Practice. Practice

Before I began working in colored pencil, I had no idea how long it takes to do an excellent job of something as simple as “blending” or transitioning one color into another. Today, I was practising a new technique of blending, using many, many layers and very light pressure of the pencil on the paper. The top bar is all the same pencil color, applying light, medium and harder pressure to get the 3 values. The second square is 2 colored pencils, transitioning from dark to light color, making the transition as smooth as possible. The ball is 5 colors of pencil, showing the way light behaves on a spherical surface. Guess how many hours these 3 exercises took?