Color pencils are among the most common art supplies with nearly every household, classroom, and waiting room keeping a box or two on hand at all times. So it’s no wonder that eventually as humans and artists, we’re going to want to experiment with them beyond obvious limitations.
One of the most common ways of manipulating the familiar medium is to soak the pencils in a warm personal color bath. After all, adding water to any art supply often radically changes the results on the page. So, does soaking colored pencils make them better?
No soaking colored pencils do not make them better. Dry colored pencils offer artists more versatility, and control, and last longer all while keeping the pencil relatively less damaged as you draw or color. However, soaking colored pencils in warm water does produce a highly saturated or heavily pigmented effect that can embolden sections throughout your picture.
Additionally, dipping lower-quality colored pencils in warm water can improve the concentration of color at the sacrifice of soft and shiny texture. Dipping the tips of the pencils in warm water won’t turn ten-dollar off-brand pencils into Prismacolor’s — or anything close to Prismacolor’s for that matter — but it will offer a bit more pigment to lay into the page.
So What Are Soaked Pencils Good For?
Soaked colored pencils offer more saturation and a louder color, but can also produce a scratchy texture if you’re not careful with your pencil strokes. Because of this, soaked pencils aren’t recommended for completing large pieces alone. Highly saturated colors with bad textures throughout the whole art piece can ruin a picture, unfortunately.
However, soaked or dipped colored pencils shine when used in fur, fluff, and even feathers when combined with dry pencil work. By combining the wet and dry pencils either by blending them or simply through a juxtaposition of the two, artists can achieve comprehensive color pallets and more variation in textures. This is also great for sections in portraits and high-contrast landscapes. Dipped pencils can even be used to great effect on focal points for mandalas — especially for adding pop to well-blended gradients.
That said, if over-used, the light breathable texture will quickly become too heavy and scratchy. Subtle sunsets with multicolor gradients on a large landscape piece may suffer in the long run compared to dry pencils, but for an object-focused art piece of a single autumn leaf, soaked colored pencils can go miles in showcasing the saturated depth and gradients.
Can I Use Soaked Color Pencils As Eyeliner?
To sidetrack for a moment, there is also a fad of using soaked colored pencils for cosmetic purposes such as eyeliner. This is a dangerous and harmful practice. Just because a box of colored pencils is labeled as non-toxic does not exactly translate to skin or eye-safe. Colored pencils go through a different manufacturing process and contain different chemical binders than cosmetic industry practices and products.
Yes, it’s cool to wear highly saturated colors for bold looks, costumes, raves, or parades — for which cosmetic-specific products exist. No, it’s not cool to have adverse skin rashes, nasty eye infections, or dangerous allergic reactions because you took a shortcut. Not to mention the wood and graphite in colored pencils tend to splinter, chip, and peel more. Seriously people, be careful if you’re going to use art supplies as cosmetics — better yet, just get the cosmetic equivalent.
How To Soak & Use Freshly Bathed Color Pencils
There are two methods of bathing your colored pencils before pressing them into the page. The first is to soak the pencils inadequately warm water for 2 to 5 minutes then pat dry with a paper towel. The second is to continuously dip the pencil tip in the water for about 30 seconds to 1 minute then pat dry before coloring.
The first method which requires a long soak will produce more saturation because the longer bath time allows a pigmented membrane to form encasing the tip of the pencil. The longer you let the pencil soak the softer and more crumbly the tip of the pencil becomes so be wary that if you press too hard into the page, your pencil will break off in chunks.
The second method, and generally less effective because of the shorter bathing period, doesn’t produce as much pigment and requires you to keep dipping the pencil pretty frequently for meager results. Surprisingly, the dip method also makes the pencil weaker and susceptible to breakage.
Whichever method you choose it’s best to lightly pat dry the pencil with a paper towel to keep all that good pigment on your pencil. Rotate the tip of the pencil as you color to make the most of all the saturation from the water.
Out of personal experience and experimentation, I noticed the best results after soaking the white colored pencil and blending it with other soaked pencils or other dry pencils. It doesn’t work for all colors or all situations, but when pulled off correctly makes a noticeable difference in how the pencils act on the page. I also tended to use the first method of soaking the pencils for a longer period and then dipping the pencil back into the water if I needed a little extra pigment after coloring for a minute or two.
Wondering which colored pencils are the best? Check out our article HERE!
What Pencils To Use?
Brands and quality in the case of soaked pencils don’t matter. You can use Prismacolor, Crayola, or store-brand colored pencils and achieve success, but don’t soak a twelve-pack of Crayola’s expecting to get Prismacolor results.
The pencil bath will slightly improve otherwise sub-parr pencils, so when you’re ready to start experimenting with wet colored pencils it might be best to use a cheaper pack of pencils and save some longevity on your good set of colored pencils.
If you have watercolor pencils, soaking your pencils in water first is an alternative way of laying down a coat of water on the page first, and then coloring in the area with a pencil. By soaking first instead of coating, you can achieve the same high saturation of color while sacrificing smoother color blending. It’s not necessarily better or worse than coating the page with water first and then coloring over the water, but it is likewise an alternative to achieve the same effect. The highly saturated look is a good antithesis to coating the paper with a watercolor pencil first then adding water for an opaque and classic watercolor look.
If you’re using oil-bound colored pencils keep in mind oil and water don’t always get along. Oil-bound colored pencils like of Faber-Castell’s Polychromos are already quite saturated and don’t need the extra boost offered by letting your pencils hang out in a jacuzzi. That and I don’t want to see your good oil-bound pencils ruined by a classroom experiment. You don’t deserve that.
Again out of my personal experience, whether you’re using watercolor pencils or any brand of regular color pencils, I recommend varying sections of the soaked color pencil with dry color pencils. The additional depth, texture, and color pallet pay off when mixing the two mediums and even blending them.
Closing Thoughts
If you’ve made it this far, congratulations! Here are some swatches I did at home just to give you an example of what soaking your colored pencils may look like. The first two left-hand columns are non-blended dry and wet swatches of a chosen color.
The second two right-hand columns are the same dry and wet swatches of the same color, but this time blended with a wet white colored pencil. Be the judge for yourself on how they turned out but I will say the blended and soaked blue, and pink turned out pretty well unlike the brown and green in the same column. The soaked non-blended colors all turned out pretty and I love the earthy depth in the brown.
Frequently Asked Questions
Will Soaking Destroy My Pencils?
Short answer: yep. They’re going to get mushy like whipped potatoes during the holiday season but without that good buttery smell. Expect your pencils to start crumbling or splitting at the tip if you soak them too long. And if bath time gets cut too short, then the heavily pigmented effect is rendered useless.
If Soaked Colored Pencils Aren’t As Good As Dry Colored Pencils, Is It Worth It To Soak My Pencils At All?
Yes actually. It’s a fun way to liven up your art and provide you with some creative ideas to keep your artistic brain firing, just don’t rely on it. I recommend experimenting with some swatches first and see what inspires you.
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