COLORED PENCILS Colored pencils are made from a mixture of pigment, clay and filler, bound together with gum. The colored sticks are soaked in wax, which gives them their smooth-drawing properties, before being pressed into rods and encased in wood. Since David Hockney set a precedent in the 1960s with his series of coloredpencil drawings, this medium has become increasingly popular with fine artists.
Of late, there has been an enormous increase in the variety of colored pencils available on the market. Not only has the range of colors been vastly expanded, but the colors themselves are now much more consistently lightfast than before. You can also obtain watercolor pencils which allow you to dissolve or partially dissolve the colors on the paper with water. Clean, quick and portable, colored pencils are very useful sketching and drawing tools. They allow you to work with the accuracy of pencil while involving color; they are soft enough to allow delicate shading, and they can be sharpened to a point for controlled lines. Colored pencils are available individually or in sumptuous-looking sets with dozens of colors. Brands vary considerably in the range of available tones and in the quality and proportion of pigments, binders, clays and waxes they contain. Some brands have hard, waxy "leads" that can be sharpened to a long, fine point; others are soft and crumbly, producing a broader, more grainy mark.	Building up color In many ways, colored pencils work like watercolors. When they are used on white paper, the marks they make are transparent or semitransparent, which means you can put down one color on top of another, building up hues, tones and intensities until you achieve the result you want. Making the paper work As with watercolors, the secret is to make the white of the paper work for you. Rather than applying dense layers of color—which quickly makes the surface greasy and unworkable, preventing any further build-up of color—it is best to deepen the color by degrees, allowing plenty of white paper to show through the lines.
Optical color mixing You can use hatching and crosshatching techniques to create colors and tones. Lay lines of different colors side-by-side, or overlay lines at right angles to one another to create the illusion of a third color.