This post is a bit overdue as I finished this drawing about a week ago. The colored pencil course has been over for a few weeks now, but I didn’t get the last two projects completed in class so they became homework. I was able to finish this one up at Boy’s office during a lull. I wasn’t too keen on the theme, as this sort of thing really isn’t my style, but any practice makes you better, so I still put effort into it. Tom provided us a dolphin cut-out to speed along the drawing.

Here you can see the process of changing colored pencil into something that looks more like paint by using the simple product of baby oil that we learned about earlier. The sky is only about half blended with oil.

In this photo, the whole sky is blended with oil. The oil adds character; depending upon how you control it, you can gently blend colors or do a somewhat blocky/sketchy look like I’ve done here.

And finally, here is the finished colored pencil drawing, blended with baby oil. You can really see how it adds vibrancy and depth to the colored pencils. The black went from a patchy grey-ish tone to (mostly) solid black.

I learned a valuable lesson, but had made the same mistake on the last drawing of the course already: add black after blending other colors. When you look closely at this piece, you can see some smudging from it. I’m not sure when I will get around to finishing the last drawing, as things have been kinda busy, but I like the theme better and found its colors to be more challenging, so I do hope to finish it within a reasonable amount of time. Who knows if that will happen!