Colored pencil is one of my favorite mediums for creating highly detailed, realistic artwork, but there’s no getting around one of its biggest drawbacks: it can be painfully slow. Building up enough layers to get rich color, smooth blending, and strong contrast takes time. A lot of time.
So when I tried LuxArchival 600 for this koi painting and discovered I could use actual water with my regular colored pencils, things got interesting very quickly.
And just to be clear, I’m not talking about watercolor pencils. These were regular colored pencils.
Using Water With Regular Colored Pencils
LuxArchival 600 is a 600-grit archival sanded art paper. The manufacturer sent the paper to me to try, but I wasn’t otherwise paid to share it. If I didn’t like it, you wouldn’t be reading this article because I simply wouldn’t bother talking about it.
Fortunately, I REALLY liked it.
One of the most interesting things about this surface is that it’s non-absorbent. Instead of water immediately soaking into the paper and potentially causing it to buckle or warp, the water and pigment can sit and move around on the surface. For my koi painting, I started by wetting the area I wanted to work on. I then applied regular colored pencil over the wet surface and used a damp paintbrush to move and blend that pigment.
It behaved surprisingly like a watercolor underpainting. I could quickly establish my larger shapes, colors, lights, and darks without spending forever filling every tiny bit of the paper with pencil strokes. At this stage, I wasn’t worried about details or getting everything perfectly smooth. I just needed to get my foundation established.
Once everything dried, I could go right back over it with more colored pencil. That one change to my normal process saved an incredible amount of time.
This Took About HALF the Time
Colored pencil usually requires layer after layer after layer to build enough pigment for the kind of realism I like to create. That’s part of what makes the medium so beautiful, but it’s also why a relatively small drawing can take days to complete.
With this technique, I finished the entire koi piece in a single day. For something this size and with this amount of detail, I would normally expect it to take me several days. I’d estimate that working this way cut my drawing time roughly in half.
The water-blended base gave me a huge head start. Once it dried, I could concentrate on refining the fish, adjusting my values and colors, and adding the details that actually mattered rather than spending hours just trying to cover the paper.
And Then I Added Odorless Mineral Spirits
The water was only the first part of the process.
After my water-blended layers were completely dry, I continued building up the painting with regular colored pencils. I then used odorless mineral spirits to blend those later layers.
This gave me the best of both techniques. Water allowed me to create a fast, loose underpainting, while the colored pencil and odorless mineral spirits gave me the control and smooth finish I wanted for the more refined areas. There’s another benefit here, too. The odorless mineral spirits don’t reactivate those earlier water-blended layers the way additional water could. I could continue working over that foundation without completely disturbing what I’d already created.
The whole process felt much more like painting with colored pencils than traditional colored pencil drawing.
Light Colored Pencil Over Dark?! YES.
As much as I loved the water technique, this may actually be my favorite thing about LuxArchival 600. If you’ve worked with colored pencils for very long, you know the struggle of trying to put a light color over a dark one.
Usually you need to plan ahead. Preserve those highlights. Don’t get an area too dark. Don’t fill the tooth of the paper too soon. Once you’ve built up too much pencil, eventually the surface basically tells you, We’re done here.
The 600-grit surface gave me a LOT more freedom. I could put light colors directly over dark areas and they actually showed up bright. That changed the way I approached the entire drawing.
Instead of worrying that every layer needed to be perfect before moving forward, I knew I could change things later. If an area was too dark, I could lighten it. If I wanted a different color, I could layer it over what was already there. If I needed a bright reflection on a dark fish, I didn’t have to carefully preserve that tiny highlight from the very beginning. For realism especially, that makes detail work so much easier.
A Different Way to Think About Colored Pencil
I think that’s what I enjoyed most about creating this piece. I didn’t feel as restricted by the medium. I could work the way I tend to approach a painting: establish the big shapes first, get my values and colors where I want them, refine things as I go, and save the tiny details for the end.
If you’re accustomed to traditional colored pencil techniques, using a wet brush to move pigment around may feel strange at first. You’re giving up some of the control we’re used to having with a pencil point. The pigment moves more like paint because, well… you’re basically painting with it. But once I got used to that, it was incredibly freeing.
And I’m already thinking about other ways I could use this surface. PanPastels could be interesting. An actual watercolor underpainting should open up even more possibilities. I could airbrush a background before adding colored pencil or experiment with charcoal and graphite. There are SO many possibilities here beyond the technique I used for the koi.
Want to Draw the Koi With Me?
If you’d like to try these techniques yourself, I have a full 3-hour real-time lesson for this exact koi painting on Patreon.
You’ll be able to follow along with the entire process step-by-step, including the water-blended base layers, building up the colored pencil, blending with odorless mineral spirits, and adding all of those final scales, reflections, ripples, and details.
You can find the full lesson on my Patreon at Patreon.com/Lachri