Getting Started with Coloured Pencils: A Practical Guide for Returning Artists

Coloured pencils were probably the last art materials you used before life got in the way. They sat in a tin on your desk at school, and if you're honest, the work you did with them wasn't exactly what you'd call "real" drawing. You coloured in. You copied. You got told you were good at art, and you believed it.

Now, years later, you've seen what coloured pencils can actually do. Detailed portraits. Landscapes that look like photographs. Fruit you could swear you could pick up. And you're thinking: I want to learn to do that.

But there's a quiet worry underneath. What if what you had as a child wasn't really talent? What if you try properly this time and discover you just... can't?

Here's what I want to tell you, because I've been exactly where you are. That worry is normal. And the answer is more reassuring than you might expect.

What you had was real. What you didn't have was training

Most of us who were "good at art" as children were good at copying. We could look at something and reproduce a reasonable version of it. Teachers praised us, and we absorbed the idea that this was talent.

What nobody taught us was how drawing actually works. How light creates the illusion of form. How our eyes perceive colour differently from how pigments mix on paper. How to look at a subject and understand its shapes, values, and edges rather than just trying to copy what we see.

These aren't complicated ideas. They're foundations that were simply never covered.

Learning them now, as an adult, is surprisingly straightforward because you already have the thing that matters most: you notice detail. You care about accuracy. You're willing to persist with something until it looks right. Those instincts are genuine.

You just need the framework to build on them properly.

Why coloured pencils are a good choice

You probably chose coloured pencils for practical reasons, and that was a sound decision. Let me confirm what you suspected:

They're clean. No water pots, no turpentine, no rags, no dried palettes to scrape. Your pencils sit in a tin or a case, and when you're done, you close the lid.

They fit around a real life. You don't need a studio. A dining table, a drawing board, decent light, and an hour to yourself is enough. You can stop mid-drawing and come back days or weeks later. Nothing dries, nothing changes, nothing goes off. You pick up exactly where you left off.

They reward patience, not speed. Coloured pencil is a slow medium, and that's a feature, not a flaw. Every mark is deliberate. Every layer is a decision. If you're someone who finds calm in careful, focused work, this medium will suit you.

The control is extraordinary. Unlike wet media that flow and pool unpredictably, coloured pencil goes exactly where you put it. This precision lets you build colour gradually, correct course as you go, and render fine details when you choose to.

They're capable of genuinely stunning work. Artist-grade coloured pencils bear no resemblance to the ones you used at school. These are serious art materials, made with high-quality, lightfast pigments in wax or oil-based binders. The depth of colour they can produce surprises almost everyone who sees it for the first time.

What you actually need to get started

One of the first anxieties is supplies. Art shops are overwhelming, and it's easy to spend a fortune on things you don't need yet.

Here's the honest version: you need less than you think.

A set of artist-quality coloured pencils (not necessarily a big one), some decent paper, a reliable sharpener, and something to draw on. That's your starting kit. No solvents, no blending stumps, no special erasers. Those come later, once you understand what they do and whether your way of working needs them.

I've put together a detailed supplies guide that covers exactly what to buy, what to skip, and how to avoid the expensive mistakes I made when I started. It includes specific UK recommendations so you're not guessing.

The sharp pencil question

This sounds trivial, but it matters more than you'd expect. A sharp point gives you smooth, even coverage. A blunt one leaves white specks in your work that no amount of layering will fix.

The problem is that coloured pencils are notorious for breaking during sharpening. The core snaps inside the barrel and you lose centimetres of pencil every time you try. I lost a lot of good pencils before I figured out what was happening and how to prevent it.

There's a complete guide to sharpening that covers the different methods, which sharpeners actually work (the most expensive aren't always the best).

Getting an accurate drawing onto your paper

Before any colour goes down, you need an outline on your paper. And here's something important: using tools to get that outline accurate is not cheating.

I trace. Most coloured pencil artists do. It lets you put your energy into the rendering, the light, shadow, and colour, which is where the real skill lives. Nobody looks at a finished drawing and asks how the outline got there.

There are two main methods, and they suit different situations:

The grid method trains your eye to see proportions accurately. You divide your reference photo and your paper into matching grids, then draw what you see in each square. It's slower, but it teaches you to really look. Over time, your proportional judgment improves and you need the grid less.

Tracing paper lets you transfer a reference drawing directly. It's faster and it's what I use most of the time. This isn't a shortcut. It's a tool that lets you focus your energy on the work that actually develops your artistic skill.

Read more about the grid method and using tracing paper to see which suits your way of working.

Setting up a space that works

You don't need a studio.

You need a surface you can work at comfortably, decent light (daylight or a daylight-balanced lamp), and somewhere to keep your materials between sessions so you're not packing up and unpacking every time.

Small adjustments make a surprising difference. The angle of your board, the height of your chair, where your reference photo sits, whether you're reaching across wet paint on a palette (you're not, because coloured pencils don't have that problem).

There's a practical guide to setting up your drawing space that covers the essentials without assuming you have a spare room to convert.

Your first real exercise: learning pressure

If there's one thing that separates someone who understands coloured pencils from someone who's just colouring in, it's pressure control.

The amount of force you apply to the pencil changes everything: the intensity of the colour, the smoothness of the coverage, how the paper tooth responds, and how many layers you can build before the surface gives up.

Light pressure with multiple layers creates richness and depth. Heavy pressure from the start fills the paper tooth immediately and leaves you nowhere to go. Most of us press too hard at first because we want to see colour on the paper. Learning to hold back, to let the colour build gradually, is one of the most valuable things you can practise early on.

This is covered in detail in the pressure control guide, with exercises you can try with whatever pencils you have right now.

The foundations you missed (and where to learn them)

Once you're set up and comfortable with your materials, the real learning begins. And this is the part that changes everything.

Basic drawing principles covers how to see like an artist: observing shapes, angles, and proportions rather than relying on the symbols in your head. If you've ever felt that your drawings look "wrong" but you can't explain why, this is likely where the gap is. It's not about talent. It's about a specific way of looking that nobody taught you.

When you're ready to go deeper into value, colour, composition, and the other foundations that underpin all good drawing, the Drawing Fundamentals section picks up where this page leaves off.

One last thing

Coloured pencil art goes through an ugly middle phase. There will be a point in almost every drawing where it looks muddy, or flat, or nothing like what you intended. I've panicked at this stage more times than I can count.

It's normal. It's not evidence that you can't do this. It's just what a drawing looks like before the final layers pull it together.

Keep going. The foundations come faster the second time around, and the satisfaction of understanding what you're doing, rather than just copying what someone else did, is worth every uncertain moment along the way.

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