pickture

paper type also affects pencil drawings greatly, if you want texture & a lot of layers, go for a rougher tooth, and if you want minimal white spots at the cost of fewer layers use smooth paper (i use bristol board for pet portraits)

you can also experiment with using pencil on top of watercolour/marker etc bases or coloured paper, e.g. for this deer drawing i did a watercolour base which you can see in this vid

with paint people say to start with fewer colours and learn how to mix but for pencil i would say get as many colours as you can bc the only ‘mixing’ you can do is layering and there’s a limit to how many layers your paper (and hand) can take. its also hard to buy the missing colours later without rebuying the ones you already have. you can def make do with a smaller set if you want to do highly stylized art

'burnishing' is good to know about

for colour in general i think just study art that uses colour in a way you like, the principles will be similar across mediums. i don’t really believe in right or wrong ways to do things, as long as you’re achieving what you want. if you don’t know where to start, i recommend checking out james gurney, he has painting vids on youtube which give an interesting insight into how he uses colour. i just found a vid which shows him combining watercolour and coloured pencils

also find colour pencil art you like and think about how it was made. i love @ink-the-artist ‘s pencil art, i think they use marker bases in some of theirs and it gives it a rly saturated warm look (esp ones w yellow bases) & i love how the darkness is made up of different colours. they use prismacolor which gives it that waxy blended look