A pencil smudger, also known as a blending stump or tortillon, is used to smear pigment from pencils across space. This dilutes the color but allows for a translucence and coloring experience that far surpasses just colored pencils alone.
To make a pencil smudger, you’ll need a piece of paper with at least one corner cut off. You will spend time rolling this paper into a tight cylinder while creating a pencil-tip-like surface on the end. Pencil smudges are useful for shading and detail work that needs more advanced variance than just a pencil can provide.
If you’re opposed to pencil lines showing up in your shading, a pencil smudger is a way to go. They can be quite pricy premade and making them at home is pretty simple. It can also be edited to suit your coloring wants however you please by making adjustments to the tools and techniques used when creating a pencil smudger.
Pick a Soft Paper for the Project
Paper is a creation made up of interlocking fibers, and in the art and coloring world, of plant fibers. The shorter the fibers, the weaker the paper will be. You’ll know a paper type is “soft” if it is jagged when you tear it. Newspaper and computer paper are also great common stump tool paper choices employed by some coloring book artists.
A soft paper will be easier to roll and will create a much more blended surface than rougher papers when rolled up. You want a surface that will best blend your coloring, so having fewer teeth on the paper’s surface for the pigment to get caught in on the tortillon tip is vital.
The Size of the Paper Depends on What You Like
Depending on how big or long you want your pencil smudger, you will want to decide what size paper to use. The bigger or wider the paper, the thicker and taller your smudger will be. You can also affect the usability of the smudger by deciding where you want to cut off a corner of the paper; the closer the cut is to the corner that gets sliced off, the tighter your paper smudger can be rolled.
You’ll want to cut off the corner in a manner that creates a triangle with the discarded piece. This allows for a more precise tip on your smudger which will come in handy when you need something that can create a mark but is more appropriate aesthetically than a pencil tip.
More About Cut
The jury is out on which size of paper and which angle the cut should be at when you remove a corner of the paper. You’ll even see people who cut two adjacent corners off to create an even stronger point or those who barely snip the tip-off of the page, so they have a nice thick stump to use on their coloring book pages. You can do all four corners and use both sides as a pencil smudger, as well.
Rolling Your Cut Paper
Once you have the size and type of paper you want, and you’ve sufficiently removed one of the corners, it’s time to roll the pencil smudger. Take the smallest edge and make a fine crease along that edge (as small as you can make it). Take that crease and use it to keep working the paper into a roll.
Some artists prefer to replace the crease with the tightest roll possible while rolling, and they do this by curling the paper before they begin the rolling process. Take a ruler and lay it flat on a table, then pull the paper underneath the ruler in the same manner you would do if you were curling a ribbon. This also makes paper curl which will make it that much easier to roll up.
Make sure you do this beginning step right! If the crease is too big or the paper isn’t tightly coiled enough, you’ll end up with a big hole in the middle of your pencil smudger. The tighter you roll the paper, the more precise tip the pencil smudger will have.
You’ll want to roll the paper back and forth in your fingers or on a flat surface like you’re rolling dough with a rolling pin. Keep doing this until you’ve rolled up all of the paper, and then use tape to tightly secure the outer edge of the paper against the body of the pencil smudger so it doesn’t unravel. Make sure to put the piece of tape out so it’s ready to use since one hand will be tied up keeping the pencil smudger formed while you secure it.
If the blending stump you’ve made is bendy at all, it’s not going to work for the coloring process as the force you need to blend color is stronger than just bending the paper by hand. Cut off any part of the tortillon that can be bent and isn’t sturdy once you’ve created your final roll.
Sharpen the Tip
Some people roll the tip of the pencil smudger so tightly it doesn’t need to be sharpened, however, almost always you’ll need a way to create a point on the end of your smudger. Some like to use a razor blade for this process so that the tip of the blending stick looks like a pencil. Other people like to roll the paper so that it comes to a point on its own.
Even if your pencil smudger was rolled incorrectly and there’s a hollow point inside, just cut the tip of the paper until it’s as small as possible, and then shave the sides down accordingly. It still may have great angular surfaces for smudging and you’ll just miss out on the sharp tip that can be created for detail work.
You can use a razor blade, a knife, or an Exacto knife to form the tip. If this seems too dangerous, it’s okay to use a pencil sharpener designed for colored pencils. Do not use an electric sharpener as it will tear your stump to shreds. Rather, make sure it is hand-shaped by you to the point that you want.
Sandpaper, Perfect Details, and Shading
To understand how to personalize your pencil smudger, you need to understand sandpaper. Sandpaper is sold in hardware stores and at art supply stores and you’ll often see kits of stumps with a piece of medium-grade sandpaper.
Sandpaper is paper with synthetic sand on it that provides sharp edges for grinding. Sandpaper is defined by how many sharp edges there are in every square inch. Very fine sandpaper can have up to 600 particles in their square inch while coarse varieties will have as few as 25 edges.
Sandpaper is designed so that when it’s rubbed against something, these sharp edges lift off a small layer of the surface. The type of sandpaper you choose will determine how your stump functions with friction against the paper’s surface. The majority of pencil smudger aficionados swear by medium-grained paper, which translates into approximately 125-minute grinders in a square inch.
You’ll want to grind the tip and angular edges at the end of your pencil smudger with the sandpaper you choose. A sharper tip allows for blending even in tiny details, and a rubbed side will create the ability to blend away pencil marks and irregularity in large sweeps.
If you find that a straight rub on the paper isn’t providing the texture you want, try rolling the pencil as you drag it across the paper, so that the edges aren’t frayed as much. When it’s time to clean the smudger, it can be refreshed with a sandpaper session. Rub the sides roughly against the sandpaper until all of the pigment is rubbed off.
Most artists will tell you it’s best to have a blending stump for each color pencil you have, so you’ll want to ideally have as many blending stumps as colors. You may want even more pencil smudgers than colors so that you can mix colors and blend them into new creations in a controlled manner. A dirty pencil smudger will just muddy a coloring book page.
Finding the perfect practice for your pencil smudging creation needs will be a manner of trial and error. You should create pencil smudgers that will work best with whatever coloring book you’re working on, and you’ll only know what those best practices are by giving building pencil smudgers a shot.
Check out more blending tips HERE.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is there a difference between a tortillon, a blending stump, and a pencil smudger?
Slightly, yes. The differences aren’t worth noting for beginners, but intermediate and expert coloring book artists will want to know what tells them apart when shopping for coloring tools. A tortillon is the smallest, a blending stump is meant for wide areas, and a pencil smudger is somewhere in between.
Why is a point better for detailing and broad, translucent blending better for shading?
Details tend to be precise strokes or color placement that tends to be a lot darker, which is easier to control with the point of a tool. Shading, on the other hand, is a loose and lighter implementation of color that doesn’t need to be exacting and instead can be sweeping. It all depends on the play of light.
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