How can you hone drawing skills with a coloring book?!

Bear with me, I promise you won’t be disappointed! I have had a life-long love affair with crayons. It’s true! I remember as a child, the best part of ‘back to school’ was getting that brand new box of 64 Crayolas to start the year. Close your eyes — can you smell them?

When the new crayons for school arrived, last year’s box became my play at home box. And boy did they get some use!

So, what’s the point of that little story? Actually, not the crayons, but the coloring books!

Coloring books have the power to help you get better at sketching and drawing. What? But the drawing is already completed, right? We just color in the image.

And that is where the power lies. How will you color in the image? Will you use color at all?

Grab a coloring page and a few tools and let’s get started. You’ll need:

• A pen, pencil, or fine-line marker
• Coloring media of your choice
  • Colored pencils — I use Prismacolor Premiere
  • Markers
  • Watercolor
  • Or yes, even crayons!
  • A coloring book page (you can download free ones from many sites, I’ve gotten these pages from Crayola’s website.)

For these exercises, I prefer children’s coloring pages because they are usually just outlines without the added shading that many adult pages have. We’re going to be adding the shading ourselves!

Use Color Variation For Shading

The first technique we’re going to play with is creating shadows and shading with color. Let’s begin by choosing 3 shades of a color; a light, a medium, and a dark. I generally begin with coloring the entire area with the lightest shade. Make sure to leave the highlight white or very light. Putting the light color over the whole area kind of helps to tie and blend all the colors together a bit more seamlessly.

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Next, take the medium color and lay it down in the darkest and medium toned areas. Again layering the colors this way helps to tie all of the colors together. 

Now for the darkest areas. When using colored pencil, I put down a bit of really dark purple — in Prismacolor pencils, it’s the Black Grape pencil. This helps to give the darkest areas a bit more depth. Use this one lightly, sparingly. Over the Black Grape goes your darkest shade.

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Make sure as you go that you are lightly blending all the colors together — in general, you don’t want harsh lines and transitions. Hard lines do happen in nature when the lighting is particularly bright, so this isn’t a hard and fast rule.

Now, step back a bit from your page. Doesn’t it look more life-like, 3 – dimensional?

Keep practicing! Try imagining the light coming from different angles and see how that changes the drawing.

Hone Those Drawing Skills Using Mark-Making

Next up — let’s look at adding another dimension to the shadowed areas with a fine-line marker or pen. To play around with this process, you need to find a really simply done coloring page — one that doesn’t already have a lot of lines and shading. That’s what you’re here to do!

Any place where your chosen subject is round or goes around a corner, you’ll add some marks:

• Hatching
• Cross-hatching
• Scribbles
• Or a combination

Make your marks darker and closer together in the deeper shadowed areas, lighter and farther apart in the mid-toned areas. Also think about following the contours of your subject — that alone will add an element of realism to your work.

If you choose, you can also add in color over the ink after you’ve given it sufficient time to dry. When adding color, follow the same procedure that we used in our first example.

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These are just 2 quick ways to practice realism and hone your drawing skills using a coloring book! Play! Have fun! Challenge yourself! Once you feel you’ve gotten the idea with the coloring pages, move on to use these shading techniques in your Nature Journal — you’ll be so happy you allowed yourself to play like when you were a child.