Swatching and Colour Picking for colour pencils

Every time I hear that a beginner is struggling to 'pick the right colour' I shudder. Too many beginner and intermediate tutorials will tell you exactly the colour name and number to use at any given stage and it can be a little intimidating to go it alone for the first time. Honestly, don’t worry about matching colours exactly! Close enough is almost always good enough, even with realism! Who’s going to see the reference and the artwork side by side anyway?

Despite all the fuss made about colour matching, it is vastly more important to get closer to the right tonal value than it is the right colour. Tonal value is how dark or light a colour is and it’s what gives a 3D object form and dimension on the page, and it's essential for good realism. If your colours regularly look a bit off, it might be because your values aren’t right.

Typical Gray Scale - TONAL - value finder

This is a typical value finder card. I recommend getting one, especially if you’ve ever been advised to ‘go darker’. It’s amazing how dark some things are when you check.

Tonal value aside, you know a yellow when you see one, right? But when that yellow is a little brown, a little green, and a little grubby looking, it gets more difficult. Which is why swatching is so important. You won’t know the true colour of your pencil is unless you swatch. Definitely don't rely on the end cap colour. I recommend making individual slim cards on your favourite surface, ensuring the colour goes right to the edge. Like these...

Swatch Card

Swatch Card

As an example, I’m checking my Derwent Lightfast yellow swatches against the shadow side of this flower. I’ve punched a hole at the end of the swatch so that I can lay the entire thing over the colour and tone that I’m trying to match. Comparing the reference through the hole, it is obvious that the first pair are too bright and too light. The second pair are much closer in value, but still too vibrant. They don’t have that muted shadow appearance.

Yellow, Violet and the resulting shadow

This is where a little bit of colour theory comes into play. When you blend an opposite colour from the colour wheel onto your base colour, you can make a lovely shadow version of itself. I opted to use ‘Golden Sun’ and layer in some ‘Mars Violet’. This had the added effect of slightly darkening the value too, bringing it even closer to the yellowy, browny, greeny grubby colour I wanted.

The beauty of this swatching approach is that I can try different blends before starting, giving me confidence going into the drawing. As you practice blending, it gets a bit easier to mix the 'perfect' colour. Professional artists have many years of practice to make it look effortless.

But if this seems a little too much, how about these alternatives to get you going?

A digital Colour Picker App might be for you. The most useful one I’ve tried is the ‘Colour Pencil Picker’. It works by analysing the pixels under your pointer, then recommends two or three brand specific pencils for you to blend. It works well, and certainly takes a lot of the uncertainty out. But it tends to give different results all over what should be a flat colour and overcomplicates the drawing with too many pencils and too much blending. If you have the version with all the pencils in, it feels like it's using every single one! I also found the drawing lacked contrast, but I love to push that, so it may be just me!

I found this really interesting YouTube video by Gemma Chambers where she compares the same drawing done with her usual colour picking method and using the Colour Pencil Picker App.

Colour Dragging

Somewhere in the middle is what I've nicknamed Colour Dragging. If you have a drawing App like Photoshop or Procreate, even the ever-useful (and free) Microsoft Paint, you can manually pick colours out of your reference (eye-dropper tool in Paint) and create digital swatches off to the side. As you can see here, this is something I also use. It's pretty quick (I have Procreate on the IPad) and I don't do every colour, just the main ones that I might struggle to identify. White's for example, are rarely white at all and always surprise me!

The benefit with this process is that you are looking at your digital swatch away from the influence of adjacent colours. With white around them, they are much easier to see, and sometimes surprisingly dark. You do still need to match your pencils, but it can be helpful to isolate the colours first.

However you pick your pencils, remember that you can adjust and shift, darken and lighten, by layering in other colours. Rarely is one pencil the exact right colour and tone, and close enough is good enough, right?

TIP - If you have a go with the hole-punched swatch cards, keep them in rainbow order, irrespective of brand, on a ring or tied at the other end with string or ribbon. This will help you see where you have lots of pencils in one colour family to choose from and where you have some gaps in your collection. Any test blends you do, keep those for future reference. Don't forget to label them though!