Over the last year or two, I’d heard time and again about how great these pencils were. Since you can get a full set for just under $50US (at the time of this writing), I couldn’t imagine it. 

Then I saw a review from a quite trusted artist, and thought I should just try them. I can’t buy all the sets but this one could be squeezed from my budget.

Tutorial: Castle Arts Soft Touch: 5 Pros, 5 Cons, 1 Hex Chart, and a fancy drink

Watch the video below and scroll to the end to leave comments or questions — or click HERE to watch it on YouTube and leave comments over there. I read both dutifully!

Blendability, color selecion

Nicely blendable wax based pencils, yet the leads aren’t fragile like Prismacolor. So they’re likePolychromos but usually softer, though smoe individual colors are on the scratchy side. This set is full of brights though! Lots of rainbow colors, few neutrals, so you have to mix complements to create your own desaturated hues.

How to color a fancy drink

Layers! Start light and add deeper color as it gets to the bottom where the strawberries are! 

The neutral colors in the rest of the picture are made from complementary colors, opposite each other on the color wheel.

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Overall assessment

These pencils are good for the price; a great starter set especially for a young artist. And if you’re a marker artist in need of colors to add detail, this would be a great option. 

For a constant pencil user, I can only imagine not being able to replace a single pencil as they wear out. And for a fine artist—be very aware that selling a piece that isn’t lightfast is okay, but you need to price it much lower and be sure the buyer knows what they’re getting.

Closing thoughts and question

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I know a lot of people love making color charts….but I’m not that person. I can, however, recommend some charts—because they’re ones that really teach.

A lot of charts are just kept in notebooks and give us an excuse to waste our time looking through them again and again. Or they serve as a procrastination tool. Or a way to just have something to do when we’re stumped. 

All those may be reasonable purposes sometimes. But since I rarely have much extra time on my hands, any chart I make has got to have a good reason to exist. And this chart – or shall I say, the PS added to this chart – is one that may really help those who struggle to figure out what color to use to shift a hue, or to darken or desaturate a color. 

Tutorial: Color Theory—Make yourself THIS color chart!

Watch the video below and scroll to the end to leave comments or questions — or click HERE to watch it on YouTube and leave comments over there. I read both dutifully!

To create this chart

Choose colors; I recommend a light and medium yellow, red (pink) and blue. You can choose cools in one trio and warms in another – but in time hopefully you’ll start to learn what happens when one color is added to another and not need to find swatch charts for them.

Steps:

1. For a 6 color chart, draw 6 boxes across, 6 down. (1/2″ is just fine.)
2. In the horizontal rows, color the same hue all the way across. Concentrate on getting a nice consistent medium pressure every time.
3. In the first column, color the first color on top of the colors already in the squares. That’ll show you what happens when this color is on TOP.
4. In each column do the same.
5. The second time  you’re coloring the same pair of hues, it’ll show you the opposite order from #3 above.
6. Then create threesome swatches with a blend into white.
   1. Start with one of the blues, add the light red (pink) and light yellow, adjusting to see what it takes to get them to be brown and grey.  Make a block with the 2nd blue.
   2. Then create a pair of blends with each blue, adding the medium red (pink) and medium yellow.

The type of learnings to watch for:

• Which yellow has more or less effect on other colors?
• Does a warm or cool pink make a better purple?
• When shifting from a greenish color to a neutral, what color do  you need to add?*

*hint: red + yellow + blue = neutral. Add the one that’s the least prevalent in the color that needs adjusting!

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Coming by Tuesday

Once I finish editing, this little elephant will be available as a snack class – those are little courses that are nicely inexpensive – which is perfect for tough economic times! I’ll be trying to add more of those in the coming months as well as some of the bigger classes with deeper learning. Let me know if you think of a great name for this little course!

In the past week I finally finished getting everything shot, voiced, written, and uploaded – WHEEE! – for the new Colored Pencil Hex Art class. Sometimes *I* learn lessons myself that aren’t related to the class…and this one did just that.

I was muddling along with the few blending stumps (also called stomps!) that were clean. I have DOZENS but they were all in bad need of repair, so I thought, “Hey, I can defer that, no biggie!”

But when the grey rocks in one of the lessons went green because I thought the mess on the end was all grey and not green….well, that was my sign.

(No it wasn’t this one but I forgot to get a pic of it, so this fuzzy little bugger will stand in its place!)

Tutorial: Deferred art supply maintenance: GAHHHHHHH

Watch the video below and scroll to the end to leave comments or questions — or click HERE to watch it on YouTube and leave comments over there. I read both dutifully!

The point…and the paper rubble

If you’re doing more small drawing with the stump/stomp then you’ll want the tip sharper. If you use it more for blending wide areas using the side, then sand it down and make it soft like in the first photo in this post.

But be prepared for rubble galore if you wait and do a ton of them at the same time!

Usually I have my detail scissors at hand and cut the tip to the shape I need right at that moment, but in this case I used the knife for everything, then if I need them softer for a project, I can file the size I need at that time.

Half and half

The tree is half blended with gamsol, half isn’t done yet. So you can see what a nice job it’ll do! The background – grasses, distant trees, and sky – is all blended with various dry blending techniques including cotton balls and qtips as well as a stomp.

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Variety in your colored pencil drawing

Having a lot of techniques at your fingertips can really help you to include great variety in whatever art you make with pencils – and I gathered a ton of them together in the new class. This tree is one of them, it’s approximately in the middle of the hex art page; with all of those drawings they were very small, and many times I found myself thinking, “I want to draw this photo reference again, larger so I can get into the details!”

As I do so, I’ll add them to the lessons in class. Not as video, but to show students what it can look like when created in a larger setting.