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How to Draw Shiny Brass in Coloured Pencil
In short
Shiny metal looks daunting and is really just careful observation of golds, yellows and red-browns. This pierced brass coaster, worked on black paper, teaches you to draw a gleaming metal surface and an intricate cut-out pattern, using your eraser as much as your pencils. A proper step up, and a very satisfying one.
Metal has a reputation for being hard to draw, but a shiny surface is mostly a question of looking closely at the colours and putting them where you see them. This little brass coaster is a lovely subject for it: it has warm golds and deep red-browns, bright highlights, and a pierced pattern of interlocking circles that catches the light. Working on black paper makes the gold positively gleam. Take it steadily, and remember Peter's own advice: this is an exercise to try techniques on, not to produce a flawless masterpiece.
The reference: a pierced brass coaster, its interlocking-circle pattern catching warm gold light against the dark.
Use black Stonehenge, not card: the surface matters more than the pencils here. Coloured pencil needs a surface with some grip to build up the many layers a metal surface wants, and most black card is too hard for that. Black Stonehenge paper (250gsm) is ideal. New to working dark? See coloured pencil on black paper first.
What you will need
Any pencil brand will work, but you want a good spread of warm metal colours.
- A range of yellows, golds and red-browns (Polychromos has a good choice), plus a very dark brown and black
- A good white, and for transferring the design a water-soluble white (a Staedtler Karat works well: hard core, sharp point, and it doesn't lock the pigment under wax)
- Black Stonehenge paper, 250gsm
- A battery or powered eraser, not optional here: it is how you correct and how you cut the perforations back in. (More on erasers.)
Free traceable outline: the coaster's pierced pattern is intricate, so do trace it rather than draw it freehand. Download the outline (PDF), and transfer it to your paper as in Step 1.
Step by step
Lay a single clean white line over the reversed (red) side of the trace with your water-soluble white pencil. It is hard to see on the paper at first, but you get your eye in. The perforations come in sets of four that form interlocking rings, so follow the pattern round, and turn the sheet upside down for the bottom half so your wrist can follow the curves naturally. Then fasten the trace black-side-up with three dabs of white tack and rub firmly over the top to register the white lines underneath. You are after a guide, not a perfect image.
Step 1: the design transferred in water-soluble white pencil onto black Stonehenge. Faint at first, but enough to guide you.
Before any colour, check the top and bottom curves of the coaster are true ellipses with no flat sections, and that the perforations sit directly below one another. Fix the white outline now while it is easy. Then try your golds and browns out on the back or bottom edge of the sheet to see how they combine on the black. Peter sorted out fourteen likely colours and did not use them all, so cast your net wide.
Step 2: testing golds and browns on the spare edge, and working out the pattern before committing.
Now block in the warm base colour of the brass, the yellows, golds and red-browns, across the body of the coaster. Do not chase the exact metal colours yet; just get a roughly correct base down. If the shape goes adrift, the battery eraser lifts the layers straight off so you can correct. The paper may go grey where you erase, but it takes colour again happily.
Step 3: the warm base colour blocked in. No chasing exact metal tones yet, just a roughly correct base.
The holes are outlined in white for now, but they need to read as crisp dark openings. Erase the white guides a line at a time with the battery eraser, taking out one middle set first and leaving the white either side to keep your place. Then re-draw each opening: either work it black first and put the ochre edges back, or lay the ochre outline in with a sharp point and add the black after. Both work. Keep checking the interlocking-circles pattern as you go round the back.
Step 4: one panel worked up. Erase the white guides a line at a time, then redraw each opening crisp and dark.
Close up: a single opening, worked black for the cut-out with ochre edges put back over the top. This is the unit you repeat all the way round.
With the base colour in, stand back and judge where to adjust. The darkest metal, front left, is still bare black paper: give it a layer of very dark brown to shape the light coming through the holes. Then build further layers of colour over the whole surface, which fills the grain and removes those black specks, and lets the golds really shine.
Step 5: building further layers to deepen the darks and fill the grain, so the golds start to shine.
Sharpen any background that has gone grey with your black pencil, and tidy the highlights that make the metal gleam. Peter leaves a piece like this out for a few weeks and tinkers before he calls it finished, which is a good habit: fresh eyes catch the last small adjustments.
The finished coaster. Warm golds and red-browns against black paper are what make the brass gleam.
This is practice, not a masterpiece
Peter is candid that his own first attempt went bent: the shape flattened and the pattern slipped out of line. He kept the wonky version in the lesson on purpose. If yours wanders, lift it with the eraser and carry on, or simply press on and treat it as a springboard for the next one. That forgiveness is the real gift of coloured pencil.
Peter's own "bent" first attempt: the right side flattened and the pattern drifted out of line. He kept it in the lesson on purpose.
Carry on from here
Coloured Pencil on Black Paper
The wider guide to working on a dark surface, where you build up to the lights instead of the darks.
Other still-life subjects and projects to try, from glass and fruit to shiny metal.
