To start this off, I would like to say that colored pencils are difficult to use, as I once said before. Doing a little bit of research on using colored pencils in art and creating a realistic figure, I did a little experiment myself. Today I used a little bit of colored pencil in a drawing.

"Blow Your Smoke"

    Creating this drawing was extremely fun. I took me about 6 hours to draw. The beauty of it is extraordinary and filled with fun colors and patterns, like the triangles in her headband or the shapes in her earrings. Testing out the colored pencils was interesting, but getting it to not come out so hard is complicated. The shading in her glasses is a little too hard and can see the lines in the lens. That was the hardest part because making the lens purple and trying to bring out her green eyes is a complicated task. I think I did a pretty good job on her lips. Because the pink was such a light color, it was easier to use to make the different values in her lips and bring out the shine on them.

    Looking on the web and looking at more of Bec Winnel's portraits, I decided to Google "How to use colored pencils in art." The Virtual Instructor helped give me a few tips on how to use and not use colored pencils. Some of the few tips are:

• Color Heavy
• Layer your colors
• Mix your colors
• Outline Last
• Take your time
• Burnish

    Burnish is a new term to me, which means to polish something by rubbing. In art, this term means to take a white colored pencil or a colorless blender, smooth the colors and values out to make a consistent texture and solid finish. Burnishing helps make the drawing look more realistic by showing the lighting in the picture. You can see an example of burnish in her lips, noticed that I did not fully color her lips pink, but left a little white to show that it's glossy.

    What I learned most from these tips was to mix your colors, and to always mix your colors when using colored media. It said on the website that if your using colors, you don't want to just go for one solid color simply because is supposed to be the color. For example, if a person is drawing the sky, or the ocean, they would not just want to use only the blue colored pencil. This, to me, makes the art work look like an elementary art class drew it. It's too simple and broad. If drawing the sky, or ocean, you may want to use different shades of blue and probably a little bit of gray or green depending on its scenery. Learning about this made me think of using chalk, since that's one of my strongest point in drawing portraits. When I use chalk to make landscapes, I always make the sky different colors..only because chalk is way easier to blend. I also learned a lot from the burnishing method, where you take a white or light color to smooth out any lines to make a texture. I guess the white colored pencil/crayon isn't useless after all.