An amazing work of art, ang a great tutorial, too!

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~~Growing old is mandatory, growing up is optional~~

So awesome watching this piece happen step by step! Seeing the steps taken by another artist to me are like trying to learn a foreign language. Your pencil coloring style is very alien to me and hard for me to get a mental grip on. I think my pencil artwork is poisoned by my preference for markers... I've been told over and over to use layers and start lightly but I always seem to barge through in one thick layer trying to get my poor pencils to work like markers! This really helped to clear up for me the wonderful effects to be had using pencils like what they are, not what they aren't.

I'm already imagining how to warp what I've been shown to benefit my personal coloring style. With layers I can get both my beloved saturation and increased value.

I really enjoyed the richness of color and shadow in the finished piece and it was particularly helpful to watch them develop step by step here. Even with my markers I have known that avoiding black (I once did a floral mixing my own black from Violet and Dark Green) and using complements and other colors for shadows is best, but this is by far the best example I've had the privelege of seeing. It really gives me ideas for how to improve the richness of both my marker and my pencil art by incorporating more colors.

I'm especially enamored of the way you've shaded the green areas of tree foliage. Leaves often come up in my floral work and they're a thing I've long struggled to add shadow and highlight to. Leaves annoy and bore me but this gives me ideas (Like I've said) for how to spice up the annoying little things. I started using Navy Blue (A Crayola color) with my greens a while ago to slight improvement but I can see from the more advanced richness of your work that the addition of other blues (And reds?! That's news to me!) will be necessary.

Thank you for taking the time to make this wonderful tutorial. Reproducing what I've been shown isn't what I have in mind, but this has given me a lot of new principles and ideas to work when it comes to improving my personal coloring style. I'm even thinking differently about how I use my markers now!

Great work. I hope others find their way to this to get a handle on how you make your work as virbrant as it is, as well. And the new "next deviation" feature thanks to DA V5 made the series so much easier to read through!

--
Peachfuzz was a real cat, you know.
For his sake and others, please drive slow.
It's a horrible thing to go look for your cat
To find that some speeder has smashed him flat.

As you'll have noticed (hopefully) by your notices, I have +fav'd all six steps of this tutorial. I had also +fav'd the original picture when you had submitted it as the coloured pencil-work made my jaw drop. In this long ramble of mine, I am tring to say THANK YOU SO MUCH!!! I have tried again and again to teach this stuff to myself, being kind of obstinate in not wanting to learn through others Anyways, I'm glad I was kind of in the right direction, but this tutorial will hopefully let me break through the barrier I was stuck in and move forward in my artistic ability ^_^

On a side note: What kind of paper do you use, and where would I be able to find it? I've tried most kinds of paper, but none seem to really work in that I either can't layer my colors or else the finished product is grainy and just ick.

Thanks in advance

Thankye!

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*Melts into a puddle of ooze.*

"Never be afraid to make bad art."

I'm glad you enjoyed the tutorial and have managed to glean some new information from it! I was a little afraid that people would get tired of it towards the end as it felt like I kept on repeating myself in some instances.

It was also a little hard for me to pause and snap shots of the progress, especially since I work so sporatically. I'd get going and then realize "oh crap, I've done 40 minutes of work ..." I think I got a little better at that portion in the end.

Pencils definately take more patience than markers, at least in my experience. I did a marker piece not long ago and there very little that's the same when it comes to how they are applied and react.

I firmly believe that colored pencils, especially the softer ones like Prismas, have a long learning curve. I've been working with them for six years and am still learning. Even on this piece I learned a bit and experimented. I think one thing that I forgot to point out in this tutorial is how I used Indigo Blue in ALL of the shadows to help tie the whole thing together. It's in the trees, leaves, clothes, and his fur. I think having unity in a piece is important, it's one of the things that I learned in my college drawing classes. "If you have this nice, dark, rich black in this corner, you better have it in other shadows to help balance!"

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*Melts into a puddle of ooze.*

"Never be afraid to make bad art."

You're very welcome! It gives me warm-fuzzies all over knowing that people appreciate the work I put into this tutorial and have benefited from it.

Colored pencils have a definate learning curve, as I mentioned replying to Peachfuzz.

The stuff I used for this piece in particular is Bristol Board of the Smooth variety (hot pressed). I've been told that the Vellum (cold pressed) has a little more tooth and will "hold" more color, graphite, or whathaveye. I haven't had issues with the Smooth yet, but I tend to switch back and forth depending on what I grab while I'm at the art store (very unscientific). I've also used them ontop of watercolors on watercolor paper (examples of this are my "postcard" images) and colored art paper and pastel paper, which I don't have examples of here as I haven't played with it in a while. Mat board is also fun to mess with as well. Watercolor and pastel papers do have a lot more grain to them due to the nature of the media that they are meant for. Mat board varries, but it's a lot more expensive than the bristol. Even with the smooth bristol you will probably get a little texture as you saw in this picture, but that's part of the nature of the medium.

It shouldn't be "noisy" enough to distract from the image, though. You could also get a colorless blender, but that adds another layer ontop of what you've done. I've experimented a little with turpentine in the past, which gives them a "painted" appearance, but in the end I prefer the look and feel of just using the colors and allowing them to blend themselves rather than forcing it with a blender or other method. You should notice as you add more layers, even lightly, it tends to smooth out.

That was lengthy, but hopefully helpful! Feel free to ask me whatever questions you have, I'm more than happy to answer.

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*Melts into a puddle of ooze.*

"Never be afraid to make bad art."

**purrs** Glad to know I help spread the warm-fuzzies

Yeah, I guessed it was Bristol (well, actually, you said it right in the tutorial ), but I wasn't sure what kind. Thanks for the help on the differences between the kinds of papers ^_^ Now I just have to figure out where I can buy the paper 0.o

Unfortunately, the grains in the paper I'm currently using doesn't layer at all >_<* So everything looks really "noisy", as you put it. What is this colourless blender? It may help my current situation until I can find some actual Bristol Board >.>;

T'was extremely helpful! Thanks so much for your time, and thanks for the +watch ^_^

Eeee, this was brilliant to go through, I love to see other the methods of other artists especially in such a versatile medium.

Markers are the same as pencils in that, with layering, you get a richness and quality of color and shadow very similar to the technique you showed us all in your tutorial. Strange that I use layers insanely with markers and hardly at all with pencils! My brain seems to work in terms of ink, not lead. With markers I can always add another layer, on on top of the other. But when I barge through and fully saturate with the first layer of pencil (As if it was a marker), I'm screwed, so to speak. Therein lies my pencil-fault, I now see.

I think you're right that pencils take more patience than markers. Something about how markers work is much more simple to me. Maybe it's because, when I was younger, I used up set after set of markers, not pencils. They're my native media!

What types of markers have you tried? My favorites are Prismacolor markers. Despite my preference for markers I own many types of pencils and can't quite pick a favorite because they don't satisfy me like markers do. I end up doing a lot of pencil art because pencils are easier to take out and use than markers, and are far less paper-specific. Maybe I'd like them better if I was more satisfied with my performance with them.

Thanks for the tip concerning balance by using the same color in all shadows. That makes a lot of sense.

--
Peachfuzz was a real cat, you know.
For his sake and others, please drive slow.
It's a horrible thing to go look for your cat
To find that some speeder has smashed him flat.