Adult Coloring Experiment: Blending Colored Pencils with Lip Balm

blending colored pencilsI don’t color with colored pencils very often, but every once in awhile I decide to have some fun experimenting.

There are several different methods people use for blending colored pencils. One that I thought sounded especially interesting was lightly dipping the tips in Vaseline to make the colors easier to blend together.

Of course, when I wanted to try this I realized I didn’t have any Vaseline in the house. Since I had a bunch of lip balms listing petroleum jelly as their first ingredient, I decided to use them instead. I used a set of inexpensive Target brand Up & Up colored pencils for my experiment, since I wasn’t sure putting lip balm on my Prismacolors was a good plan.

The left side of the photo above shows the colored pencils with no blending whatsoever. The right side shows them after the lip balm. My camera isn’t professional quality by any means, but you can definitely see they are blended together much better on the right side.

Overall, I was fairly pleased with this technique. I smudged it a bit accidentally, then decided to smudge  it some more to give it more of a soft watercolor type look. (Sometimes, you just need to embrace your mistakes, right?)

If you decide to try this yourself, I’d suggest practicing on a printable page first to experiment with how much pressure you need and how much petroleum jelly to use. I think I used a bit more lip balm than what was technically necessary, which is probably why I ran into issues with smudging.

[Photo is a page from OrnaMENTALs Volume 2 Splendid Symmetry: Adult Coloring Book with 36 Playful Patterns to Color by Sue Chastain.]