When I was a little kid, making colored pencil drawings was one of my favorite activities. I loved to draw with crayons as well, but they were not quite the same to me. You see, crayons tend to be too waxy and imprecise. It is hard to get a good tip on them and when you do, they don't last very long before they get dull again. I have always been very meticulous, and as a kid I loved to make precise drawings. Charcoal pencils, markers, and crayons just wouldn't cut it. I needed a good, hard-tipped colored pencil to really make the kind of drawings I wanted to make.
My first colored pencils set was actually a pretty minimal one. It had about 18 different colors – what I thought at the time as a lot. It really taught me economy. The problem with colored pencils is that you can't really blend them like you can with certain other media. You can layer them together, but it tends to destroy the texture of the marks. Therefore, to get the colors I wanted, I would have to combine different strokes in complex shading patterns. I would hatch one way with The bright red and do cross hatches with the brick red if I wanted to get an intermediate color, for example.
This technique actually works pretty well for me. They were pretty high quality Prismacolor pencils, and the individual colors meshed together pretty well. When I finally did get a better colored pencil set – one with over 40 colors – I had already taught myself some pretty interesting techniques out of necessity. Having the luxury of all those other colors was like a dream come true.
When I got older, I give up color pencils for a long time. I used pastels, oil paints, and other materials that I thought of as more adult. After all, I was an art student. I had to take myself seriously – who else would. Nonetheless, a few years ago I rediscovered colored pencils and found out that I could still get the same joy out of them that I did when I was a kid. With my expanded artistic skills, they afforded even more artistic possibilities. I have been using them since then, and I haven't even started to get bored. Just the opposite. It seems like the more I use them, the more things I discover that they can do.
