Fundamentals of Coloured Pencils - Beginners Course

You’ll be provided with the printable resources to create your colour swatches which we will use to find accurate colours from reference photos. These are great for beginners who want an easy way to find colours until they are comfortable with finding them on their own.

We’ll be jumping straight into a practical drawing of the colour wheel while we go through the minimal theory of colour. I will only be going through the bare basics as we don’t need to know the entire history book in theory, this course is hands on practice and you won’t have to endure hours of talking without doing. Lets get drawing...

This is where the fun really start to happen. We go through the process of layering and touch on the process of blending that layers together. This lesson will take you through combining your wax and oil based pencils together. 

Now that we know how to layer we will be using this process to draw our first complete realistic drawing. 

In order to blend we need to layer out pencils first, this lesson will give you more practice in layering and in the next lesson the blending fun begins. 

Now that you have layered your oil and wax based pencils together we can explore the three methods of blending. Blending with a blender pencil, blending while using the burnishing technique and finally blending using solvent and a detail brush. 

Adding highlights to a drawing can be the difference between making something look realistic and making something look hyper-realistic. We explore three methods of highlighting and how they can be applied in different drawings.

This technique of texturing is one of the simplest methods to achieving hyper-realistic fur. This technique involves the use of an etching tool to apply texture to the surface of your paper before applying colour. 

This lesson takes you through creating the illusion of texture with the use of your pencil strokes.

How to create freehand outlines and the pro’s and con’s of this method.

How to create grid outlines and the pro’s and con’s of this method.

How to create traced outlines and the pro’s and con’s of this method.

The next three parts of this section will cover everything we have learnt throughout this course. 

What have we learnt and how do we apply this knowledge to future drawings.