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
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