If you’ve spent any significant time working in color pencil, you will eventually find blending tools such as the Colorless Blender pencil (made by Prismacolor) is invaluable. For smoothing out small details and lessening some of the grainy texture of the color pencils, the colorless blender works wonders and should be bought at least two at a time.
http://www.prismacolor.com/products/colored-pencils/colorless-blender
Another unrelated tip: Always have these colors in stock for the basics of laying down light and shadows. White, Indigo Blue, and Black. Black Cherry is also another good color of laying down shadow if you don’t have black on hand, or you want to try something a little different.
With this most recent piece, I used a piece of blue-grey pastel paper and drew my subject in very light HB lead. I start with shading in the beak and legs. I used one of my own photos as reference.
I then start shading in some of the basic light and dark colors in the bird (White Ibis.) I used mostly 50% Warm Gray for the dark areas, with only a little Indigo Blue around the edges.
Started blending the beak and legs. Notice how much smoother the color looks compared to some of the other colored areas in the artwork.
< ——-The image to the left was taken before blending.
Once I was finished smoothing most graininess of the white, and some of the mid tones, this was the finished product. The grass was done without any blending.
Thanks for reading.
~ Angela
