Technique Tuesday–Colored Pencil Doodling Tutorial

Happy Tuesday everyone!  Today I’ve posted a YouTube video of how I color in the artwork in my bullet journal here on my channel.  If you haven’t seen the short, time-lapse video I posted on Instagram, you can watch it here.

Creating these videos is definitely a learning process so bear with me as I learn the ins and outs of making them!  I realized after I finished all the filming that there were a few things I left out so I wanted to cover some of those things here.

Ann Kullberg’s site can be found here. My favorite of her books, Colored Pencil Portraits Step by Step, pictured below, can be found here.

To pencil in my drawings, I always use a mechanical pencil, since that guarantees a sharp pencil tip.  Mine is just an ordinary .07 mm tip pencil that I got at the grocery store, nothing fancy there.

The kneaded eraser is just like the one below and and you can buy them here or at most hobby and art stores.

The pencils I’m currently using are just cheap Crayola colored pencils.  I use Prismacolors in my more serious artwork but I’ve been very happy with toting these around for use in my bullet journal.

The electric pencil sharpener I’m currently using is similar to the one below:

If there is anything else that I’ve left out, please let me know and if you have any questions, please leave them in the comments!

Happy coloring!

The Great Debate

Leuchtturm vs. Moleskine.

Yes, I’m aware that, in the grand scheme of things, with all of the sadness and violence in the world today, this is pretty small problem in comparison, so please know that I am giving it its proper context. While this isn’t something that’s keeping me up at night, I would definitely value your feedback.

And this is all assuming that I can even get my hands on the color that I want (which is still up for debate itself!).  Enough disclaimers?  Ok, let’s move on…

I’ve done my own research, read the articles, watched the videos, so I already know most of the pros and cons.  As of today, I have 26 pages left in my Moleskine, so it’s not too big of a rush but I want to try to make the best decision I can.

I LOVE the softcover of my Moleskine.  It makes me happy.  The hard cover of the Leuchtturm would be something I’d need to get used to.

The elastic band that keeps my notebook closed looks really sad about now when it’s not wrapped around my book.  And it’s definitely losing elasticity when it is on, but just slightly.  How does the Leuchtturm elastic hold up?

I don’t mind the one bookmark, I don’t really use it a ton to keep my place, it’s pretty obvious where I am in my book.

I’m about 80% happy with the page quality of my Moleskine. I don’t mind the color, the pages are a little rough, but not bad, and the ghosting doesn’t bother me TOO much but it would be nice to cut down on that.

I like the idea of a built-in index and page numbering, since I forget to number my pages every once in a while and have to go back and fill them in, but, again, not a big deal to me.

Moleskines are slightly easier to get a hold of, my local art store carries them, as does Barnes & Noble, so if I can’t find the Leuchtturm I want in stock, I may have to just fall back on using another one.

My main concern is smudging.  It happens to me very rarely with my Moleskine and I’ve heard that with the smoother pages of the Leuchtturm, it’s more of an issue.  I use Pigma Micron pens mostly and am happy with those.  Has anyone had any consistent issues with smudging in their Leuchtturm?

Is there anything that I’ve missed that I need to consider??

I know that the art store I go to carries the Rhodia brand also.  I’m not a fan of orange but I might use a black-covered one if I loved it enough.  Is smudging an issue with that one too?

Again, I get that this is a pretty first world problem, but maybe planner peace is the beginning to world peace?

Yeah, that was a stretch. 😉