Grayscale Coloring
Techniques BLOG
TIPS, TECHNIQUES & TUTORIALS
Which was colored with which? Prismacolor Premiers vs. Faber Castell Polychromos Tiger from the Beautiful Creatures grayscale coloring book For a long time I've heard many wonderful things from the coloring community about both Prismacolor Premier colored pencils and Faber Castell Polychromos colored pencils. I've had some Prismacolor Premiers for a while (which I love!) and recently was fortunate enough to also get a set of Faber Castell Polychromos pencils (which I also love!). Once I had both, I decided it was time to conduct a head to head test!!
In this post I will:
I recently discovered how wonderful coloring grayscale with colored pencils over water-based markers can be! I suspect it would be even better over alcohol-based markers but that is something I haven't tested yet and will have to wait for a future post :-). The marker serves as a great base of color that can add some richness and depth to your image. If the marker color is light enough then the grayscale details will show through making it easy to figure out where and how dark or light to go with the colored pencils. I completed the bear above using this technique. The bear has a ton of fur detail that would have taken me hours to do with just colored pencils. By coloring the entire bear (except the eyes & nose) and the background with Tombow Dual Brush Pens I was able to get a base of color and then just focus on enhancing the detail with colored pencil. I found that I did not need to be too precise with the colored pencils. Overall, it made the process faster but still really enjoyable and I achieved a more vibrant result thanks to the color coverage from the markers.
In this post I'm going to walk you through my step-by-step process of coloring two different pictures using this technique and what my key learnings were. One I colored with Staedtler Triplus Fineliners and the other with Tombow Dual Brush Pens as well as Fineliners for the smaller areas. In both cases I used Prismacolor Premier colored pencils over top. |