How to Use Watercolor Pencils

Scribble the pencil hard into a palette well until you have a small pile of loose pigment. Wet a brush, lift the colour off, and paint with it.

You now have a pan of watercolour paint that happens to live in a pencil. It is the fastest way to get strong, even colour without dragging a pencil across the paper at all.

A spare piece of textured watercolour paper does the same job. Scrub the pencil onto it, then lift the pigment with a wet brush.

The paper drinks a little of the colour so you get slightly less off it than you would from a palette well. For something already on your desk, that is a fair trade.

For an even block of colour, shade gently and evenly across the whole shape first.

Resist bearing down. A hard pencil dents the paper, pigment settles into the dent, and it dries as a dark line you cannot lift out later.

Bring a wet brush across the shading in a single consistent direction rather than scrubbing back and forth. One clean pass pulls the pigment into an even wash.

Scrubbing lifts colour off the paper as fast as it spreads it, which is how you end up with a patchy middle.

Anything larger than a thumbnail wants a flat brush. It carries far more water than a round one, and running dry halfway across a square is what leaves a streak down the middle.

On a large painting, sweep straight off the edge of the paper rather than stopping short.

For a sky that fades out, shade the colour along the top only. Wash it downward, then rinse the brush, come up from the bottom with clean water, and meet in the middle.

Without that clean-water pass from below, the colour keeps creeping all the way down and you lose the gradient entirely.

Sometimes you only want one edge to disappear. Shade the shape, then brush outward from that edge into clean water and keep going until the colour runs out.

Work slightly outside the pencil outline. Trying to stay perfectly inside it gives you a hard rim, which is the opposite of what you are after.

A small tin goes much further than you would expect, because watercolor pencils mix on the paper rather than in a palette. Lay one colour over another and you have made a third.

Shade a warm yellow into one corner and a blue in from the other, letting them overlap along a diagonal. Wet the join and a citrus green appears where the two meet.

It is a livelier green than anything premixed, and you can push it warmer or cooler just by adding more of one pencil.

Give a layer time to dry before you work over it. Go back in too soon and the wet brush lifts the colour underneath, so instead of two clean layers you get one muddy one.

Wet the paper first with clean water, then draw into the damp surface with the pencil tip. The marks bloom and feather out on their own.

You get soft, spreading lines that you simply cannot make on dry paper, and every one comes out slightly different.

Hold a blade against the pencil tip and scrape a few shavings onto a wash while it is still wet. Each fleck bursts where it lands.

It is a quick way to suggest foliage, grit or distant texture, and because you cannot control exactly where the specks fall it never looks laboured.