After using colored pencils every day for five years to color Rock Garden, I'm just now getting really comfortable with them. The best way to get good with them is to use them a lot. There seems to be no substitute for that.
One thing every artist learns is to develop a palette. You start out trying every possible color. Some seem to go with your subject and art better than others. I've read that many artists eventually use only a dozen colors most of the time, and that's true for me a lot of the time. Although the majority of webcomics use fairly dark palettes, that doesn't look right to me for Rock Garden. It's also much more difficult to blend the darker colors.
There are a few pencils that I use constantly. I made the remark to a friend that I wished I could buy Rose Art and Crayola pencils individually. She surprised me by calling Rose Art to ask about that, but they told her it wasn't possible. Even so, if I had to buy a box of Rose Art or Crayola pencils every time I needed one of my favorite colors, it wouldn't be any more expensive than buying one pencil from the art brands. As you might expect, I have ended up with hundreds of pencils in colors that I seldom or never use. It's very easy to donate them to friends with kids, or even institutions, so they do get used.
Experimentation is about the only way to learn to use colored pencils. My own progression with them was probably fairly typical of anyone who uses them. I initially tried to color very lightly. That didn't look good, so I tried to color very heavily. That didn't work well, either. It was kind of like The Three Bears. Medium pressure works fairly well. But it doesn't solve a host of other coloring problems. Every artist will find the ways that work best for them.
Usually I color in a circular motion. That creates the heat necessary to melt the wax, so that it blends best. It gets rid of streaks and uneven spots. If you color with chalk, you can use something called a stomper to blend. That's a chalk-sized piece of tightly rolled paper. I was delighted to discover that there was something called a colorless blender pencil, and I ordered three brands to try. I used them quite a bit for several years. In the long run, I developed a good instinct for the hand pressure needed to blend colors with the pencil itself.
Someone was kind enough to give me a dvd about techniques with colored pencil, and I also bought several books on the subject. They were all geared for fine art techniques. To my notion, cartoons need to look, well, cartoony. I don't even want them to look like fine art, because then they wouldn't look like cartoons.
Many webcomic artists color every single inch of their cartoons. I asked one of them why, and he told me that it mimics the look of animation. My next question was why he wanted his cartoons to look like animation, when they were cartoons, not animation. He didn't have an answer for that, except to say that's how he wanted them to look. And that's fine with me.
I love to leave quite a bit of negative space in my cartoons. Negative space can be defined as space with nothing in it. My cartoons have areas with no color. And I fade the colors to nothing before they get to the main lines of the cartoon. This looks, to my eyes, like the way natural light hits objects in the real world. Most webcomic artists don't do it that way. Usually their comics are throughly and consistently colored throughout their work. Once again, I asked one of them why everyone does that. His answer was because that's how one colors webcomics. The absolute worst thing to me would be having a comic that looked like anyone else's comic, in any way, shape, or form. But it's none of my business what other artists do.
There are both fans and detractors of the way that I color my comics. In fact, I've been laughed at by several artists who digitally color theirs. These criticisms all came not long after I started coloring the comic. Partly, I think that's because I wasn't very good at it at the time. I can't help but notice that the negative comments have diminished in direct proportion to my skill level rising.
This is not to say that I believe that I have mastered the art of using colored pencils. Far from it. As of today, I have never colored a cartoon to my complete satisfaction, and I'm relatively certain it's because I still have a lot to learn. That makes them fun to use, because, like cartooning itself, it's a subject that can hold one's interest throughout a lifetime.
I think the next subject we tackle will be my particular method of drawing cartoons, which makes use of something called crosshatching.
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