I recently started experimenting with colored pencils. I’ve tried lots of other art media including acrylics, soft pastels, and watercolors, but I avoided colored pencils after trying them a few years ago because I found them hard to work with. However, after recently watching colored pencil artists on YouTube, I decided to give them another try.

In a recent blog I compared Prismacolor and Artist’s Loft colored pencils and found that the Prismacolor provided better results. Yesterday I opened a photo that I took in December of the Love Rock at Eckley Miners’ Village (which I wrote about in another blog) to create a colored pencil drawing of it.

I did a quick sketch of the scene,  then pulled out my Prismacolors and began to fill in the sky. It was only then that I remembered that colored pencils don’t work all that well on heavily textured paper (like the paper I was using). The pencil marks (even when done fairly hard) tend to stay on the upper parts of the paper, leaving small white spaces.

Frustrated, I was about to toss out my drawing when I remembered a tip I’d seen one of those artists talk about–blending colored pencils with odorless mineral spirits.

Luckily I have some. I poured a bit into a disposable cup, pulled out a small cheap brush, and after lightly dabbing it on a paper towel, started blending. In the photo below, I’d already done a lot of blending with the mineral spirits, but you can still see bits of the white of the paper in parts of the unfinished drawing.

I kept adding color with the pencils and blending with mineral spirits. At points, it looked like a hot mess, but I kept going anyway. Might as well finish it.

Because I figured it would be a fail, I felt free to play around with my drawing. I made the sky more interesting than in the photograph, changed the season, and simplified parts of the image (see below).

Another advantage to using mineral spirits with colored pencils is that it breaks down the wax from the pencils, allowing for additional layering.

When I was done, I stepped back and compared the reference photo to my finished drawing (see them below). Not an art piece for a gallery, but good enough for my sketchbook.

I’m glad I kept going with my drawing. And, strangely enough, I’m glad that I decided that it was a failure. It allowed me to loosen up and play around with the pencils and mineral spirits, and surprise myself with a drawing that maybe isn’t so bad after all.