Prisma Baby Oil Tutorial

Today I'm going to show you a super easy technique for blending your colored pencils. I'm sure some of you have seen this before, maybe with different products. Maybe you'll learn something new from me!

What you'll need is a set of colored pencils, baby oil, blending stumps, and a piece of sandpaper. I use Prismas but have heard this will work with other brands. You can find blending stumps at any store that sells art supplies.

You can see I've already gotten started coloring, so let's begin!



First, what you want to do is decide what colors you're going to use on your image. Then, starting with your lightest, outline those areas. Don't color them in, just outline. You can see I already blended the flesh and wings. Consider it a sneak peek!

I found you can actually outline your entire image first and then blend after that, as long as you start with the lightest color first and make sure to clean your stump in between colors. The choice is yours.

Here, I outlined the angel's dress in pink.



Next, grab one of your blending stumps. Dip it into your baby oil, making sure the end is saturated. Using small circular motions, swirl the color around, pulling it into the center of the image. It should end up looking something like the above photo.

Then, I outlined the next section (in this case, her hair) with my colored pencils.



Before blending the next color, I ran my blending stump along my sandpaper. Actually, I'm using a buffering block because it's less messy and I just so happened to have one laying around unused. You can also use a nail file.

Be sure to sand off all of the previous color so as not to get any on your next section.



Keep outlining and blending each section, stopping in between to clean your stump. Here is my finished image. Pardon the blurriness, my camera is on its last legs.



The angel was stamped on what I believe is PTI stamper's select white cardstock. I stamped a few little bird images on some of my cheap white cardstock to compare the results. I found it still worked, although the colors didn't blend quite as nicely on the better cardstock. [Again, pardon the blurry photo.]

This technique is so easy anyone can do it. Just try it out! Most of you probably have baby oil, colored pencils, and sandpaper laying around. All you need are some blending stumps. They're only a few dollars, so it's not a huge investment. And if you find you love this technique, you can invest in some better cardstock, which is what I will be doing.