Colored pencils + Petroleum jelly | Experiment DrawingsteemCreated with Sketch.

in art •  7 years ago 




...not exactly.

I mean, it's not exactly meant to be an "experiment drawing," because I purposely did the drawing for a really close friend who's celebrating her birthday today. It ended up as an experiment, however, when I decided I wanted to try something I'd seen from Youtube recently.

That was, I tried applying Vaseline petroleum jelly on my drawing. Yikes.

The technique.

The Vaseline apparently acts as a somewhat good blender for colored pencils. Well, many colored pencil artists actually tried this technique (the many videos on Youtube are enough proofs of that). And while I am not as good as them in the art of using pencils, I'd like to join the fun.

Materials

The goal

Make the colors of a student-grade set of colored pencils look smooth and saturated.

How it went

The normal drawing. I started off by drawing as normally as I could get. LOL. I began with a little detailed base sketch before I layered it with colored pencils. The colors started with the skin, before I filled in the rest of her face. I particularly had a hard time with the hair, but I ended up liking it, at least.

The petroleum jelly. I know! I've heard of people using alcohol for blending colored pencils, but this is a first I've heard of them using petroleum jelly. A review showed that using Vaseline on your colored pencil drawing could saturate the colors -- and I was excited.

The application of Vaseline went on like this: I colored first before using a cotton swab to spread the jelly across the drawing.

Except it didn't turn out the way I wanted it to.

I may need more practice with this technique, if I would like to get the hang of it. For now, I think I did things wrong. For one, here are the results.

I liked the smoothness.

Applying Vaseline (petroleum jelly) into the colored pencil drawing sure smoothed out the colors, covering the valleys in the papers that appear as little white spaces. Sure enough, I could see why they did say Vaseline allows a really good blending of colors.

The color isn't as saturated as I wanted.

Instead, after applying the jelly and completely dried, it looked like the colors were sort of muted. However, I think there are things that I did wrong. 

  1. I used a lot of Vaseline (the size of a mung bean) each time. 
  2. I didn't apply even a little bit of Vaseline on the colored pencil while drawing.
  3. My coloring was too light.

I tried experimenting on a scratch paper and found out that applying a lot more color (i.e., coloring hard enough) would produce better effects. Also, in the video below, Moon Heaven showed different sorts of techniques in using the Vaseline on drawing, which I haven't applied... at all.

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@erangvee
Your picture still looks amazing though Awesomeeee! :D

Awww that means a lot, thank you! 😊

Thanks for the tip.

You're welcome! 😊

You are so talented , I liked your technique
Followed ♥

Thank you so much, @ahmedezzat! 😊

You're welcome
Can you take a look in my blog ?

Will check it out. 😊

OK

Ikaw na ang the best art scientist na kilala ko... <3 <3 <3 Awesomeeee! :D

OMG HAHAHAAHAHA. 😂😂😂 Inaapply mga natutunan ko science classes 😂. THANK YOU SOOO MUCH! ❤️️

hihihi~ very good student!!! :D you're welcome... ^^

Para sa kinabukasan. 😂😂😂

your post is very nice, full pack of knowledge and very attractive

Thank you so much, @ujjaval! 😊

Wonderful work, I love drawing, but whenever I applied color in my drawing it end up to be a mess, lol.
You are gifted

Thank you, @hananan! That means a lot to me. 😊 I'm still a beginner with colors, too (hence my trial and error) and it would be nice to see some of your colored drawings. 😊

Haha, no, it will only put my self in shame 😂 I have no idea how to use colors perfectly like you did. I believe one day you will bloom, you have a gifted sense of art.

Very interesting! Thank you for sharing this. I have the problem with color pencils when they don't look smooth enough but I don't want to use oil markers because their points are too large and cannot be used with small size drawings :) Will try this tip soon ^^

  ·  7 years ago (edited)

You're welcome (and thank you)! 😊 It is interesting, and helped a lot for the smoothness. I did some steps wrong though (hence the kinda sorta maybe muted saturation) so I believe the video I provided should help enough. 😉

It's a very interesting way to blend colors together. Your picture still looks amazing though. (⁀ᗢ⁀) how long did it take you?

True! LOL. Didn't end up the way I was hoping for, though. 😭 But thanks! 🤣😊 It took me between 4 and 5 hours, I think? Haha I'm a slow worker (I easily get distracted; have the attention span of a 5-yr-old 😂).

Helpful information! @erangvee

  ·  7 years ago (edited)

Thank you, @vasilisapor! 😊

awesome good job!,upvoted! ^ ^

ill be happy if you would check my work of drawing ^ ^

https://steemit.com/@cuteve

Thank you so much, @cuteve! 😊

Sure !!
And thank you ^ ^

Your friend will be happy. :D

She was. 😂 Pambawi sa hindi pagpunta sa bday celeb bya lol.

Hehe ganun pala ha. :D

Great, accurate portrait :) Never saw this technique before, it looks interesting :)

Thank you so much, @djei.art22! 😊

Regardless... it looks really good :)

Awesooome. Thank you so much! 😭

This is a very cool experiment, Great post. Also I love your work.

Thank you so much, @artonymous! 😊

Good work