How to pick the right pencil colors for your drawing

Most people you cant get their heads around picking out the correct colours to use on their drawings and that is down to a few things. Mainly over-complicating the whole thing.

You see as adults we seem programed to expect everything that looks hard to do, to be hard to do, and that includes drawing and picking colours. We are afraid to get things wrong and to mess things up.

But if you sit a child down with a load of pencils they just go for it. Instinctively seeing red and picking up the red pencil they think matches, for instance.But as adults we most likely think, whoa... hang on, don't i need to know colour theory etc before I start?

Anyone that has done some of my lessons know that I make my techniques as simple as possible, and also as intuitive, so we work a lot more like an unstressed child would and less like a degree level colour theorist would lol

So how do I pick the "right " colour?

Well 1st we should start off by realising that the EXACT colour most likely wont be in our pencil sets, no matter how many we have lovingly collected. There are just too many colours in the word l for them to be reproduced by pencil or paint manufacturers.

So the solution is to just get as close as we can, and believe me, for the drawing to look good, REAL good, you don't even need to be that close.

Most of my videos show me picking colours, but this is an excerpt out of one of my latest 2026 videos - hope it help to take the pressure of you to be perfect

Jason