How to Draw Smooth Tonal Layers in Colored Pencils

Smooth tonal layers are important in pencil drawing and especially colored pencil drawing, where smudging isn't going to help smooth out shading. It's easier to fill an area with hard strokes covering it completely than to fill it with a light shade of a dark color. Since exercises are more fun if they result in cool artwork, this project will make an attractive, graphic looking landscape of mountains receding into the distance... entirely done in smooth tonal layers.

Instructions

Difficulty: Moderately Challenging

Things You’ll Need:

• 24 color set of colored pencils including dark brown, red-brown (Burnt Sienna or Terra Cotta), yellow ochre or non metallic gold,
• Drawing paper or sketchbook (white or cream), with some tooth.
• HB (No. 2 normal) pencil
• Kneaded eraser
• White vinyl eraser
• Workable matte fixative
• Grid ruler or regular ruler

1. Tracing of design since actual lines are too light to scan. Mark off your paper with at least a half inch margin around the drawing area. This is easy with a grid ruler, just line it up along the sides and draw along it. With a non-grid ruler, measure in from the edges several times and then connect the dots with a ruler-drawn line. The markup lines can cross each other. This will give your final drawing some space to go under the mat. Using a big sketchbook and leaving bigger margins like my example will give plenty of room to test color combinations without turning the page.
   
   Turn the marked up page to landscape orientation, wider than it is tall. This will give the best layout for an abstracted landscape. Use your ruler to lightly draw some slanted lines across the page. Mark up a 6" x 9" area and use these coordinates:
   
   Top line starts 1 1/4" down on the right, slants to 2 3/8" down on the left.
   
   Second line starts at 3" down from the top on the left and slants down to 3 3/4" on the right.
   
   Third line starts at 4 1/8" down on the right, slanting to 4 3/4" on the left
   
   Fourth line starts 4 1/4" down on the right, slants down to 5 3/16" on the left.
   
   Lowest line starts at 4 1/2" on the right and slants to the bottom, 2 7/8' in from the left.
   
   To draw these lines put coordinate dots just outside the border line and connect them.
   
   Last, lightly mark the jagged mountain. Slide the ruler up from the bottom horizontally till the line 4" in from the right crosses the second line. Mark a point 2" in from the right side and 3 5/16" up from the bottom. Mark another point 1 1/2" in from the right and 2 7/8" up from the bottom. Last, mark a point on the right edge 3 5/8" up from the bottom.
   
   Use the ruler to connect those dots to make the jagged peaks.
   
   Use the kneaded eraser to lift those lines till you can barely see them, if you drew lightly they should not have grooved the paper. To lift, press the kneaded eraser hard on the line, then peel off. Do not rub. Stretch and squish eraser when it gets dirty, presenting a clean surface. Press and lift on all the lines till you can barely see them. Erase any graphite smudges within the picture area with the white vinyl eraser.
   
   Spray with a light coat of workable matte fixative as soon as they're light but still visible to you.
2. Pencil points sharp and angled, and a sample of smooth tonal layer in dark blue on white Using scratch paper, wear down the point of each colored pencil you use to an angled chisel point before drawing on the picture. It's much harder to draw smooth tonal layers with a sharp point. Practice on the side margins until it's worn down and try to draw lightly.
   
   Do not put much pressure on the pencil. You should see white flecks of paper showing within the strokes, since normal sketchbook paper has some tooth. When it's worn down, try to produce the effect of a smooth tonal layer by doing light strokes parallel to each other in a small area. Spacing them about one line width about, just do a row, then fill in between them with another stroke.
   
   In the next step we'll show what happens when this goes wrong and how to avoid each type of problem. Practice tonal layers on a scratch sheet or a different sketchbook before working on the picture. I'll use my small sketchbook to show some different problems and how to fix them.
3. Some common problems and their fixes Some common problems in drawing smooth tones in colored pencil are trying to do it with a sharp point, pressing too hard, pressing unevenly and worst of all, my personal bugaboo for a long time, unwanted overlap stripes when trying to fill in an area. These can make a distracting striped pattern over whatever you try to fill.
   
   If the point is too sharp, just draw heavily on scratch paper without turning the pencil, holding it at an angle. It will turn into the wide angled point of the previous diagram. Don't roll the pencil while doing this or it'll resharpen itself.
   
   Pressing too hard is sometimes difficult to overcome. Try to barely touch the paper with the flat tip of the pencil, keeping it at a consistent angle. Lightly brush across it. Go as light as you can even if your first tonal layers are lighter than you wanted. You can always go over them again to get them to the exact shade. It is much easier to go over a light layer than to lift a layer that's too dark, or has heavy ground-in dark strokes in it.
   
   Practice until you can get consistent light texture. It helps at first to slow down and be careful. Think about how hard you're pressing. Go slow and try to fill in gaps rather than getting it just right on the first try. Go extremely light and then fill in over it.
   
   To avoid overlap patterns, start your next row of strokes exactly at the ends of the previous ones. It may help to trail off your strokes lifting entirely from the paper, then gradually come in over the feathering with the pencil in the next row. With a blunt enough pencil I can start and stop just next to the end of the previous row. You may want to err on the side of gaps and gently fill in afterward.
   
   To fix an area that already got overlap stripes, first lift the whole area with your kneaded eraser. Press hard, then peel off. Do not rub. Once it's lightened, go in and very lightly fill in just the lighter areas, till they match the darker ones. This can take time but it will usually work in one careful pass.
4. First strip mostly done, showing smooth tone created with horizontal gentle strokes with a blunt dark brown pencil Try keeping your strokes parallel. Many beginners fill in with strokes that form unwanted patterns, going around the edges of a figure with short straight lines that cross each other like basketweaving but do not quite touch each other. This doesn't produce a heavy fill, it produces visible strokes and patterns that distract instead of being a smooth layer. Others will have overlap patterns in backgrounds that suddenly turn into a heavy outline of the picture area.
   
   Another problem is trying to cover an entire large area with long strokes. It is much easier to get smooth tones with a short zigzagging light stroke, then fill in any light bits in a second pass to clean it up. So on the picture, try using slightly angled strokes that fill the narrow bands, and then do more than one row of them in wider bands and parts of bands. Start with the narrowest band first and then gradually work up to larger areas.
   
   Practice until you can get smooth layers of tone in more than one row of short lines no more than 3/8" to 5/8" long, without overlap lines in either direction. Then start the drawing with the easiest part, the narrowest band. Let's do that one in a medium tonal layer with the darkest brown.
   
   I used horizontal lines to fill it in because once my pencil was blunted, the right side was so narrow only two lines filled it. So I worked back and forth in rows of horizontal short light lines, filling in between groups of them. At the left is an example of an area left to fill in. This technique may help. Where I got accidental overlap lines, I was going light enough to just fill in by gently going over the lighter parts.
   
   See the dark patch on the right for where I wore down the dark brown pencil to an angled point. Scrub hard till you start seeing the lines get wider, without rolling the pencil at all.
5. Earth tones triad filling foreground areas Finish filling in the narrow dark brown strip. Pick a russet color, Terra Cotta or Venetian Red or Burnt Sienna, whatever medium dark reddish brown is in your set. For most art we would work background to foreground, but on something this graphic it does not matter which area to fill in first. Just turn the picture on its side or upside down to keep clean areas under your hand.
   
   Put a piece of printer paper under your hand while working so that your sweat does not dissolve the colored pencil. Hand oils can work even on non water soluble colored pencils, and smear them to create an unwanted texture.
   
   No matter how good you are, you may still get an unwanted dark stroke by accident. Just press and lift with a kneaded eraser until the dark part is the tone of the layer, then fill in around it gently.
   
   Some artists do smooth tonal layers with soft tiny circular strokes, starting in the middle of an area and working outward. This may work for you. It still rests on filling in accidental light bits until you get the hang of it, and edging very carefully with the edge of the chisel point. Barely touch the paper while edging a smooth tonal area. With a sharp point or edge it's too easy to go too hard and draw a line.
   
   Whatever type or direction of strokes you use, if they are gentle and overlap with fill-ins on the lighter parts, you shouldn't be able to tell afterward what direction they went. That's the beauty of smooth tonal layers. Strokes don't show to distract the viewer from the shape of the area.
   
   Fill the triangular area at the bottom right with yellow ochre, a gold color that isn't metallic. Because it's such a light color, cover it with two layers and fill in around accidental darker streaks on the second layer. It's okay to use longer strokes once you start getting the hang of light pressure, within the middle of an area. It's also okay to do layers across the first layers as long as that does not make visible crosshatching. I personally like to stay parallel, but have sometimes crossed directions in filling in.
   
   My yellow ochre pencil was already blunt so I didn't test it on the side.
6. Green layer complete, gray layer across more than half of the right side mixing with it With seven color areas in this drawing, I want the middle one to be cooler than the earth tones in the bottom three -- the foreground. Green, blue and violet are cool colors, gray counts as a cool color unless it's a warm brownish gray. What I want is green-gray for that middle area, and I will now need to put something under my hand to keep from smearing my gold, reddish and dark browns while I do it. Or turn it upside down to start filling from middle towards the top.
   
   To mix green-gray, start with green. My set has four greens, counting yellow-green as one of them. I want the bluest green in my set, which is medium dark. Test your greens on the borders until you have a good combination of green-gray that will work. You can either mix gray and green, or you can mix green and a little red-purple to mute it and make it grayer. It is easier to just mix gray and green unless you have plenty of practice doing very light tonal layers, since it doesn't take much for red-purple to dominate the picture. Let's see how those samples look on the side.
   
   Green and gray looks better and is easier, so let's mix green and gray. Do the green layer first, going lightly.
   
   Because the gray is light, I could go a little heavier with it and do it in two layers. It's easier to get a mixed color smooth than a single layer single color, because each layer lets you correct areas that are too dark or light.
7. Jagged hills filled with blue-purple and dark brown Choose a medium value purplish blue, and cover the jagged hills with a double layer of it for smoothness. Value means how light or dark a color is, not how much it costs.
   
   Because the purplish blue is too bright and too light, cover it with a light layer of the very dark brown used for the first narrow strip. Test the mixture on the side and fill the little jagged hills area with a mixed dark purplish blue. Even if you have this color in your set, the mixed colors can be more lively. If your purplish blue is darker, use a lighter brown to tone it to match the example.
8. Next to last area filled with light blue, covered with brown most of the way and fuchsia about a third of the way for a three color mixture Fill the next to last band with a layer of light sky blue. Some colors are harder to get smooth than others, my set's light sky blue gave me trouble getting streaks of darker color unpredictably even though my pressure is consistent. Since the light blue is exactly the same value as the gray-green, it looks bad next to it though it's fine next to the dark purple blue muted with brown. So let's gray it with another color that will darken it to midway between the gray-green and the dark grayed blue-purple.
   
   After testing fuchsia, gray, red-brown and a medium brown darker than the yellow ochre, the best color for that area is a three layer combination of fuchsia and medium brown over the sky blue. Get each layer as smooth as you can, but filling in with later colors on light areas also makes a subtle jazzy shimmer.
   
   The example shows the blue area extending all the way to the right, the brown area slanting off about a half inch away from the jagged dark hills and the fuchsia area stopping a couple of inches away from where the brown stops, to show the combinations in order.
   
   If this project wasn't planned to use flat smooth tones in all areas, I might shade this last layer gradually darkest at the left to lightest at the right, to create interesting value changes. Try that variation if you like the idea when you reach this stage.
9. Final completed drawing, with border and color tests showing Fill in the rest of the three-color mixture on the next to last area. Then fill the last area with smooth gray. Lift any dark patches with kneaded eraser and gently fill in on the light areas created by the lifting so that the previously dark part matches the rest.
   
   If you want to do this project in exactly the colors I did, my 24 color set is the Koh-I-Noor Progresso Woodless Coloured Pencils set. Reasonably priced compared to most artist grade sets, the woodless pencils can wear down to a very wide chisel point without sharpening because wood doesn't get in the way. They are sturdy, heavy in the hand and excellent quality especially for filling in large areas with smooth tonal layers. I have seen them at art supply stores and office supply stores at reasonable prices compared to say, Prismacolors, and they are a bargain because they wear out much slower. They have five times as much pigment as a wood cased artist grade pencil.
   
   If you are a beginner but like colored pencils, I recommend investing in a large set, 72 colors or larger. The more colors you have to choose from, the more interesting your color combinations can become and the easier it is to get the right color in the right value to start with.
   
   Practicing smooth tonal layers will help get heavy layers smooth too. Start with light layers and then go over them again, finally burnishing a mixed color with a colorless blender or with white or a light color. Burnishing is going over the entire area of a tonal layer very hard, filling in everywhere, and blending the colored pencil on the page with the light color or clear blender till no white specks show. It can make an interesting contrast to use both textures in a drawing.
   
   Smooth light tonal layers like these make very good backgrounds for floral subjects or portraits, or anything where there isn't a specific background but the white paper is too dark against the subject. If you have light edges to objects like a yellow flower or a pale skinned person's cheek, consider filling the background with a dark tonal layer in a muted complementary color -- blue-purple behind the warm pale peach-tan of a face, violet or brown or dark green behind a yellow flower.
   
   When you can blend away your strokes entirely in smooth tonal layers, you will have control over your strokes when you want them to show. Smooth tonal layers are an important technique for mastering colored pencil realism, and useful when soft textures are needed.

Tips & Warnings

• Try the design small at first for practice and to decide your exact colors and combination colors. Once small ones start looking good, draw a big version to hang as a poster.
• Practice smooth tonal layers in coloring books, or print out enlarged copies of line art cartoons and use those like coloring books to practice smooth fill-ins with tonal layers. A heavy thick line around the area to be colored may help for beginners to keep from going over the lines while coloring. Girls' manga are very good for this because many costumes and areas take light soft colors perfect for smooth tonal layers. Shade with flat areas of darker smooth tonal layers.
• Time, patience and practice will make this a powerful technique for any colored pencil drawing you do. Shading in colored pencil is easier, so try shading into smooth tonal layers on some exercises if you have too much trouble with flat areas of light color.
• Do not use 'smooth' Bristol or 'hot press' watercolor paper. Rough paper will make a coarser effect but might work. Vellum Surface or Cold Press watercolor paper or standard sketchbook paper is best. Index cards are smooth surface. Try different papers till it starts looking like the examples. Canson Mi-Tientes smooth side without the woven texture will work, use White color or Cream.
• Don't press hard. It's better to go over it in two light layers than try for a smooth tone on the first pass.
• Don't rub with your kneaded eraser when lifting dark marks. Press, then peel off, stretch to clean, fold and repeat. Rubbing grinds the pigment into the paper so it will make an ugly smear that won't come up.