Nature in detail

LEARNING OBJECTIVES

■ Tips & techniques for using coloured pencils

■ Practise burnishing with coloured pencils

■ Use a gouache painting as your reference material

The coloured pencil is vastly underrated and often deemed as a medium only for children to use. With the rise of adult colouring books, however, there has been in an increase in their popularity, but they are often still not used to their full capacity. I love working with coloured pencils. There are so many techniques and styles with which to experiment.

Burnishing

In this article, we will be practising the burnishing technique, where all your layers of coloured pencils smooth out and merge so that you can no longer see the pencil strokes or even define the different colours. Even the tooth of the paper will smooth out and the colours become very bright and rich with a smooth sheen to them.

There are special colourless burnishing pencils or paper tortillons available to buy, but with so many colours in our source image (above), we will be using the pencils themselves to do the burnishing, as they will help in creating the final smooth finish that we will be aiming for.

Your pencils

I will be using Faber-Castell Albrecht Dürer watercolour pencils for the purpose of this demonstration, but there are all sorts of different brands, at various budgets, on the market.