Why You Should Stop Swatching Your Coloured Pencils

Swatching is something you’ll never find me doing as a coloured pencil artist as I find it’s a form of procrastination. Let me explain why…

I want to start by saying it's not something you shouldn't ever do, but it's just not something that I find particularly useful and it's something that can actually stop me from drawing. You end up spending lots of time filling all of those little squares or circles in with a solid single amount of colour but what you could actually be doing with that time is drawing and mixing colours on different surfaces. This is how I teach, to allow people to understand how colour works and how we can mix our colours on the paper by layering.

Swatching is something that I don't recommend because you're only using one colour, but when it comes to coloured pencils they're all about layering multiple colours to create depth and really get your values into your piece. When you're wanting to draw something you're still going to have to learn which colours are going to layer well together to get the colour you want, so I'd much rather just look at my pot of pencils and decide which colours I think are going to work best, they don't need to be coloured onto a piece of paper. I think by practising and experimenting with layering your colours it also teaches you to understand colour and colour theory a little bit better.

Swatching could be something that you really love to do, in which case I'm not gonna say stop doing it because if you love it then it's an amazing thing to do, but if you are one of those people that says "Oh, I haven't got time to draw" but you have got time to swatch, then I'd say stop swatching because that's stopping you from drawing. Just be very aware and careful of why you're choosing to swatch and why you're not choosing just to start drawing.

If you are struggling with your colours then I've got some great videos on choosing colours then I have some really helpful videos on my YouTube here, that will offer some hints and tips to help you choose the right colours, create shadows, highlights and all those sorts of things! Just make sure you’re choosing to swatch for the right reasons.