You can do this with any amount of colors, but just for demonstration’s sake, we will use these five. I’m going to start with our warm color. Start with Crimson Lake. I’m just going to start at the top corner and I’m just applying very light pressure and just filling in using little circles.

You want to be careful of not going over too much your previous path across because you’ll end up with stripes. That tends to happen more typically with a smoother surface–you see some of those uneven patches a little bit more clearly. You can go over again just to smooth out and fill in a little bit more.

This time I’m going in little bit larger circles just to even things out. Now where we have this line this is going to blend into the orange so I’m going to use even a lighter pressure, gradually fade it out, and go back up to where those 2 sections meet and do a mid-range amount of pressure and just continue down to get it to fade into the white as lightly as you can.

Set down crimson lake, gonna pick up my pale vermillion and I’m going to start where I want the most true orange color. I’m going to use little circles. Be careful not to overlap too much. I want to make sure I have enough room for all five colors.

They don’t have to be equal amounts. Again I’m going to go over the whole area to kind of smooth out any uneven patches. I’m gonna take this up into the red. Light pressure here where the two colors meet. Blend it into the red. This part can be a little more dense.

You basically want to take that second color up higher than where you faded out the first color so you have a seamless transition. Now let’s bring this down very lightly. By the way these are Prismacolor pencils, wax-based. And keep them very sharp. I tend to sharpen them by hand, I don’t like electric sharpeners for Prismacolors because in my experience it tends to make them break more easily.

I just going up and trying to make the transition from heavy application to light, more gradual.

Now let’s take our pink and again I’m going to start where I want it to be the pinkest. See I made too much of an overlap right there so it created a line. We can fix that. If you use a heavier-toothed paper, you won’t see those overlaps as much. But it does give a different look to the piece. And if you wanted to burnish, which is another technique of blending which I will show you once this is through.

And the burnishing on smoother paper tends to work best for a very smooth effect. Right here we are lightly phasing it out. I want to even out some of those places that look like there’s too much overlap. And you can see I’m even kind of moving my brush in different directions, really lightly, which again works better on smoother paper.

Now I’m going to blend the pink into that orange. We’ll leave the pink alone for now. We’ll lay down our Mulberry. Such a pretty color. Blend it in to the pink. Now what if you wanted to blend green directly into orange? Or something where you have two other opposite colors? Because where they meet may not be such a pretty color. Well I would opt at least to have a neutral in between them, like a gray or a beige or tan. Or use a yellow to visually separate them a bit without making a muddy color.

I should put that down for another tutorial. It might be helpful to show you rather than to just explain it. Here’s my violet blue, start at the bottom of this one. It’s a nice intense color. Since it is such an intense blue, I’m going to be careful about how I blend it into the purple. Again you’re lightening your pressure as you go up. That makes such a really pretty transition. I want to intensify the blue down here.

I’m gonna go back to my purple, my Mulberry, and I’m going to bring that down over the blue a little bit. Now I’ll show you what we have so far. So that’s looking pretty smooth. I could probably work on this a little bit, the red into the orange. For a first pass I like that.

Now you could go in and this is where you can burnish, which again I will show you another time. But for me, I just want to go in and smooth these transitions and punch up the intensity of these colors a little bit.

So I’m going to go to my orange. This time I’m adding a little bit more pressure and my strokes are a little broader. Careful as I go into the pink, I don’t want to overpower the pink too much. You can see I’m just kind of jumping around a little bit.

Back to the red. So I’m almost burnishing but not quite. Burnishing would be applying the heaviest pressure possible and getting rid of all the white space of the paper. It’s just one of many colored pencil techniques. And I went outside the line. Gosh darn it! It’s alright.

Back to the orange a little bit. So you can just go over this quite a bit even though it’s not very toothy paper. Here’s my pink. Punch that up a little. Right now I’m just making large strokes to even out some of these overlapping lines.

A little smoother into that orange. I really like where it goes into that purple, it almost looks like an Easter egg or something. I don’t know why, maybe it’s the texture.

Back with the purple, and be careful with the purple here since it’s a darker color I don’t want it to overpower the pink. And blue. Alright, I like that. And that is how you blend colored pencils with layering.