I had my second colored pencil course tonight – you can read about the first here, if you missed it. Tonight, we learned other fill techniques.

Cross hatching, for those of you who don’t already know, is simply drawing straight lines one direction, then overlapping them with perpendicular lines. The trick is to keep the lines straight, watch your spacing, and keep the pressure on the pencil the same.

We also learned stippling, which is just tiny dots. To make something look darker, you have dots closer together. Lighter shades will have less dots, spaced further apart.

And then we did something I had never heard of before! We started out with a color, shading from dark to light (simply by pressure as in the first class), and then used a substance to blend it. Tom listed some other options for this, but for class purposes we used baby oil. Doing this makes it look more like paint than colored pencil because, when using pencils like Prismatics, it melts the wax base and blends quite nicely.

Then, for our end-of-class project, he handed out a color copy of a still-life he did and asked us to mimic it.

The classes are only an hour and a half long, so we weren’t expected to finish tonight. My yellow pepper looks more like a pumpkin so I call this one “Cici n’est pas une citrouille” 😉

I am debating buying more pencils so I have a better color selection, but I don’t want to pay for duplicates. I’ll have to dig around all the pencils I’ve collected over the years and see if any have a wax base.