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Coloured Pencil Tools and Accessories: What You Actually Need

Walk into any art shop and you'll find an entire wall of accessories marketed at coloured pencil artists. Solvents, fixatives, blending stumps, specialist erasers, burnishing tools, storage solutions, extension holders. The packaging promises smoother blends, richer colours, professional results.

Most of it can wait. Some of it you may never need at all.

When I came back to coloured pencils, I bought far too much too soon. A full set of blending stumps I barely touched for two years. A bottle of solvent that sat on my desk while I learned that careful layering does most of the heavy lifting on its own. An expensive electric eraser that turned out to be less useful than a 50p kneaded rubber.

The supplies that matter most are your pencils and your paper. Everything else on this page is a supporting tool: useful in specific situations, unnecessary in others, and never a substitute for understanding how your pencils actually work.

Here's what each tool does, when it genuinely helps, and when you can safely leave it in the shop.

Solvents: dissolving pigment for a painted finish

Coloured pencil solvents are liquids that dissolve the wax or oil binder in your pencil marks, allowing the pigment to flow together into a smooth, almost painted finish.

Applied with a brush or cotton bud, they break down the individual pencil strokes and merge them into a continuous layer of colour.

The result can be striking. Areas that looked textured and strokey become smooth and saturated. It's a different look from what you can achieve with layering and burnishing alone.

When solvents help: Large areas where you want a smooth, even finish without visible pencil strokes. Underpaintings where you want to establish colour quickly before layering dry pencil on top. Backgrounds, skies, and broad areas of flat colour.

When you can skip them: For most detailed work, careful layering gives you more control. Solvents can be unpredictable on certain papers, and they remove some of your ability to build colour gradually. If you're just starting out, learn what your pencils can do on their own first. Solvents make more sense once you understand why you'd want them.

A note on safety: Some solvents (particularly mineral spirit-based ones) have strong fumes and need good ventilation. Others, like Zest-It, are citrus-based and less harsh. Either way, you're adding a wet medium to what was a dry, clean process, which changes the simplicity that probably drew you to coloured pencils in the first place.

There's a detailed guide to coloured pencil solvents covering the different types, how to use them safely at home, and when they genuinely improve a piece versus when they're just adding a step.

Fixative spray: protecting finished work

Fixative spray deposits a thin, transparent coating over your finished drawing. Its main job is to protect the surface from smudging and, in the case of wax-based pencils, to prevent wax bloom (that hazy film that can develop over heavily layered areas after a few weeks).

When fixative helps: Protecting finished work that will be handled, transported, or displayed without glass. Preventing wax bloom on pieces created with wax-heavy pencils like Prismacolor Premier or Caran d'Ache Luminance. Adding a protective layer between stages of a drawing if you plan to layer over the top.

When you can skip it: If your work goes straight under glass, fixative is less critical. Oil-based pencils like Faber-Castell Polychromos rarely develop wax bloom, so the main reason for fixing them is smudge protection. If you're working in a sketchbook for your own reference, you probably don't need it.

The risk: Fixative can change the appearance of your work. Some brands darken colours slightly. A heavy coat can dull the surface or cause spotting. Light, even coats from the right distance are essential, and testing on a scrap piece first is not optional. I learned this the hard way on a drawing I'd spent three weeks on.

The fixative spray guide covers application technique, which brands work well, and how to avoid the common mistakes that can ruin a finished piece.

Paper blending stumps: smoothing and transferring pigment

Blending stumps (and their thinner cousins, tortillons) are tightly rolled paper tools used to physically push and smooth pigment on your drawing surface. They pick up colour from one area and can deposit it in another, creating soft transitions and subtle tonal shifts.

When stumps help: Portrait work on smooth paper, where you need delicate transitions in skin tones. Softening edges between adjacent areas of colour. Picking up pigment from a scrap "palette" and applying whisper-light layers of colour to your drawing, a technique that gives you remarkable control over very subtle tinting.

When you can skip them: On textured or rough paper, stumps don't work well and can damage themselves against the surface. For most coloured pencil work, layering with light pressure achieves similar blending results with more control. Stumps are genuinely useful for specific effects, but they're not the default blending method for coloured pencil the way they might be for charcoal or graphite.

A practical tip: If you do use stumps, keep separate ones for light and dark colours. A stump loaded with dark blue pigment will make a mess of a pale face if you forget to switch. I keep mine in two small boxes to prevent accidents.

The paper blending stumps guide covers the difference between stumps and tortillons, how to use them without damaging your paper, cleaning techniques, and the palette transfer method that I find most useful.

Erasers: lifting colour and fixing mistakes

Erasing coloured pencil is not like erasing graphite. Once pigment is pressed into the paper tooth, it doesn't come out completely. But the right eraser, used at the right moment, can lift enough colour to soften an area, recover a lost highlight, or correct a mistake before it gets buried under more layers.

The kneaded eraser is the most useful eraser in a coloured pencil artist's toolkit. It's a soft, putty-like rubber that you mould into whatever shape you need. Press it gently onto a surface and it lifts pigment without friction, without crumbs, and without damaging the paper. It's cheap, it lasts ages, and it does five or six jobs that would otherwise need separate tools.

When erasers help: Lifting graphite underdrawing lines before they get trapped under colour. Softening an area that's gone too dark too soon. Creating subtle highlights by dabbing away colour. Cleaning up edges where colour has strayed outside your intended area.

When they won't save you: Heavy, burnished layers of coloured pencil are essentially permanent. No eraser will take them back to white paper. This is why working with light pressure in early layers matters so much. The earlier you catch a problem, the more an eraser can do.

Beyond the kneaded eraser: There are electric erasers, vinyl erasers, eraser pencils, and more. Each has specific strengths. But if you're just starting, a kneaded eraser is all you need. Add others when you understand what they'd do for your particular way of working.

The complete eraser guide covers the different types, which ones work best for coloured pencil, and techniques for lifting colour without wrecking your paper surface.

Everything else: the helpful extras

Beyond these four main tools, there's a world of accessories: pencil extenders, storage cases, drawing boards, lightboxes, colour charts, brush pens for blending watercolour pencil work, and more.

Some of these are genuinely useful. A pencil extender lets you use pencil stubs instead of throwing away a third of every pencil you own. A decent drawing board makes working away from a desk comfortable. Proper storage protects pencils from the kind of drops that shatter the core inside the barrel (and then every sharpening session becomes a battle).

Others are nice to have but not necessary. And a few are solutions looking for a problem.

The accessories guide sorts through the extras honestly, with notes on what I actually use, what sits in a drawer untouched, and what's worth investing in once your practice is established.

The honest summary

Here's what I'd tell myself if I were starting again:

Buy first: A kneaded eraser. That's it, as far as tools go. It costs almost nothing and you'll use it constantly.

Buy when you need it: Fixative spray, once you start producing finished work you want to protect. A few blending stumps, once you're working on smoother paper and want those soft transitions in portraits or similar work.

Buy when you understand why: Solvents, once you've spent enough time with dry layering to know what it can and can't do, and you have a specific effect in mind that solvents would achieve better.

Don't buy because someone said you should: Every coloured pencil artist works differently. The tools that are essential for someone doing hyper-realistic portraits on Bristol board might be completely irrelevant if you're drawing landscapes on textured paper. Let your own practice tell you what you need. It will, given time.

Your pencils and your paper are where the real investment belongs. Everything else is supporting cast.


About the Author

I'm Carol, and I've been working with coloured pencils for over 15 years.
My work has been featured in Ann Kullberg's COLOR Magazine and I'm a member of the UK Coloured Pencil Society. Like many of you, I came back to art as an adult and had to learn the colour foundations I'd skipped the first time round. Everything on this site comes from that experience of going back, learning properly, and finding out it was worth the effort.

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