Blending Tools - Using your Finger, Shaper & Blender

There are four ways you can blend the pastel pencils. Either with your finger, with a colour shaper, a paper blender or with another pastel pencil and each one has a different effect. The point at which you blend the colours also creates different effects, so you see this is quite a complicated procedure. Lets deal with each one separately.

When to use your Finger

I use my finger for creating a good base colour or when I need to blend several colours together, skin tones, backgrounds, skies are all good examples of this. I also use my finger lightly for taking the harshness off the raw colours, cats fur human hair could be good examples wher this technique is used.

Using a Paper Blender

I don’t use this much these days as the colour shaper has taken over but there are times when this could helpful, using it to lightly blend a ground colour where there is no light base colour applied i.e. a roof is a good example where I use this technique.

Colour Shaper

This is currently my favourite tool and blender as it can get to places my finger can’t reach, it is ideal for small areas where blending is needed. But this is not really suitable for large areas such as backgrounds etc.

Pencil Blending

This is possibly the best blending procedure and one I use a great deal. There are to many examples of this to mention but you will see this in action in every picture I ever demonstrate.Which tool do you find best for blending? Let us know in the comments below.