Not every drawing is finished when you think it is. Sometimes, no matter how long you spend on a piece or how finished you make it, you come to realize that it could use a little more work. With some mediums it’s easy to add additional color. . . with colored pencil, not so much.
Sometimes the problem is that your paper is too smooth to handle a lot of layers.
But sometimes there’s just so much wax on the drawing that you just can’t make more color stick.
So what do you do when there’s too much colored pencil wax buildup?
The problem isn’t hopeless. Unlike resolving the issue of too smooth paper (which is pretty difficult to fix), you can remove some of the wax that’s clogging up the tooth of your paper and making your drawing slick.
One way is to simply remove as much of the wax buildup as you can without disturbing the color. Since the wax tends to rise to the surface of the color layers over time, all you have to do is lightly rub the drawing with a piece of bath tissue or paper towel.
But what if that isn’t enough? Then what to do you do?
In this week’s highlighted EmptyEasel article, I describe a couple of other methods for removing–or at least dealing with–the problem of too much colored pencil wax on a work-in-progress. You can read the full article on EmptyEasel by clicking here.
Have you found other ways to work with or work around wax buildup on your drawings? Please leave a comment below and tell us all about it.
