I spent an entire afternoon recently taking stock of my coloured pencils.
Yes. An entire afternoon.
Not drawing. Not creating. Not even doing anything particularly artistic.
Just…counting pencils.
I went through my collection, checked which colours I was running low on, which ones needed replenishing, and which poor, neglected pencils had barely seen the light of day.
This is apparently what my life has come to.
But as I sat there looking at rows and rows of coloured pencils, I realised just how far this humble little art supply has come.
Because when most of us hear coloured pencils, we probably think of school days. Sharpeners. Pencil cases. Colouring books. Maybe the occasional overly enthusiastic attempt at staying within the lines.
I certainly didn’t think of them as a serious art medium.
Until I started using them seriously.
And then I discovered that coloured pencils are not quite the simple little things we remember from school.
Coloured pencils have grown up
Professional-grade coloured pencils are made very differently from the pencils many of us used as children.
For starters, there is the pigment.
Good-quality artist pencils contain highly concentrated pigments, which means the colours can be remarkably rich and vibrant. They can also be layered over one another to create new colours, depth and subtle variations without necessarily having to mix anything on a palette.
There is also the matter of lightfastness.
This is basically a measure of how well a pigment holds up when exposed to light over time. For artwork that is meant to be displayed rather than stuck on the fridge for a week, that’s rather important. The last thing you want is to spend hours creating something beautiful only for the colours to gradually fade.
Then there are the different formulations and degrees of hardness.
Some pencils are harder and better suited for fine details and crisp lines. Others are softer, lay down more pigment and are lovely for building up richer layers. And depending on the brand, you can have pencils that behave quite differently even when they are technically the same colour.
Which is probably why I have accumulated so many.
Apparently, one cannot simply have a brown pencil.
One needs several browns.
And then there are the reddish browns, yellowish browns, greyish browns, dark browns…
You get the idea.
But here’s the catch
For all their wonderful qualities, coloured pencils are not exactly the easiest medium to work with.
They are slow. Painfully, gloriously slow.
Unlike paint, where you can cover a large area with a few strokes, coloured pencils require you to build an image gradually. Layer by layer. Stroke by stroke.
And because I tend to draw realistically, that means a seemingly simple patch of fur can involve an unreasonable amount of time and an equally unreasonable number of tiny pencil strokes.
You also can’t simply press harder whenever you want more colour. Well, technically you can, but doing so can burnish the surface of the paper and make it much harder to add more layers afterwards.
So instead, you learn to be patient.
Light pressure.
Lots of layers.
Different colours.
More layers.
A little blending.
More layers.
And then, just when you think you’re nearly done, you notice one tiny area that needs fixing.
And so you sharpen another pencil.
This is how an afternoon disappears.
Which brings me back to my pencils
My recent stock-taking exercise was partly practical. I wanted to know which colours I actually use regularly, which ones I need to replace and which ones have been sitting quietly in their little compartments wondering if they will ever be chosen again.
But it was also a reminder of just how much goes into creating a coloured-pencil piece.
A finished drawing may look deceptively simple. A dog sitting on a piece of paper. A familiar face. A pair of expressive eyes.
But underneath that finished image are layers and layers of pigment, countless pencil strokes, different colours used together, and quite a bit of patience.
And, apparently, an alarming number of pencils.
That’s probably what I love about coloured pencils.
They look approachable. Almost ordinary.
You don’t need a fancy studio filled with paints and easels. You can pick up a pencil, a piece of good paper and start drawing.
But the more you learn about the medium, the more you realise how much it can actually do.
It can create soft fur, shiny eyes, weathered faces, delicate whiskers and tiny details that you might not even notice until you look closely.
And that’s what keeps me coming back to it.
I’m still learning, still experimenting and still discovering what these little sticks of colour can do.
Even if, every now and then, they also require me to spend an entire afternoon counting them.
Which, I’m beginning to suspect, is just another part of being an artist.
Leave a Reply