Every colored pencil set promises 72 vibrant colors. Open the tin, and half of them look the same. You pick a pencil because it looked right in the store, you lay down three layers, and by layer three the color has shifted darker or muddier than you expected — and there is no going back. … Read more
Fire is the most forgiving subject in colored pencil — and the most commonly muddied. The mistake is always the same: color the flame orange, color the background dark, done. A real flame is a light source, which means everything else in the page borrows its glow. When you treat fire as a lamp instead … Read more
Color-by-number gets dismissed as “training wheels” by people who have never tried to fill a one-inch circle with a pencil that has three millimeters of point. Done well, it is the fastest way to finish a page you actually like — the numbers handle color choice so you can work on the only skill that … Read more