Colored pencils demand pressure and patience. After an hour of layering and burnishing, your hand cramps and the page is half done. Gel crayons deliver saturated color with almost none of either — the pigment lays down buttery and thick in a single pass, which makes them the medium for tired hands and the fastest … Read more
Flat Red Circles and the Page That Made Me Quit Every colorist hits the same wall the first December: a page of Christmas ornaments comes out as flat red circles, side by side, like a row of stickers. The drawing gave you spheres — round things with highlights already inked in — and you colored … 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
You finish a page on black paper — the mandala glows, the night sky finally looks like a night sky — and then you add your white highlights and watch them vanish. Or worse: the pen skips, leaves gray ghosts, and blobs exactly where you wanted a crisp star. White gel pens are the fastest … Read more
Your first attempt at coloring on black paper goes something like this: you pick a bright yellow, lay down what feels like plenty of pigment, and stare at a scratchy, grayish smudge that looks nothing like the glowing artwork in the sample photos. Black paper does something strange to your color instincts — every color … Read more
You bought the big 120-pencil tin because the swatch page looked like a candy store. Then you sat down to color a portrait and discovered the problem: forty different browns, and you have no idea which one is the shadow on a cheekbone and which one is the shadow under a jaw. A huge palette … Read more