There are times when even 120 brilliant colors don’t strike the right mood for a picture. For this dilemma, the greyscale color palette, or black-and-white palette exists.
The use of only greyscale color tones and black-and-white pencils is typically associated with classic noir pictures. A lady singing and playing the piano to a cigarette-hazed audience in velvet lounge chairs, or a dog sniffing for scraps behind the closed restaurant alley dipping muddy paws into puddles as he walks.
As colorists, we can use grey tone color palettes to give vivid images like these the weight and depth associated with aesthetics such as film noir, gothic, and vintage.
Greyscale color palettes are a timeless look that continues to impact us beyond the visual eye and somehow speak to us with a heavier tone of visual voice.
To color greyscale in a coloring book, you won’t need box sets or special color blends. All you need is a black colored pencil, a white colored pencil, a graphite pencil, and a blending stump. As well as some rudimentary techniques, and a couple of friendly tips to be successful. Also, practice helps, but hey that’s why we’re all here, every piece is practice for another.
The Tools To Success
First, black colored pencil. This is your darkest tone and will be used to make hard lines that provide a clear shape and structure to the image. You can use just about any black colored pencil keeping in mind that generally the higher quality pencil you have, the better results you can achieve. Specialty black colored pencils do exist, but if you’re just working with a black pencil from a set of any brand, again, you can’t go wrong.
If you’re familiar with the graphite grading scale anything between a 4B and 9xxB will work great. If you’ve never heard of the graphite grading scale now worry, any black colored pencil will do the job perfectly. Greyscale color palettes are less about equipment and more about technique anyway.
Second, white colored pencil. This is your lightest tone, and in some cases may be a lighter color value than the paper you are working on. The white colored pencil is excellent for blending, creating gradients, and producing space on the page. This is going to give the picture feel, and a visual texture when blended.
Just like the black colored pencil, specialty white colored pencils exist, however working with a white colored pencil from just about any box set will be more than sufficient. Again, the greyscale color palette is a focus on our technique, not necessarily our gear.
Third, graphite and grey-colored pencils. The original who started it all. The pencil is a legend of all drawing and coloring tools. Grab yourself a bonafide number 2 graphite pencil and get creative.
Depending on the picture you’ll be using this guy a lot. Which is great. It’s one of the few tools we can use at any age because you wouldn’t give a seven-year-old a blender, and most 80-year-olds have very little use for an Original Toy Company shape sorter when the grandchildren aren’t around.
The pencil is great for texture and grey tone values that will need to be the shadows and fill in your picture. Additionally, grey-tone colored pencils such as silver, steel, and pewter can also be used like a pencil to offer you more tonal options.
Fourth, blending stump and eraser. The eraser goes without saying, messing up happens, and thankfully greyscale palettes are forgiving enough that we can get away with using the eraser to get rid of mistakes as well as using it for effect on the page to lighten or remove graphite saturation.
The blending stump or just stump as it is often referred to is a magical tool you need to have in your artist’s toolbox. It is a tightly rolled cylinder made of paper typically with points on each end.
The blending stump does exactly what it says it does. Blends. Suffice it to say that a blending stump helps to combine black colored pencil and white colored pencil on the page to create mixtures of grey tones. The stump can also smoothen out textures and do excellent shadow smearing.
Fifth, sheets of white paper. Extra sheets of white paper are necessary for colorists to create swatches, and act as a protective layer between your coloring and your palm to avoid unwanted smudging.
That’s it. No 120 colors with neon glow-in-the-dark, or oily pro-sketch pencils. Just the basics, it’s very humbling and a great creative practice.
The Techniques
Since our supply list is pretty limited there is a little more pressure on the technique end, but it’s nothing you wouldn’t do with regular colored pencils so all of this should feel familiar if you’ve been coloring for a while. New to the game? Then this is a perfect place to start.
First, make swatches and vary both pressure and technique to provide you with the best visual information. Color in small ovals for blending and smoothness with vibrancy. Color using ventricle, diagonal, or horizontal lines, a.k.a hatching for texture with spacing and detail work.
Additionally, coloring perpendicular lines to the already existing hatch work, a technique called cross-hatching is great for complex laying. Dotting and other creative pencil strokes are also beneficial to include in your swatches. That said, there’s no art authority watching over you so feel free to get creative with your swatches techniques.
Second, use the side of the pencil. This is even more true for greyscale coloring palettes since tone degrees can make or break the quality of your picture. You’ll get more surface area out of the side of the pencil as well as preserve the tip of your pencil for detail and hard-line work. The side of the pencil offers smoother drawing and a lighter texture.
Third, blend black and white to create tones of grey. Take a minute to look and analyze the differences between your grey-colored pencil tones, the pencil, and the blended black-and-white. Under inspection, these colors are all different from each other and offer a wide variety of greyscale values. It’s up to you as the colorist to experiment and decide which blends you want to apply throughout the picture.
Fourth, become extremely familiar with a blending stump. A stump as previously described is a pencil-like tool made of tightly rolled paper. It looks like this:
Have fun with the stump, many experts use the stump to great effect such as Bobby Chiu and Liz Berube. It’s fun to experiment with and a cool little gadget for your artist’s toolbox. I like to use the Pro Art Drawing Tools Value Pack stump which can be found at most grocery or general stores, but if you want something top of the line Norocme and Leobro are two popular brands of tortillions — another term for blending stump.
Check out our list of the best adult coloring books HERE!
The Tips To Start You In The Right Direction
First and foremost, use a white sheet of paper wax paper, or parchment paper between your hand/forearm and the paper you are coloring on. Smudging the perfected ventricles of a darling chanterelle picture after moving your palm is a disappointment no one needs to feel.
The piece of paper is a page protector and it’ll save you a lot of frustration if you have a habit of palming the paper when you draw or color.
Second, use a bit of sandpaper on the blending stump to get rid of collected graphite layers. By keeping the blending stump fairly clean with some sandpaper applied to the working end, we ensure that our blends also stay clean from unwanted debris collected from previous blends.
Third, envision the shadows. As you color take breaks to plan out where the shadows are going to be cast. This will help you account for the light source in the picture and provide a bit of gradient guiding from your darker tones to your lighter tones.
Last but not least, and this is the most important, have fun. Get creative, if you don’t mess up a little how are you going to figure anything out on the page? The great thing about art is that any problem presented on the page has creative solutions ready as an ailment.
Frequently Asked Questions
What Is The Difference Between A Greyscale Coloring Book, and A Greyscale Coloring Palette?
Greyscale coloring books are printed in shades of grey, black, and white, to indicate color tones for the colorist to fill in over the grey of the page. A greyscale palette is coloring in only shades and tones of grey, black, and white leaving out all other primary and primary-based colors.
Can I Use Other Mediums Like Pens or Paint for Greyscale Coloring?
Yes absolutely, but keep in mind changing the medium changes the parameters of the work. Introducing oil pastels and charcoal to a black-and-white pencil piece removes the picture from being classified as a strictly greyscale coloring piece. That said, on a personal level, I’m a huge enthusiast of mixed mediums so adding some black-and-white watercolor, black or white Sharpie, or especially a bit of charcoal work takes a picture to a whole new world of textures, depth, and ironically… color.
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