Art Pencil Drawings -- Adding Watercolor & Ink to Your Art

By Lori Lee

Art pencil drawings can be made even more fun by adding pen, ink and watercolor to them. This is an art form learned from Claudia Nice. Claudia is a Pacific Northwest artist who has her studio in Oregon. She has many animals on her place and when you attend a workshop with her, you get to see exactly how to draw the fur on a horse by looking at a real, live horse!

The first step to start your art pencil drawing is to choose something to draw. A subject or scene that's easy, such as a flower, is a good choice if you are new to drawing. You will first want to work up a pencil drawing sketch and you can use art pencils or a regular pencil to do this.

"But I can draw!" is a common thing to say right about now. Please keep reading because everyone can draw! You may want to start out easy by tracing a photo or picture from a book onto your piece of paper. It doesn't have to be anything fancy and certainly not perfect. You can look at a photo or picture and sketch it out while looking at it. And you can also create abstract art by drawing some shapes on a piece of paper -- anything that you feel like.

Supplies that are essential to this first drawing are:

A pencil, Ink pens -- the ink must be waterproof, smudge proof and archival ink, Watercolor paper -- 130 pound is good for this type of work, A picture or idea of what you will draw, Watercolor sticks, pencils or watercolor pencils

Once the pencils drawing is complete, the ink work is added next. This is simple to do by just tracing over the pencil lines you've just drawn with the ink pen. Adding depth and dimension using extra ink in areas to darken can be done by looking at your original photo or picture and adding shading where needed. If you're drawing an animal, you can add lines or strokes of ink to darken the fur around the eyes and ears.

Next, you will choose areas to add watercolor to. Use the watercolor pencils, sticks or paint with the brush and a little water. Be careful not to over saturate your paper by adding too much water as you don't want all the colors to run together -- or maybe you do! There's no such thing as bad art and you don't have to show your work to anyone if you don't want to! So have fun and experiment. - 32367

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