...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.
- I used a lot of Vaseline (the size of a mung bean) each time.
- I didn't apply even a little bit of Vaseline on the colored pencil while drawing.
- 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.
