4 Techniques For Adding Snow to Your Coloured Pencil Drawings

It’s that time of year again when those wintery scenes are influencing you and now you want to add some lovely snow to your coloured pencil drawings but how do you do it? I have got 4 different techniques to help you add those little snowflakes to your drawings with ease.

1) Caran d’Ache Museum Aquarelle

The first one is using a Caran d'Ache Museum Aquarelle, which is very sharp and slightly dampened. It works really nicely and should actually work for any paper. I drew this Highland Cow on Clairefontaine Pastelmat using Luminance and Polychromos mostly. You can just use it to draw on top of your piece to add those little flakes of snow.

2) Slice Tool

The second technique is to use a slice tool. I like the manual pen cutter. It has this lovely chiselled ceramic blade, and I use it to gently scrape the pigment off to leave you with the white surface beneath and it looks like snow.

This could have worked nicely except that, for this highland cow, I'd used very warm pigments, so the actual colour of the pigments had sort of stained the surface underneath. This meant that when I tried to scrape the pigment out, it left it a little bit pinky and I didn't get a bright white. So it didn't work brilliantly, but it was quite nice for faded ones.

3) Derwent Electric Eraser

The next one is the Derwent electric eraser. This little eraser is actually really fast and when you press the on button, it actually stays on, whereas some of them you have to hold the button down. Again, this one worked quite nicely, particularly for those more sort of fatter faded snowflakes. What you have to be quite careful about, particularly with Pastelmat, is the pressure that you use because it can make the pigment stick to the paper even more if you use too much. But, this one worked really quite nicely and then combined with the Museum Aquarelle over the top, it can create some lovely effects.

4)Posca

The final technique is to use a Posca. It's not something that I particularly like to use purely because I like to only use my coloured pencils, but this is a good alternative. It doesn't yellow and it’s archival, but you've got to be careful because it can peel off. It does work really nicely though and it can give a very similar effect to the Museum Aquarelle, but it's just that little bit easier because it's already damp, and you don't have to keep on dampening and sharpening it. If you don't mind not using pure coloured pencils, then this could be a really nice option for you.

So, these are four different techniques for getting the snow in over the top of a drawing and they all work really well. I would opt for the Museum Aquarelle and the electric eraser and that's what I used mostly for this highland cow piece. If you’d like to see a demonstration of how I used these techniques, click on the video above at the top of this blog.