When you work with coloured pencils, it’s always a little bit tricky to think about how you’re going to create a background. I work on predominantly two surfaces: drafting film and Pastelmat. 

Drafting film, which is the surface you can see me using in the video above, is a plastic surface and it’s amazing for coloured pencils. However, if you try to create a background on it, it’s really tricky because you can’t blend. 

I know a lot of people use regular pastels to create a background on drafting film, but unfortunately, I’m incredibly allergic to them, so I’ve always had to steer clear! 

Luckily, I found a fantastic medium to use with coloured pencils to create lovely backgrounds, and that’s Neopastels. 

The Neo Pastels I use are from Caran D’Ache and they’re oil pastels, so they’re soft and slightly sticky.

If you have a look at the video above, where I’m drawing the background for one of my older tutorials, you can see me plotting the colours in with the Neopastel, then using a handy little device I pieced together with a paper stump and a bit of my Faber Castell kneadable eraser to lift out tiny circles. I was then able to go back in over the top of the Neopastel with my coloured pencils and add more depth to the piece. 

If you’re like me and you can’t work with ordinary pastels, this is a real game-changer. The Neopastels go down so smoothly on drafting film and create a really lovely overall effect. 

If you haven’t already, make sure you click on the video at the top of this page to watch how I used my Neopastels in this piece.