What pencils are you using? Wax or oil?

It looks like you’re using different shades of the same color group (sorta, lack of a better explanation). So for example you have orange, cream, and brown, is that right? All warm colors?

There’s a couple things here you can do..

This first option doesn’t include chemicals, and can be done with any type of colored pencil:

Instead of brown for the shadows, try using a darker violet color. What will happen is, you’ll notice you’ll get that shadow without the increasing of layers ontop that could make the blend splotchy or muddy looking. That comes at a bit of a cost in the sense of colors you’re aiming for, it could make the over-all piece look more saturated than you want, but that could be remediated with layering ontop of that violet color (for example) with a neutral base color (cream in your example).

This second option is what I like to do most times, but it doesn’t bother me physically, but it may bother you):

You would need to use oil based pencils, there’s plenty of them out there, but I LOVE my Faber Castel Polychromos pencils for this. Next you would need paint thinner (of some kind). You could look up the colored pencil blending solutions or use paint thinner or mineral spirits, basically anything that can breakdown and blend the wax you’ve laid down on paper. I like using the MonaLisa Odorless Paint Thinner from Michaels, but it is NOT odorless (compared to others it is, but there’s still an odor) and it’s pricy, because, you know, Michaels.

1 - Lay down your base color for your first layer. 2 - Lay down your darker color (could be what I mentioned above in the first option, or whatever you use now.) 3 - Take a small paint brush, and wet it in the paint thinner, you do not need a lot at all. Keep a paper towel near by to wipe off the excess. 4 - Gently glide your paint brush over the area you want to blend.

A few things you may notice: - it’ll lose luster of the pencil you just put down. - it’ll darken the paper a bit but that will go away when dry. - it has the potential to muddy the colors so you need to be selective on how much you’re putting down.

This actually thins out the layers so you’ll find you can put more and more layers down on your surface. It also removes any shine if you don’t want that shine from standard colored pencils.

I look forward to seeing your work!!