Coloring with soft chalk pastels on a grayscale background

If your approach to grayscale coloring is anything like mine, you probably spend a bunch of time and effort on the main part of your picture and then you are left thinking "what am I going to do for the background??" You are probably also thinking: "I worked so hard on this picture, I don't want to mess it up by doing a bad job on the background!" Well, when you feel this way soft chalk pastels are there for you :-). 

With grayscale you can take advantage of the lovely details already present in the grayscale image and just dust over the background with some light color from the soft chalk pastels because those details will come through and give your background some interest.

Here are the basic steps which you will see in the following video:

• ​First, scribble down your color with the soft chalk pastels being sure to follow the guidance of the gray (just like you did for the main image). 
• Now, with a clean finger begin smudging the color around.
• When you move to a new color area, use a DIFFERENT, CLEAN finger!

Medium used in the following video:

• Staedtler soft chalk pastels

​Here's the completed picture from the video:

Coloring Book: Beautiful Creatures
Colorist: Nicole Stocker

Here's another video showing the use of soft chalk pastels for the background. This time-lapse is done by the talented Jones Flores. Her background technique is different in that she is also using colored pencils. The soft chalk pastels make blending of her Faber Castell Classic Colors colored pencils much easier. Interestingly, this approach does not work well with Prismacolor Premier colored pencils.

​Here's the completed picture from the video:

Coloring Book: Beautiful Creatures
Colorist: Jones Flores