Dallon.

i usually shy away from doing traditional pieces , but your (Beautiful) work has got me feeling really inspired , so i was wondering - Do you have any general tips for using colored pencils? It’s amazing how vibrant and clean your work with them is and i kind of struggle with them. Also there’s the age old question .. is it ok to just use a normal old pencil sharpener on them ??

aaa thats so nice to hear thank u! traditional art is a lot of fun im glad you're getting into it. For colored pencil tips I actually have a post here where I show a step by step process for one of my colored pencil pieces that I think might be helpful to you

other than that uhhhhhh. ok so disclaimer, just about all of the stuff I do with colored pencil was not taught to me in any kind of art class and is just stuff I figured out on my own, I did have an art class where we used them but we were taught to just press down real hard right away basically just blending everything from the start (my teacher knew this wasn't the "proper" way to use colored pencil but she was basically just having us use them as a means of learning realism, so the focus was on learning to use color well and not learning to use colored pencils) so im just gonna talk about what I myself like to do and there's a good chance there's better ways to do it lol

one tip as something I like to do a lot that I think produces a cool effect is, after layering all the color and moving onto blending, I blend the areas I want to be lighter with a way lighter color and it creates this neat glowing undertone. You obv go from light to dark with colored pencil as you layer BUT when it comes to blending I find using light colors to blend dark (not yet blended, it doesn't really work doing this on already blended dark color) creates a different effect than putting the light color down first and then the dark and then blending those together. no idea if this is a proper tequnique with a proper name but I do it a lot and its how I get that glowing effect in a lot of my colored pencil art.

(pic isnt the best quality but its meant to show how the different methods have a different look)

colorless blender pencils are also nice for cleaning up edges and small things, though for anything other than small things like that its better to blend with a regular colored pencil, the colorless blender kinda thins out and dulls the color if you’re relying on it for blending bigger things

one other tip that might be obvious but might not is try as best you can not to drop your colored pencils... im bad about this myself but dropping them can break the lead inside and make sharpening them a PAIN later on. and it just sucks when that happens with expensive pencils lol

as for the pencil sharpener question I did not know you arent supposed to use a regular sharpener 😅I had an art teacher when I was younger that had us sharpen our pencils by hand with a boxcutter knife but she only had us do this for graphite pencils, not colored pencils. but yeah I use a regular sharpener for them