light on the red, I actually think that they're more of pink. So I'm going to put this color. This is Rose carmine. I'm going to lightly block this in again, on the left hand side of all of the red patches. Nice and lightly. You can see I'm still holding the pencil quite far back, and I'm still working in circular motions. I have also made sure to keep my pencil nice and sharp. And although it looks pretty obviously pink at the moment, when we add the other colors around this, it's actually going to start looking a lot more muted and we'll probably have to add more of this later. But that's okay. Once I filled in the pink pencil, I now want to think about the next most obvious and lightest color I need to add. So I'm actually going to move on now to a yellow, partly because I am going to need to add light yellow to the light strips on the lolly on the right, but also looking at the light strips on this lolly on the left. As I mentioned, I think it's a mixture of gray and yellow and some other colors. So I'm just going to add a little bit of this light yellow. This is the cream pencil. That's the lightest yellow that I have in my set. I'm just going to add that along those light strips, and I'm also going to add it on the rocket lolly. We don't have any colors on the rocket lolly at this point yet. What I'm going to do is start adding yellow to where roughly those light strips are going to go on that lolly. So again, I don't think that the strips of light on the rocket lolly are very bright white. They're more like a very light yellow. Maybe with a few subtle colors, but we can add those in later. For now, I'm just going to block in where those light strips are going to go with this bright yellow, and then we can build up other colors over the all of these colors are very, very light. You can slightly see where they're going. We need to build up these lightest colors, and then we can start working on the mid tones in a second, and it's all going to be a lot clearer and easier to see. But it is so important to start with these light colors, and you can be quite rough really about where the colors are going, but we need to get something down on those lightest area. Start focusing on the lolly on the left hand side, and I want to get something down on all of the green areas. So I once again want to compare the reference photo to my color swatches and think about the most obvious color that I need to add on the green sections. So I'm looking for this kind of lighter green around here, which is kind of the next darkest color after the very light patches. It's, as I've said, much darker on this right hand side. I think the earth green yellowish is the closest green to this ice lolly and the closest green to that next darkest color. So what I'm going to do is very carefully start mapping in the shapes of each of these green sections. So I find it easiest to start off by mapping in the outline so really work out where the edge is of the section I want to mark in here. I'm just going to block in the whole thing. So you can see I have mapped in the outline, particularly around the top. I can now work in circular motions, and even though this right hand side is going to need to be so much darker than this color, I can start off with this color, and then we can add darker colors over the top, and it's going to add a lot more richness and blend these colors together much better. Also wants to be mapping out the general shape of that patch of light because I don't want to just shade in the whole thing, go over that patch of light, or then this blue won't show through. So there's the main patch along here. There's a little line going through the middle, and there's also a little light patch around here. Now, I would say that it's probably patchier than what I'm going to draw, but that's okay. We can always tweak this later. You see, I have drawn in the outline of that patch, and then I'm applying light circular motions just to shade around that patch. Now, I think the most important thing to remember in this first section is that we're not trying to create a perfect ice lolly. What I'm trying to do is just put something down so that I kind of have my bearings I know what's going to need to go where. Let's move on to the next section. Once again, you'll see that I have mapped out the outline. And then I can use circular motions to block in the color. So I'm once again here marking out the edge of the patch of light, and then I can use circular motions to shade this in as well. So looking at the patch of light here, we've got kind of one main section here and then a smaller section here. And it's the same down here. We've got a main section here and a smaller section down here. And there's just one kind of circular with a little dip in it, light patch here. Literally all I'm doing here, it's sort of reasonably time consuming, but I'm just working my way down carefully blocking in some of the green on each of these sections. And this is helping make it much clearer to see how the ice lollies built up, and again, what needs to go where. Now, as I get to the end of this bottom section and add all of the nice soft shading down here, I don't want to forget about the very bottom of the ice lolly. So down this bottom here, look at how we've got this little extra bit of green. I don't want to forget to add that in. It's kind of wrapping around the lolly stick. It's mapping the shapes for this as well, and just lightly block that in. Now, before I move on with the green, I want to think about if there's any other section that this green is a good match for. And I'm particularly looking at the very bottom of the rocket. So what I want to be doing here is working around those patches of light, and again, just getting something marked in. So you'll see I am once again drawing in an outline and then shading in up to that outline. So drawing in the outline of this patch of light. Now, I do have a little bit of a guide here because I have marked in where I think these patches of light are going to go with that yellow pencil. Noting that down on the bottom of this ice lolly, we've got a patch of light here, a much thinner patch of light here, another one here. There's three on this left hand side, and then there's two more. And although this patch here, for example, is quite sparse, I'm still drawing it in as a solid line for now, and I can adjust that a bit later. But I just want to be getting an idea of where that patch of light is going to be going and just getting some sort of color down on the paper. Let's follow and map in the line along the bottom of the lolly working around that orange drip that's down here, and then I can work in circular motions once again to block in this area. And you can see because we've got so many colors to build up, the base layers are going to take a little while. It's going to take a little while to get something down in each area. As I say, simply because there's so many colors to add, we've obviously got yellow, orange and red to add on the rest of this rocket then we have all of the red, blue and yellow to add on the lolly on the right hand side. So because it's so lovely and colorful, it's just going to take a little bit longer to build up these initial colors. But that's literally all I need to do for this bottom section. You can see it's not looking amazing, but we've got something here that we can start building off of. And then we'll be able to think about adding in the base layers on the top of the rocket lolly. Before we do that, I'm actually going to add a bit more color onto the light sections on the rocket lolly here. Now, as I mentioned, the light strips here are kind of a mixture between yellow and gray and maybe some green around here as well. I don't think I have enough color on this right hand side at this point, so I'm just going to add some of this yellow. This is quite an earthy kind of yellow. This is the naples yellow. Just going to block in a little bit, particularly on the right hand side, but also kind of where the green is meeting this light strip, it looks quite yellow, so going along the edge here. But I want to make sure that I'm avoiding those patches of light. So you'll see I'm pressing much lighter as we get towards the left, but I just want to try and make a nice smooth gradient going towards that right hand side. We will build up a lot more color over this, but for now, I just want it to be a little bit more bright yellow. So you'll see kind of I'm working from the lighter colors towards the darker colors. But I am also thinking about if I need to add any extra colors there's any colors that are missing from what I've added in. And I can't stress enough. I don't expect these patches to go straight to looking amazingly perfect. We're just gradually building them up. Now on a few areas on this lolly, I am adding a little bit of the yellow onto the green. If it kind of looks like the green needs to be made a little bit more yellowish green. And that's particularly over on generally the left hand side to the left of that patch of light. So you can see I'm adding a little bit along here, just a tiny bit. Really, I don't need to add a lot of color, and it just tweaks the green that we've got. Right hand side of the green, we will be building that up with a much darker color in the next section. Now, let's think about where else we need to add this yellow color. And this, I would say, is the lightest yellow that I can see on the yellow section of the rocket lolly. So let's block in this area with a block of yellow, once again, avoiding those light strips. On the left hand side here where there were three light strips on the green section, actually, one of those light strips kind of dissolves away. So we've only got two strips of light on the left. There's then this very big prominent one towards the middle, and there's one on the right hand side. And you'll see with this color, I'm still pressing lightly. I'm still working in circular motions. I'm ever so slightly overlapping that green with the yellow to just very slowly begin blending these colors together. To clarify, we don't want a perfectly smooth blend at the moment. And actually, it's quite a kind of fast blend between the green and the yellow, for example, because the rocket is sorted into sections. So although we need to blend the colors together and make a little gradient, I don't want to make a massive and perfect gradient like you often try and make because that's not what we can see on the ice lolly. Just marking down this right hand side where the edge of the lolly is, and then I can shade out from that line, making sure I also do the same with the light patch on the left here. And then once again, block all of this in. So it's not looking amazing at the moment, but that's okay. We're starting to get something down in each section. So let's keep working. You'll notice, I keep generally working from the left to the right. I just find it's the easiest way to work to work in quite a kind of methodical. Let's use this same yellow to start filling in the yellow patches on this lolly on the right hand side. So right now, all we have on this lolly here is some very light yellows, pinks and blues for the light patches. Let's just start blocking in the whole of these shapes so that we're a bit clearer on what's going well. Worth bearing in mind that I can still very lightly see my sketch lines here. So I'm just following that sketch and working around that patch of light to kind of, as I say, make it a bit clearer what's going to go where. So you can very lightly see the sketch lines. It's not easy, but I can see them a lot clearer in real life, and hopefully you can see your sketch lines reasonably clearly. So let's do the same for this patch up the top, and then we can move on to the next color. So still generally working from the left of the drawing to the right, the next color that I need to add on the left side of the drawing is we need to fill in the orange patch on the rocket lolly. Going to pick a reasonably vibrant orange. This again, is the closest color that I have in my set to the orange on the rocket. And before we fill in the area towards the top, let's start off by just going over this drip down here. So that's this drip here. You'll see that it's quite a distinctive shape that I have marked in on my sketch, but it also has these two patches of light, a little dot at the top and a kind of strip and a dot at the bottom. So let's mark the outlines of those shapes before working in circular motions to just block that in as well. So I'm just trying my best to get this as accurate as I can. It doesn't need to be perfect. I'm not spending ages trying to make it absolutely exactly the same, but I do want it to be reasonably close. So just trying to get that dot mapped in. And then I can move on to the top of the ice lolly up I'm still doing exactly the same thing, avoiding those light strips, marking in nice and clearly to the edge of the lolly, and I'm slightly going over the yellow as well just to blend these colors together a little bit. But I'm stopping with this color just before the red section cause we'll add the red on the top in a short while. The most important thing here is that we need to be pressing really nice and lightly and trying to work as smoothly as possible. This ice lolly will need to be very nice and smooth. So you'll see I'm working in the circular motions along here. And so once I've blocked in the top orange section, let's also just map in some of the darker shadowed strips coming down. So on this lolly, it's got some dips, some grooves going down here. Some of these grooves on the yellow section look very orange, particularly here and here and a little bit along here. Let's use this orange pencil to mark in those grooves and get a bit of an idea on where these shadowed areas are going to be. Now, I do think that these strips are orange. They look a bit much in just this bright orange on its own. So later on, we'll be able to tone these down with other colors. But for now, I just want to mark in where these shadowed areas will be. And that's generally to the left of the light patches. So you can see this is slowly starting to look a bit like a lolly. It's obviously not looking very realistic. And it's got a long way to go, but we're gradually getting something that looks a bit like an ice lolly. Also use this pencil to go over a lot of the red sections on this lolly on the right hand side. So when you look at these red sections, I feel particularly along the bottom. This here, for example, is much more of an orange than a red. It's more of a red at the top, but down here, because it's close to the yellow, I guess, it's more orange and down the bottom down here. And there's orange down here and here. It's blocking a lot of these shapes with this orange, and then in a second, we can go over it with the red. You'll see I'm working through this in the same way. I'm marking out the light shape first, and then working in circular motions to just generally block orange in on this section. So this is exactly the same process, so I'm going to go through this a little bit faster. Do you notice that I've added orange onto the top of this ice lolly. There's a very small sliver up here that we don't want to miss. I really just want to be blocking orange in and then we'll go over the top of bit with the red. I also just going to mark in this drip down the bottom in the same way that we did for the lolly on the left hand side. I can move on to the red pencil. This is quite a nice and vibrant, slightly orangy red, and I'm going to use this to go over the top of the rocket. So going again, around those patches of light, and then I'm going to block this color in slightly going over the orange to try and get a pretty nice blend. I'd say that the orange and the red are the colors that are blended together the most. I need to get the smoothest color blend here. And actually, that red is coming a little bit down the left hand side as well. So I just want to add that in before then blocking in the whole of this top section. So I'm happy with the rocket lolly, let's think about the lolly on the right hand side. And here I want to be going over any areas that need to be a darker red. So that is generally along the top. Note that there is a dark red line going around here, and then it's a lighter strip on the right hand side. So I'm generally going to need to do that the whole way down. Again, there's a lighter strip along here. We're going to need to add a line of red along here and then shade along this section up the top. And similar in this section, we need to shade along the top on here, but I don't need to add as much down the bottom. I'll add a little bit of red along this darker line here, but I really want to avoid this lighter strip here. And that is very slowly starting to add a little bit of shape into each of these lolly sections. Just adding a light little bit of the red over the top of what we've already got here and just beginning to mark in the shapes. I can't stress enough, though, it doesn't need to be perfect. We're going to tweak and add to this a lot in the next few chapters. Once I'm happy with the red sections, I'm generally happy with the rocket lolly at this point. We've got something down in each section. I now want to think about focusing on the blue on this lolly on the right hand side. So let's add in this turquoise pencil do exactly the same as I did with the yellow and the orange and red. Marking the outside sections here, and then shading, avoiding that patch of light. It's very much the same that I need to do. Once again, we're just marking things out and working out what roughly is going to go. By going through all of these sections and building up all of these colors nice and lightly, it means in the next section, it's going to be so much easier to start building up these colors a bit more and generally getting things marked in a bit darker and a bit richer. But at least we'll know roughly what's going where we kind of have our bearings. Now, honestly, I can't stress enough how important it is to be having a sharp pencil. It's amazing what a difference it makes shading in areas like this with a sharp pencil versus a blunt pencil. So I've marked in all of the sections, what I then want to do is just add one other color to the blue areas in a similar way to what we did with the orange and the red on the red sections. Some of the darker areas on the blue. I think just to map in the shapes a bit clearer, I want to get them marked in. So I'm looking at how dark blue it is along here, and there's once again a light strip down the right hand side, and it's darker along here and all the way up here where the blue meets the red. The same along here, there's this dark blue line along here and coming up. And there's a darker patch up the top here and all along here and this top sort of corner here. So let's use this pencil. This is the dark indigo. It's a very, very dark blue. I'm not going to press hard with it. I'm going to build this up nice and lightly. I just want to mark in where those patches are going to be and generally work along all of those darker sections. So you can see I'm just lightly building up this color on top of that turquoise pencil that we've already added. Starting to add a very small amount of shape to these sections. Now, the last thing I want to do in this chapter is just put a little something extra down on the lolly sticks. So as I mentioned, the color isn't looking right on these lolly sticks. I think the gray was the closest color to begin with, but it needs to be more of a light brown, and it's got quite a dark shadow going around the right hand side. So on all of the lolly sticks, they've got a shadow coming around this right and down the bottom, and then down the bottom, it kind of fades up into the lolly stick. There's a bit of a darker kind of orangy brown here, but generally speaking, all of the lolly sticks look pretty similar. Use this pencil to lightly shade over the top of the gray to just begin to slightly tweak that color. And then I'm also going to use this pencil to add that darker line around the edge in a second. Let's go along each of these lolly sticks, just lightly shading over the top. It's always amazing to me how just adding a small amount of color really changes the whole look of this lolly stick, for example. It's only a small amount that we need to adjust that color. Once I've gone over all of the lolly sticks, I'm just going to mark in that darker line on the right hand side. So just nice and carefully following my line of my sketch and blending a little bit down the bottom up into the lolly stick. As I said, it's a little bit kind of faded down that bottom. So let's do that on all of the lolly sticks, building up a bit more color towards the top. And then going around the edge, and I'll do it to the lolly stick on the right hand side. So by the end of this first section, what you'll see is you have all of the lollies mapped in. We have all of the main colors and shapes marked in. It's just obviously not looking very realistic or very vibrant. But that's okay. We can build on that in the next few sections. But that is it for this first section. 8. Brighten up the Colours: Now this chapter, I want to focus on gradually starting to brighten up these ice lollies and generally gradually working towards the darker colors. So I'm going to start off focusing on the lolly on the left hand side, and I want to be thinking about the next darkest color. Any other areas that need to be made darker? So I'm particularly looking at the green strips to begin with. Some areas on these strips of green are really very dark. But I don't have any dark colors built up here at the moment. So I'm going to use this color. This is kind of the darker version of that earth green yellow. I'm going to use this to mark in all of the shapes that I can see within this green section that does need to be darker. So, for example, you'll see that it's pretty much all down the right hand side, and then on this top section here, it's got a kind of patch of darker green here. It's also darker green in this bottom right hand corner. And there's a darker patch here, admittedly not as dark as down here. So let's with, again, a nice and sharp pencil, start shading this in and just making some of these areas a little bit darker. Now, I'm using exactly the same process as I did in the last chapter. I want to be pressing really nice and lightly. I am holding the pencil closer to the tip here, literally because I want to be pretty accurate with where this pencils going, and holding it closer to the tip just gives me a bit more control over where that pencils going. Also still working with a nice and sharp pencil, and you can see I'm still working in circular motions to try and get this down as smoothly as possible. There's pretty much no texture in any of these ice lollies. So we're going to be working in circular motions throughout. So let's look at this second section and see where the darker areas are here. So on this strip, again, the darker areas more on the right hand side. There's quite a defined line down this side. Then there's a slightly lighter patch here, and then it gets darker around here and all along this middle strip. I will also add just a small amount on this left hand side, just a light strip. You can see what huge difference that's making quite quickly. So I'm going to keep working down here one of these strips at a time, just really looking at where those lighter and darker areas are. Now, I'll mention before we look at the reference photo again, that you'll see here I'm using something on the end of my pencil. This is called a pencil extender. Are so good for extending the life of shorter pencils. So this pencil is quite small. And if I try to use it without the pencil extender, it would be extremely uncomfortable to hold. It would hurt my hand very quickly. Getting a pencil extender just means I can use this pencil for a bit longer. I do highly recommend them. So let's look at where we need to be adding shading on these bottom two areas. So on this patch, it's got a dark kind of strip coming down here. It's dark all around the edge of this section, and it's dark along here and along here. And up the middle, but not as much along here. And the same on this bottom section, it's generally darker towards the top, up here and coming all around here, a little bit darker towards the middle, but not as dark as here. So let's just add a little bit of extra shading along the bottom, as well. And then I think already this ice lolly on the left is looking much better. Now, let's keep using this same color, but now on the rocket lolly to start adding some extra brightness in here. I just want to be adding this pencil to again some of the darker areas. Generally speaking, that is to the left of the light strips, along this edge here. Look how dark this line is along the very edge. It's got a darker patch here, a little bit here, a lot darker on this dip that's coming down here, and this dip and this dip that we have already marked in a little bit, but also need to build up some more of the shading along here and it's generally much darker on this whole right hand side here. Sometimes easier to see these areas if you just come a little bit further out, if you look from further away. It's a bit easier to see where the darker areas are. So just building up a little bit of this and adding in some of these colors is going to start brightening up and filling in some of the patches on this rocket lolly. We're going to need it to be really lovely and vibrant. Add a little bit of shading curbing round as well around here. And then I'm going to try and make the light strips in between here a little bit darker. Now, you'll know from before I talked about how I feel like the color on these lighter strips of the ice lolly are a mixture of gray, yellow and green. I don't think we have any green on here yet. So let's use the same green that I used before for the base layers on the green sections to just tweak the color here, make it a little bit darker. Though you may think of these strips between the ice lolly being white color. When we actually look at it, it's not white. On the right hand side, it has a really deep shadow. So let's keep building that up. I'm also using this pencil to just tweak the shape around the edge here. I think that it actually probably needs to stick out a little bit more than what I've got at the moment. So I'm tweaking that line and then lightly adding some shading, not a lot going towards the middle. I do want to stress that I'm not putting a huge amount of this color on here. I want it to be a little bit I don't want it to be drastically different from what it is. At the moment. I don't want it to look like the other green section. So it's very much a case of what we do to the top we're going to keep doing as we work down. I also want to be making sure that I'm adding some of this color, particularly where the green section is meeting the I'm going to call it the white section, just to try and make this line a little bit softer. I'm going to add some of this color down the bottom. If we look in the bottom right hand side of this lolly, look how green this patch here actually is. I feel like it's much greener than you might expect, so we want to be building up that color. Now, whilst still looking at these white patches, I'm also going to go back to the gray that we used before, the warm gray to just do exactly the same as I did before, but we need more of it. So I have already built this color up on the light sections. It clearly needs to be darker. The light patches aren't standing out enough, and you generally can't clearly see where the edge of the ice lolly. So let's build up some more of this color working around those light patches. Until it's just looking a little bit darker, it's just a bit clearer to see where the ice lolly actually is. So I am going to take a minute to focus on this lolly, particularly for a short while. I feel like if we can get the lolly on the left hand side looking a little bit more accurate to the reference photo, it will make the rest of it feel a lot easier. For every color I add, I feel like it makes the next color that's missing more obvious. So now that these light patches are looking a little bit more obvious, I feel like now I'm noticing some of the color that is missing on the shadowed side. The shadowed side to start with is not looking dark enough. But also, it has a bit more of a kind of yellowy orange tone. You can really see it here, which is a reflection from I also feel like it has that same kind of orange, yellow on all of these on the shadows. So let's start off by adding in some more of the burn ochre. And I'm going to use this lightly, not only to adjust the color, but also to add in some of the kind of ripples that you can see on the light section. So you can see that there is a little orange gray patch here, kind of a zig zag here, and then it's also quite orange all on this right hand side. There's an orange patch here, a darker line up here, and coming down here, and it's the same on all of them. There's these lines on each of these section. Going to lightly go over this section, draw in those patches. You can see me working with circular motions, still pressing lightly. I don't want to press hard, particularly because this is actually quite a bright color, and I don't want to be applying too much. So if I just apply it a little bit, it means it's all happening nice and gradually. That's really helping to make this right hand side shadow look much better. As I always say, for every color that I add, I feel like it makes the next color that's missing more obvious. So I now think that the green sections aren't looking bright and vibrant enough. So I need a very bright and vibrant green to add over the top of everything I've got here to make it look much lighter. So this is the most vibrant green that I have in my set. It is literally called light green, and I'm just lightly putting this color over all of the green sections, still making sure that I avoid those light patches, and you can see me just working in circular motions and pressing nice and lightly. And then I'm going to work down these sections one at a time once again. This eye oli on the left hand side has actually changed quite a lot, quite quickly throughout this chapter. Now, whilst I've got this green, I'm also going to apply it to anywhere else that I think needs brightening up with this color. I'm particularly wanting to apply it to the green section on the rocket lllly. Once again, I think this green here needs to be much brighter and more vibrant and at the moment is looking a little bit dull. Let's again use circular motions to just build up this green on the whole of the rocket. Actual, whilst I've got this pencil, I'm also going to use it to just start mapping in some of the shapes along the lighter section here. So at the moment, we've just got a solid white strip here. What I want to do is just mark in where some of these lighter patches are going to go and shade around them to start filling in a lot more of these areas. And I'm going to do that to all of the light strips here. Now, I can't stress enough. It doesn't need to be perfect. And it will be a lot more visible as I start doing this with a darker color. Just going to go along here and just mark in some of those patches, change the shapes of some of these light areas because they're actually much bigger than they need to be. And generally just try and get things mapped out a little bit clearer. We roughly marked everything in in the last chapter, and I can start gradually refining things in this chapter. So let's now to the same yellow that I used to map in this yellow section before. But I'm going to build up more of the color now to gradually make this look a bit brighter. I generally want to brighten up all of the colors on all of the different lollies. So again, notice that I am going over the green a little bit with the yellow just to try and blend these colors together so that it's not just a harsh stop with the green. Important thing to remember with colors like this is that if we want it to be brighter, we need to go over it more times rather than pressing hard. You'll see that I'm pressing lightly. I'm holding the pencil far back. And I'm building up that vibrancy just by going back over the area with this yellow. I'm also going to just slightly start adjusting some of the shapes of some of these light patches. I'm just marking in some of the shapes that I can see on the reference photo again. And I do think it will become more apparent as I start adding in with some of the dark colors as well. But I just want to start marking out. As I mentioned, it's not all actually one solid block of white. It's all different shapes and different bumps along these patches, and I want to start marking that in. Whilst I've got this yellow, I'm also going to add some more of it to the right hand side of here. Now that I added in that orange pencil a short while ago, I think it's not looking yellow enough now. So I'm just going to go back over this with the yellow to both brighten up and smooth out what I've got. Let's go back to the rocket lolly, and I want to be brightening up the next section. So the rocket lolly is really lovely in that it does work in sections. So let's use that same orange that we did before, and once again, I'm literally going to make it more vibrant by going over the area again, making sure that I am stopping where that red section starts. I also want to slightly overlap and ease up my pressure with the yellow section so that we have a lovely gradient here as well. Once again, I'm marking in the shapes I can see along the light patch here. But I hope that you can see how kind of rough and ready this is. It really doesn't need to be perfect. We're going to tweak it as we go. And even at the end, we're going to add in the final details. So we might tweak it right up until the end. So once I've shaded in the orange all the way along here, and I've got quite a sharp line, really, I would say it is between the orange and the yellow. I'm just going to once again, shade this orange down onto that kind of groove the dip that comes down this right hand side. I can't remember how much I pointed it out, but look how dark orange this area is. We need to build up all of this to really add a lot of shading into this area. I want to clarify that we don't expect it to be looking good at this point, though. It's going to look a little bit weird, at least until the end of the chapter, I would say, when it's going to start coming together. Let's also bring this orange down on this dip here and go right down to that green. We will slightly tone this down a bit later. Also just going to smooth out this line a little bit. I probably looks a little bit too harsh where that yellow is meeting the orange, so I can just add a little bit more shading on the yellow. Then let's move on to the same red that I used at the top before and once again, go over this whole section as well, and you can see how much brighter this rocket lolly is looking reasonably quickly. Once again gone over that light patch, just toned it down a little bit. And I also want to be looking at the orange section and seeing if there's any areas where I'm going to want to put this red onto that orange. This red is so sort of bright. It almost looks like a pinky orange. But I do think it is the main overall base color of the top of this rocket. Here, I would say that I can see a lot of red coming down this right hand side, so it goes from red here to orange here. There's also a red strip coming down here and along here and particularly on this left hand side. So let's build this color up and bring it down into the orange section and also build up some of this color down this right hand side. As I've said before, I think for every color that I add in, it makes the next color easier to see, and it's gradually all coming together. So now I'm noticing that the dark areas on this lolly on the right hand side are looking nowhere near dark enough. So what I'm now going to do is use the darkest green that I have in my set, that is the pine green to go over a lot of the areas where I put the green that I used at the beginning of this chapter to make these sections even darker. Generally speaking, I'm going around the edges around pretty much exclusively the right hand side, and I'm also adding in all of the shading with those patches that I added in before. And once I've gone over the whole of the lolly, I also want to go over the same darker sections that I did a short while ago with that darker green, but on the rocket lolly, too. So when we get to this sort of point, we need to be both brightening up the colors, but also I want to be starting to think about adding in some contrast. Now what I always think with any drawing is that the key is contrast. If we can get a really good amount of lights, darks, and midtones, then it's always going to look good. What we're missing at this point is we don't have any of the darks. We really only have the lightest colors and a bit of the midtones. Let's start working through and making these darker areas darker. So going along this dip along here. I also want to go over some of these patterns that I mentioned before where we marked it in with that lighter color, but I want it to look a bit more obvious. So kind of toning down that light strip, as well as making this right hand side a lot darker. I want to have that really good crisp lineup this side. And then I want to shade all of this so I'm happy with this, I once again want to be thinking about the next most obvious color that's missing. I want to think about where I should be going from here. So I'm still working my way kind of up for this rocket, thinking about adding in more contrast. And what I'm particularly noticing now is the yellow section in actually some places needs to be made darker. If you look particularly along this left hand side and along here, for example, isn't so much a bright yellow, the same here. It's more like a kind of orangey brown, I would say. So this is the same color that we used on the lighter areas on the green lolly to the left. I can use this to tone down a lot of that yellow and generally add a bit more contrast to this area as well. I need to add quite a lot. Some of these dips need to be more smooth out, I would say, with its surrounding areas, and the top section needs to be smoothed in a bit better with this area underneath. I still think this section looks bright yellow. It just looks kind of smoother, more blended bright yellow. So we just want to be going over this area again, going over the orange, going over the yellow, and a little bit towards the bottom, going over the green to blend all of these colors together and start making this all a bit smoother. But once again, I'm just building this up a little bit at a time, gradually allowing these colors to become more vibrant. Just going to add a little bit of shading onto this drip at the bottom, particularly on the top right. It's just a lot darker. And then I'm going to keep building up the contrast as we go up. So I'm going to go back to the red that we used for the top section. Once again, make this a bit more. So a lot of those areas that I marked in, I want to add more of them. Before actually moving on to a much darker and richer red. So this is the middle cadmium red. And I want to be particularly adding this color down the left hand side. As the same with the green at the bottom, it has a really defined edge here. Actually, I want to use this color not only on the strips, where we use that other color or a second ago to make them darker, but actually on a lot of the very top of the rocket lolly. It's all just looking a little bit too pale, and I generally want to build up some more color. Now, do notice on the top right on the area up here, there is a light strip going down this right hand side. So it's got a line at the edge, which is much darker, and it's much darker along here. But there is this lighter strip around this edge. So you'll see that I am leaving that lighter strip, and I'm just adding in the darker part to the edge and generally building up the shading along. It is absolutely amazing already how much vibrancy we've managed to build up in this chapter, particularly, just by adding more layers of, in many cases, the same color over the top of what we've already got here. Now, let's carry on using this same red on any area that needs to be made darker on this lolly on the right hand side. So we haven't really built up anything on this right hand side in this chapter. But I do want to try and build up the contrast a bit here so that we're all looking kind of similar amounts of brightness and contrast ready to go into the next section. Let's look at these red sections and really see the shapes here. And once again, you can see the light strips on the right hand side on not only the red, but actually all of the colors. I want to be building up some darker red going around here, along here, up here, and this whole section and all along the top and here. So, see that it's much darker around here and here, for example, and then round and the same at the bottom, it's darker around here. So I'm just building up these same colors. It's actually very similar, I would say, to the green that I did on the left hand side. We're just kind of building up this patchiness in any area where I can see that darker red. And once I'm happy with the red sections, I can go back to the yellow. I again can use that burn ochre pencil to make the yellow section a bit darker. At how dark all of this yellow all around here really is generally around the outside. It's not really a vibrant yellow. It's more like earthy, darker yellow. And the same around here. All around the edge, it's more of this darker orange yellow, making sure that I leave the brighter yellow on the right hand side, though here. Often hard to see, particularly with yellow. You just assume yellow is just a really bright color. But actually, it needs a lot more shading and contrast than you might expect for it to match the rest of the drawing. You see I'm going around that light patch. I don't want to be going over the bright area. I want to leave that patch of light. And then I can do the same to this part down the bottom. Already, this lolly on the right hand side is looking so much better. It's really starting to match the other two lollies. Let's just focus for a second on the blue section as well. And actually, between the blue and the yellow, I think I've mentioned before there's quite a prominent green line. You can particularly see along here, this very bright green and along here. I'm going to use this earth green, yellowish to just slightly mark in that line. I do like where possible to try and use the colors that I've already used. I think it makes the whole drawing come together and look more as one. Let's go back to the very dark blue that I used in the last section to just once again refine the shading on the blue areas. As I say, we have used this color before, and I have built up all of these patches before. I very much just want to go over what I've already got here, but I want more of it. I want the darker shadows around here to look more prominent. As always, the most important thing is to be working in circular motions and to be working nice and lightly. So by the end of this second section, what you should have is some very nice bright and vibrant ice lollies that have better contrast than they did. They're still not colorful enough. They're not bright enough, and they need more contrast. But they're certainly now looking closer to the reference photo. And I feel like everything is now very clearly mapped in. I feel like I really know what needs to go where. In the next section, I want to start thinking about building up that contrast further and really brightening things up that extra level. 9. Build up the Contrast: So in this chapter, let's get the shadows marked in and also the contrast added in. So I'm going to start off by focusing on the shadows. In the reference photo, it's got some very prominent shadows and we have nothing here at the moment. So I'm going to start off with the lightest color from the shadow. What I'm going to do is build up the shadow in three main colors, starting with a very light cold gray this time. Generally speaking, I find that shadows tend to be more of a cold gray. Although that's not necessarily the case every dime. Let's start off with this lightest color, and what I'm going to do is use this to just map in the general shapes and where I'm going to want the shadows to be. This is going to be a good way to kind of get my bearings, work out where these shadows are going to go. Now, let's just take a minute to have a look at the reference photo, both to see where the shadows are going, but also to talk about any shadows that I think need changing a little bit. This reference photo, these ice lollies are on a plate. I haven't drawn, and I don't want to draw my ice lollies on the plate, so some of the shadows will need to change slightly. I'm going to keep this shadow pretty much the same except I'm going to just do this straight down until it's level, I think, with the lolly stick. Same with this shadow, but all of this up here can remain the same. Then here, I'm just going to do the shadow curving around like this and around down the bottom here. I don't want it to come in so abruptly here like it is on the plate because I think it'll look a bit odd. And once again, I'll make the shadow for the lolly stick go down to be level with this here. So that's what I plan on doing. Hopefully, that will make a lot more sense when you see me start doing it here. So I want to map in where these shadows are going to go. Now, once again, I want to be pressing nice and lightly, and I want to be building up this as smoothly as possible. It's been very important on the ice lolly. I would say it's even more important on the shadow because we do want them to be as smooth as possible. So still working in those circular motions and with a nice and sharp pencil. And I just want to smooth out the edges of the shadow. I don't want to have any really harsh lines. Let's fill in all along and between these ice lollies where they're meeting each other. This will need to be very, very dark and work down the bottom where that lolly stick is. And then let's just map in where the shadow is going to go for this lolly on the right hand side. So you can see I'm marking in where I think the edge is going to go first. And then once I've got that edge marked in, I can start shading. So once I've got all of these shadows marked in with the lightest color, and then start doing exactly the same thing with this darker gray. So this is still a cold gray. This is the darker cold gray in my set. And I'm just blocking in this same area, which is made much easier because I've already marked in where this is going with the lighter gray. Now, what I also want to do here is add a really nice and crisp line along the edge of the lighter areas. So those cream strips in this lolly, I want to really have a good edge here and then shade out from this is quite a time consuming process. I am going to go through it reasonably quickly because it is very much just a case of going over what I've already marked in with the lighter pencil, looking at the shapes and just trying to make it as smooth as possible. And the reason that this is quite time consuming is just from taking the time to try and make this as smooth as I can. So going over it really lightly with this pencil. Can see how much better that looks already, having a shadow around it rather than kind of leaving some floating ice lollies, it makes it look like they're on a surface rather than just, as I say, floating, which I don't think looks as good. And let's go over this lolly on the right hand side, as well. So I still think even though I'm focusing on trying to make this as smooth as possible, I do still think it looks a little bit patchy, but that's okay. It will smooth out as we keep building up the next color. So I've built up this darker cold gray. What I now want to do is add another darker color. So another color that I think is missing from this shadow is actually, I can see a certain amount of brown. If you really look at the shadows, particularly the shadows towards the top where it's a bit more prominent, it really does look like a kind of browny gray rather than only a gray. So I'm going to use this pencil. This is the walnut brown pencil, and I want to use this for a couple of reasons. First up, I'm going to use it to go over the shadow, make it a little bit more on the brown side, generally make it a bit rich. Will also in a second, use this same brown to add in the darkest values, really try and get that contrast looking a bit better. So I'm literally going over this the same as I did a short while ago, just trying to really get the shadows nice and dark. And I think adding in the shadows with this darker color makes the ice lollies look a little bit more washed out. That is where we're going to need to increase the contrast on the ice lollies. And then in the next chapter, we're going to need to really increase the vibrancy of the color so that it doesn't look as washed out next to the shadows. If we can get the shadows correct and accurate to the reference photo, then we just need to get the rest of the lollies brightened up, really. So once I've gone over the shadows, you can see adding that extra color over the shadows just makes this a little bit smoother. It looks much better. I now want to do is go over any area on the ice lollies that need to be made darker. So for example, starting at the top left, working towards the bottom right, I'm beginning here on the green sections of this ice lolly. I pretty much want to go over any area where I put that pine green in the last chapter. So building that up, it doesn't matter that this is a brown rather than a green. It's just going to make what's there darker, and then I can always tweak the color and build other colors over the top of this in the next section just to make it a little bit more on the green side. Color. Now, let's also add a really, really light layer of brown on the right hand side of this just to make it a tiny bit darker. But you can see how lightly I'm pressing. I don't just want to be building up tons of this color. That's not my goal here. And I'm just going to work down building up this contrast. You'll notice that I'm also going over the shadow a little bit more on the right hand side, particularly around where those lighter patches emting the shadow. I feel like the shadow just looks a little bit darker around these cream sections. So I can make it a little bit darker here, as well as building up some of the brown on these green sections, particularly on the right hand side. And I feel like this is making a massive difference to this lolly. It all of a sudden looks so much more realistic because we've got the contrast right. The colors now are not looking quite right. We are going to need to tweak them, but that's okay. Tweaking those colors is nice and easy. What we want to do is get this contrast right so that we can easily see those colors and tweak them as necessary. Just go over the shadow a little bit more, smooth it out the whole way up. And then I want to start building up some of the shading on this rocket lolly. So particularly now on the right hand side, at the top, I want this to be darker. It does need to be more of a red, but as I say, I can literally use this walnut brown to make an area darker, and then in the next chapter, we can build a color over the top of it, and it will make it a darker version of that color. So I can go all around the edge. Here, this will need to be a very dark outline, I guess. And then I can start gradually building up some of the shading on any area again, of the lolly that needs to be so I'm particularly looking at this area here. And you can see, I'm not building up tons of the color. I just want to build up a little bit to just adjust that contrast. It's amazing how a small amount of shading will make a massive difference and generally make all of these areas kind of flow and blend together a little bit better. So let's add some light shading going the whole way along this dip here and really refining the edge along here, which we did add in with dark green, but I think it just needs a little bit more. Also going to add some shading on the other dips here as well. Just build this up. I think it does make a huge difference. It looks so much more realistic already. And you can see, because I'm pressing so lightly, it's not building up tons of this dark brown. It is just adding a small and subtle shadow. Let's also just fill in this line along the left hand side, make this a little bit more crisp. And I'll focus briefly on this drip. This drip hasn't got a huge amount of shading on it at the moment. It needs to be made darker. Particularly in the top right hand corner around here. So you can see it's got this dark shadow all around here and coming down here and just under this dot here. And that looks far better already. Let's now focus on this lolly on the left hand side. And this lolly is probably the lolly that needs the least of this color building up. There's, particularly between the blue and the red, some pretty thick and dark lines. So I'm just adding that in. For the most part, I need to be adding this over the top of where I added that dark indigo pencil. I'm just going to add a bit more down this side of the rocket before I carry on with this lolly on the right. I feel like it's not got a deep enough shadow down this side. So I really want to add to it, particularly along the edge of the rocket. And then let's just work up this lolly. So I'm literally just looking at, again, if there's any areas that need to be made darker. So, for example, on this red section down the bottom here, this all needs to be made much richer and crisper, more so than what I've got at the moment. And going around the edge with the shadow of the yellow section helps that yellow section stand out a lot. Keep working up going over the blue section where I added that dark blue in the last chapter. It's amazing how even though we built up a lot of that dark blue, and it was looking very dark, because we've now added in the shadow, that blue isn't looking as dark, so we need to build up more of this color. And that's why we need to keep coming back to the same area and building up more color over and over again so that it does eventually and gradually build up to the brightness that we need. So I'll go over this patch at the top, as well. And the ice lollies look so much better. They look so much more accurate to the reference literally because of that contrast. Go around the right hand side of the lolly sticks. There's a very deep shadow around here that I did add in with, I think it was the burn ochre pencil a little while ago, but it's not looking dark enough. It looks a little bit washed out. In fact, we haven't added a lot to the lolly sticks at this point. We will need to add that in later. And then I'm just going to go back to the darker cold gray and go over all of the shadows one more time. This is just to smooth out a bit more and blend together all of these colors so that we're ending up with something that looks more like a shadow than a patch of brown. Go over all of the shadows. It's much faster now that we get to the end here because I'm literally just wanting to smooth anything out finally. And then we're left with a muted looking series of ice lollies. They need brightening up, really having the vibrancy increasing. But the core sort of structure that needs to be there does now look really good. We literally just need to build up the vibrancy. 10. Brighten the Colours Further: So now that I've got the colors marked in, the contrast marked in, let's focus on brightening everything up a little bit further. So I'm going to once again focus to start with on the ice lolly on the left. I once again want to be thinking about kind of the most obvious color that's missing at all times. So I'm starting off by looking at the kind of creamy white sections, and they're not looking dark enough, particularly on that right hand side to me. So let's once again go over this. All I want to really do is make it a little bit darker. Comparing my drawing to the reference photo, I think the main color that's missing is this cool gray. So I'm just going to lightly add some of this color over the top, and it's very much the same as what we've been doing up until this point. I'm going over a lot of the kind of folds and marks that you can see on this strip of ice lolly, particularly on the right hand side, but also on the left want to go over anywhere here that needs to be a bit darker. So the left is generally lighter. But when you look at the light patch that's on the left hand side of the lolly, it really shows how dark the areas around that light patch needs to be. So I am going to add a little bit of shading on the left hand side, as well. And then I can move down to the next section. So again, building up some of the color on the right hand side, going over all that yellow. It's just slightly kind of toning down the yellow, making it a little bit less vibrant. Also go over any area that needs to be a bit darker on this left hand side. So you can see some kind of subtle marks, some subtle darker patches on this left hand side, particularly around this patch of light. And that's what I'm adding to with this pencil. You can see building up just a small amount of this pencil is making a massive difference really to these light patches. All of a sudden, they look so much more interesting. They've got that extra bit of contrast. See I'm building up a decent amount of the color on the left hand side here. But still pressing lightly, it's so important to still press lightly to still work in circular motions. And then I can do exactly the same down the bottom hip. Building up a decent amount of the color on the right hand side where it is darker. But I do want to also build this up on the left side just to make the light patch stand out a little bit. Once I'm happy with this color and how I've built this up, I do feel like for every color that I add in, it makes the next color more obvious that's missing. Now that those white strips are marked in a little bit darker, I now think the green section isn't looking green or dark enough. I'm going to go back to that slightly darker earthy green and I'm going to go over everything that I've already marked. Ing up, particularly the green over the right hand side, where it generally is darker. But I am also needing to add a little light amount of the green on the left, as well, or I think it just looks a bit too light on the left hand side. So you'll see that we're very much going back over a lot of the same areas that we did before. What I particularly need to do is to be adding in more. I can't stress enough how lightly I'm going over this. Sometimes, especially as you get more towards the end of a drawing, I think it can feel tempting to press harder. But you want to try and resist doing that because building up the color nice and lightly is just going to create a much softer and smoother color. And really pressing lightly and adding a small amount of this color over the top of what's already here, it is changing the color quite a bit, really. It's making it a lot darker, adding in a little bit of this color. Let's work down through these sections one at a time. I'm going to add a little bit of this same color onto the right hand side of the light sections, as well. I feel like there's a little hint of green there that we don't really have at the moment, and it makes sense to use the same green as on the green sections below that nicely ties everything together. Do note that I am still frequently sharpening my pencil. It's also so important to be working with a nice and sharp pencil. And on this pencil because it is such a small one, I'm once again using a pencil extender, which just means I can hold the pencil further back more comfortably than I would be able to otherwise. So now I'm generally happy with the green. Let's think about any other colors that I want to be building up for now on this lolly on the left hand side. Now I think the lighter area of the white or cream section isn't looking quite yellow enough. I just want to brighten it up a little bit. So I'm going to add this cream pencil. This is that very, very light yellow, literally over the whole of the left hand side of each of these lighter strips, but working around that light patch, you can see I'm doing this reasonably quickly. I'm not adding a huge amount, but it is just lightening and brightening the area up, making it more of a bright yellow or a light yellow. I'm also going to focus on the light patches on the green areas. So right at the very beginning, we did use this color. This is the light ultramarine to add a tiny hint of blue onto these light patches. But I feel like that color has got a little bit lost now. It's not looking as prominent as it was. So let's just lightly go back over these patches. You can see it's just a tiny bit to add that hint of blue. And now I'm generally happy with the ice lolly on the left hand side. Let's start focusing on the rocket in the middle. I'm very much going to go back over this in the same way that I have done before. We need to be working generally from the darker colors towards the lighter colors, but also brightening everything up. I've got the shapes of the rocket lolly, the main kind of sections marked in, but it's looking way too muted. I think that this rocket lolly needs a lot more work than the lolly on the left hand side did because it's more vibrant in color. Starting off with the darker red. This is the middle cadmium red. Going over all of the areas in this top section that needs to be a little bit darker. So that's generally the same areas where we built up the brown in the last section. And I'm just working in circular motions, building up over and over again on this section. Want to not only go over the very top of the rocket lolly. But just like we did before, I want to bring some of this red down a little bit to any of the more shadowed areas down here. So, particularly this right hand side along here, for example, this is really quite rich red, I would say. And then you can see I've built up quite a lot of that dark red. It's looking a lot brighter up the top here. Now let's move on to the slightly lighter red. This is the pale geranium lake. I'm once again going to use that red over the top of the last red to brighten it up a little bit further. So this is a lighter, kind of more orangy red, I would say. So you can see putting this color over the top of that darker red, it doesn't stop it from looking dark red. It just kind of brightens it up and smooths it out a little bit. So I'm going to go all over here. I'm going to slightly fade out as we get to the orange section because we do want to blend these colors together and smooth the red into the orange. And I'm going to go over the red sections going down into that orange area. Again, to smooth them out and brighten them up. So you can see we need to be building one color on top of another. To add to that vibrancy. But I already think the top of the lolly looks so much better. It looks so much brighter than it did before. And it's all going to come together even further as we start working our way down the rocket, building up all of the colors. So I'm just going to go over the patch of light a little bit along here. It's actually looking too bright, I would say, and I want it to be toned down a bit. And then let's move on to the orange pencil. This is the pencil that we've used a lot on this section to once again go over this and brighten it up. I do keep saying it, but the most important thing here is that I'm still not pressing hard. Where I want to build up more of this color, I'm just going over it more time. So going over it still with circular motions, but building the color up on a section is what's going to make it the brighter orange rather than just pressing hard with the pencil. So working lightly, working in circular motions is so, very important, particularly on this Illy, for example, where we don't want it to be really scratchy, we want this to try and be as smooth as it possibly can be. Notice that I am going over the red section a little bit to kind of smooth these colors together. Because I don't want to have a really abrupt edge where these colors are meeting, I do want it to blend together as much as possible. And I can do that by literally just overlapping these colors. Particularly where I'm working with a lighter color here, I can go over the red a bit. Once I've gone over the whole of the orange section, I once again want to use this orange to go over any of the more shadowed areas where I can see a hint of this orange. So once again, down this right hand side, down this shadow here. I'm also just going to smooth out the lines along the bottom so that it's not too harsh. So I'm happy with the orange that I've added, but I actually think that the line between the red and the orange is looking too abrupt. I also think that the orange section is looking a little bit too light, particularly at the top. Going to go back to that brighter red that I used just a second ago and just blend out the top of this section a little bit more. So I'm just going over a lot of the orange, but particularly focusing at the top, where the red and the orange met. And you can see adding more of this color both over the red at the top and the orange section, so over this kind of gap is smoothing these colors together much better. And because this is a kind of reddy orange, it's not making the orange section not look orange. And now let's move on to the yellow section. So for the shadows on the yellow section, I want to be using the burn ochre pencil. I would say is the closest color that I have in my set to the kind of earthy shadowed yellow that I can see within this ice lolly. So let's build this up anywhere on the lolly that needs to be a bit more shadowed. And hopefully you'll notice from this that we're very much doing the same as I had done previously. So I'm going over all of the same shadowed areas. I'm really building this up in exactly the same way as I did before. We're just adding more of it. So I want to be going over the line where the orange meats, the yellow. This is good for making that a little bit darker. And generally smoothing out that shadow along here a bit better. Build up a lot of this color on the right hand side where that is that shadow. And then I think what's the most obvious thing about this yellow section is it's not looking bright enough. So let's use this very bright yellow to go over this section, and a little bit goes a long way with this color. You can see adding a small amount of the yellow over all of the shading we've got here is massively brightening this section. Over the orange section a little bit, as well to try and blend these two colors together. And I can go down and over the green a little bit, and it's all looking much more vibrant. So I am finding this easiest to work one section at a time, as you can see, working from the top towards the bottom. I think that's making the nicest and smoothest blend on this ice lolly. Once I'm happy that I've built up some more of the yellow, let's focus on the green section. So let's go back to that same green that I used on the lolly on the left hand side, build up all of the shadows. These are the same shadows that I've built up before. So this is made far easier because I can see pretty well what needs to go where. But I think now that the rest of the ice lllly has been built up, it really shows how much shading is needed on this green section. Green section is looking way too muted at the moment, so let's build up all of these darker patches. So, particularly these lines, but also there's a particular dark patch here, for example, and here. And generally down the sides, this whole section here is very dark. And then once I'm happy with this very dark green section, when I'm happy that the contrast is looking a bit closer to that reference photo, use the closest green to this green at the bottom, which I think now is quite a bright and vibrant green. This is the leaf green. I'm just going to go over this whole section and brighten up down the bottom. See going over all of the bottom of the ice lolly, using these circular motions to brighten up this green. And it's still not looking quite right. The green sections clearly needing a little bit more tweaking than the colors at the top of the rocket. I think it needs to be a bit darker, but also a bit brighter. First, let's add a bit more yellow, the same yellow I used a second ago to brighten this up further. For every color that I add, I think it makes the next color that's missing a little bit more obvious. So I'm literally doing the same with the yellow as I did a second ago. And then let's use this very dark green. This is the pine green to once again go over those darker sections that we went over a second ago. But I think they're not looking dark enough. So I want to build up these same sections a little bit further, going over all of those darker sections with this nice and light pressure. I'm going to brighten it up, go over it again with this light green, particularly where the green and the yellow are meeting so the top of the green section. And you can see how adding this color over the top is really brightening up this area. Let's keep working down through the ice lily, and I'm going to focus at the very bottom of the lolly now. So I'm looking at building up some of this color This is kind of healthy brown, I guess. To fill in a little bit of this color around the bottom of the lolly and around the lolly stick and also build up some of this color on the drip here. So you can see some of that brown around the bottom of the lolly stick here. So that's why I've built that up at the bottom of the green section. I'm also going to go over some of the shadows at the bottom on here, make them a little bit lighter brown. But this is very much the same as, again, what we've done before. So much of what I'm doing in this chapter is just brightening things up, but a lot of it isn't kind of new, I guess. Actually also going to use this same color to just make the shadows in the yellow section a little bit darker. I think even with the burnt ochre, they're not looking quite dark enough. So let's just build these up a bit more. So you can see I'm just going over this area over and over again to build up some extra of this shading, particularly focusing on where the yellows meeting the orange because that's generally where I need this to be a little bit darker or where I need this yellow section to be a bit darker. Then let's once again go over the orange sections, so still using that orange pencil to brighten this up a little bit more. It's looking a bit too patchy. I can smooth out those patches a lot by just building up some more of the color. Now finally, let's focus on brightening up the ice lolly on the right hand side. I'm going to go back to the red pencil. This is that same red that I used a lot on the rocket lolly, and I want to be using this to go over any of the darker sections. So once again, you can see all of these darker sections have already been filled in. They're just looking too light and too muted. So I'm going to go over those darker areas. Again, this is making it not only darker but also a brighter red. Working through one red section at a time. So this ice lolly, I would say, is not complicated. It is time consuming because there's so many colors built up on it. But I'm going to go through this a little bit faster because it is so similar to not only what we've already done, but what we've been doing for a lot in this chapter so far. So I'm working down one at a time going over any area that needs to be a brighter red, really focusing on going over the shadows that I've already marked in. But obviously, still pressing lightly, still working with that really lovely and sharp pencil. And then I can move on to the darker red. So the same darker red that I used on the lolly on the left, to once again, build up those darker patches a little bit more. I think I have already talked about it, but I think it's so important where possible to try and use the same colors throughout the drawing, even though this is obviously a different red section. It is still red on an ice lolly, and if I can where possible, if it is reasonably similar, use the same red as I did for the top of the rocket. I find that the whole drawing looks a lot more cohesive. It just goes together a lot better. Doing a very similar thing of going over the darker areas, making the shadowed areas more of this deep rich red. And then I can use the orange pencil to go over the lightest areas. So I would say that it's more orangy on the lighter section, so towards the middle here. It's not just looking orange, though, because we've already built up a lot of red on the whole of each of these strips. So we kind of get something that's an orangy red rather than just an orange because we're building the orange on top of red. I'm generally happy with the red section. Let's take a minute to focus on the yellow. And I want to brighten up all of the yellow areas. So this is actually not the bright yellow. This is the more earthy yellow. And I'm literally just going to go over the whole yellow section just to brighten it up. Nice and lightly. I don't need to put a lot. Then want to move on to the burn ochre and go over any areas that need to be more shadowed. So particularly at the top here where the yellow is meeting the red, I want to add more of this kind of earthy orange. And on the most part, I'm going about this in a similar way to what I did on the yellow section of the rocket lolly because this is a really good color for adding in shadows on those yellow sections. So I'm just going to build up a little bit with this color going over those more shadowed parts. And then we've got a lot more depth already to the yellow areas. Let's now use the raw umber pencil to really make the darker areas on the yellow look a lot so you can see where I'm just building up these shadows and just adding bit by bit to what I've got here. But as I've said before, none of this is new. It's very much what we've already done. Let's now brighten up, particularly towards the middle of the yellow section. So this is that slightly brighter yellow. I only need to add a tiny bit just to lighten this up, avoiding particularly that light patch. Let's focus on the blue. So I'm just working through this one color at a time, so I can go over all of the red, then yellow, then blue. It's much easier than trying to kind of switch between. So this is that turquoise pencil, I can once again use this to mark in all of those darker and brighter sections, really get the main color of the blue looking a bit closer to that reference photo. This is once again the blue that I used before. So this isn't a new color. We're just building up more of the same color. I can move on to that extremely dark blue. This is such a dark blue. It's almost like a dark gray. Just to go over all of these more shadow sections of the blue, really give it that extra contrast and that extra pop, which is the main thing at the moment that I think is missing on this ice lolly. And that's what helps give it all its shape. And as I say, for every color that I add in, I think it makes the next color that's missing more obvious. So now that I've built up that darker blue, I'm actually going to add some more of this more turquoisy blue to brighten things up a little bit more, maybe tweak some sections like around this white or light patch. Mostly happy now with the ice lolly on the right. Let's just go back through a few of the same colors that I've already used to brighten it up a bit further. So going back to the orange to make the center of the red sections a bit brighter, working around those light patches. And I'm going to go back to the pink that I used right towards the very beginning to add a bit more shading on the light patches. They're looking a bit too white at the moment, and I think I can blend them a bit better into the surrounding areas. If I go back over all of them with the same colors I used at the beginning. Using that light ultramarine on the blue, for example, just lightly adding a small amount of this pencil, so it looks a little bit less bright white. And then thinking of a white pencil, let's also use the white pencil to just blend on the right hand side on each of these different colors. So you can see adding white over the top of this pencil, it's just smoothing out this slightly scratchy area on the right. I don't want to make it any darker, but I do want to blend what's here. And then let's just add a bit of extra shading on this right hand side, particularly on the yellow with this mid cool gray. Slightly smooth out what I've got here and tone down the brown. Now, the last thing I'm going to add in this chapter is this green pencil. Where the yellow and the blue are meeting together. You can see there is a really prominent and bright green line. You can see it here and you can see it here. Let's just add a thin line of this green in. And then I'm pretty happy with all of the ice lollies. They're all looking nice and bright and vibrant. In the next chapter, let's think about adding in the final details and really finishing this drawing. 11. Add in the Final Details: In this last chapter, I want to focus on building up the color on the lolly sticks. We haven't really got a lot here and generally adding in the final details. So let's start off by looking at these lolly sticks, and I want to be once again, thinking about the most obvious color that's missing. So right now, we haven't really got anything here. There's a very, very light color that we added in towards the very beginning. I want to be comparing my drawing to the color swatches and thinking about the most obvious color that's missing here. So I think what I need to add is the burn ochre pencil. Want to be adding in some light shading, but also beginning to add in the lines of the pattern on the lolly stick. I'm noticing that there's a little bit of a kind of bent ochre shadow at the top. There's also a little bit around the bottom, and then there's all of these lines, the more prominent lines along here. On this lolly stick is a bit more prominent at the top. It has a very dark section up here. Also has some of this color in a curve around here. And again, we've got all of these lines, all of these very prominent lines along here. I'm not going to worry about all of the teeny tiny lines. I only wants to be adding in these very obvious ones. This one here, it's got a little bit of this burn ochre, maybe at the top, but it's really more of a red. The main burn ochre sections here is around the bottom. And again, these lines. So you can see I'm building up a little bit of the color at the top of this lolly stick. Then adding in those lines. I'm trying to get these lines of the pattern of the wood reasonably similar to the reference photo. It doesn't need to be exactly the same. But I want to get them roughly in the same place because I kind of want them to look a bit random, and it's very difficult, as I always say to get things in random. So if I copy the lines from the wood on the reference photo, that's the best way for it to look random. Build in some of this color on the right hand lolly stick, as well. You can see I'm just gently brushing my pencil against the paper to make these light lines. So kind of like how I would for building up fur, just gently brushing the pencil against the paper to add in that kind of wood texture. So once I'm happy with this first color, let's just very briefly add a bit of extra shading, particularly on the left hand side of each of these lolly sticks. And then I'm going to move on to the raw umber pencil. So I kind of think the raw umber pencil is a darker version of the burn ochre, and I'm going to do exactly the same thing. So filling in the top of the lolly stick and adding in the lines with this flicking back and forth motion with the pencil. So the same lines that I've already marked in with the last pencil. So going over these lolly sticks one at a time, filling in the shadow at the top and then filling in the kind of wood lines. And already, I think these lolly sticks are looking so much better. So let's just blend down the top a little bit better so it doesn't look as abrupt and also blend the sides of the lolly stick. And then I'm just going to work through anything else that I think needs improving. I want to be thinking about the most obvious colors that I still think is missing from the reference photo and from the drawing. But now I'm looking at the drawing as a whole rather than just focusing on one lolly at a time. So here I'm going over some of the green sections. I think the green at the bottom of the lolly here is the main area that is just not looking dark enough or rich enough. Still going over this in the same way that I did before with this kind of earthy green pencil. But I'm just adding more. And what a difference it makes just building up a small amount of this is just looking so much darker and richer. I'm also going to use the yellow to blend into the green a bit better. So I'm just going to go over where the yellow is meeting the green. And that's just smoothing out this line a little bit, making it a bit softer between these two sections. And I now want to just improve the contrast a little bit. So I'm going to go back to the walnut brown pencil, which is the darkest brown that I've got in my set and just make the particularly green sections on this left hand eye lolly a little bit darker. It's very much the same as what we've already done. I just think it needs more. And you can see adding a small amount of this color onto this left hand lolly and giving it that extra contrast, it just looks so much better. It's also increase the contrast on the green section at the bottom here. So let's also refine a lot of the darker areas down the bottom on this drip, for example, make the shadow on the right hand side more. I'm also going to go over some of the shadows on this lolly on the right hand side as well. So just small amounts of this pencil, and it's just really helping improve the contrast on these lollies. I'm really not adding a lot. And it's also not anything different to what I've already been doing. I just want to be making it a little bit darker so it stands out more in comparison to the lighter area. Now I would say that I am pretty happy with the color. What I want to be doing is adding in and improving the lighter areas. So on all of the lollies, they've got some light patches. Some of them are very prominent. We've talked about it quite a lot. Some are smaller light patches, we haven't added in. So this line along here, for example, along here, all along up here, there's all of these thin lines on this lilly. And there's all of these dots. We have talked about them, but there's all of these dots along here as well, as well as the lines along this li. The easiest way to add these lines in is to use a pen like this one. This is a jelly roll pen, and it is amazing for adding small patches of light, so small bright white patches over the top of darker pencil. Now, you do need to be careful not to smudge this as you're doing it. Obviously, it is a gel pen, so it can smudge. It takes a few minutes to dry. I'm literally just adding the lines on the left hand ice lolly, and then I'm going to go over all of the light patches on this rocket lolly and add in kind of dots. So the light patches are along all of these lines that we've added in, but we've also toned down. They're not really solid patches of light. They're dots, in a way. So I'm going to go over all of these light patches, adding in dots, trying to make it reasonably close to the reference photo. So I'm looking at where the light patches are in each section and trying where I can to copy those sections, it doesn't need to be perfect. More than anything I'm saying that I'm using it as kind of an inspiration. You can see it's just adding that little bit of kind of texture in a way. So I'm almost kind of dabbing the pencil against the paper to make all of these little dotty, kind of spotty sections. Now you'll notice that I'm working from the left hand side towards the right, that is literally so that I am less likely to smudge the pen with my hand. As I say, it takes a few minutes to dry, and I could very easily ruin the whole picture by smudging white all over it. So I've gone over the rocket lolly, I can then start looking at the white sections along here. As I mentioned, there's a white line kind of between each section. So let's add this in. And I'd say it's reasonably subtle, but I do think it makes a difference. If you don't have a jelly roll pen, though, it is absolutely fine to leave it without this. I don't think it's necessary, and I think it's a lovely drawing even without the white here. And so I'm happy with those white sections and it's completely dried. Let's carry on building up just a few final tweaks with a couple of last pencils. So I'm going back to the light ultramarine just to fill in some of the blue sections. It's just looking a little bit kind of blotchy and patchy. So I'm just going to smoothly add a bit of this color. I think this is the most obvious color that's missing in this section. So just add a little bit over the lolly. I'm just going to use a putty eraser. This is again, optional, but a lot of along the bottom here is looking a little bit of smudged to me. It's not looking as clean as I would like it to. So I'm just going to use this pencil to just lift any of those smudged patches. Again, I think it looked fine without it, but if you do have an eraser and yours looks as smudged as mine does, I do recommend just lifting some of that smudged pencil. But then that is the end of the drawing. I hope you've enjoyed this tutorial and I look forward to seeing you in the next. 12. Summary: That is the end of the drawing. I hope that this makes the process of blending colors together feel a lot less overwhelming. Essentially, the key is to build this up in a series of light layers. We want to gradually build and mix those colors together so that it looks as nice and soft and blended as possible. Now, I do hope you've enjoyed this class. Please do leave a review if you have, and don't forget to upload your drawings into the class projects. Happy drawing, guys, and I'll see you in the next class.