Investigating Colored Pencil Solvent with Scooby Doo’s Velma Dinkley

This week I worked on a Scooby Doo tribute featuring Velma Dinkley and the Ghost of the Black Knight — the very first ghostly villain Scooby and the gang encountered back in 1969!

I worked in colored pencil. I don’t do it often, but it’s something I’d like to get better at. I used my Prismacolor Premier pencils, and worked on Arches Hot Press Watercolor Paper.

If you take a closer look at the colors, you may or may not notice that they’re a little smoother than usual for colored pencil — for me, anyway. And that’s because this week I experimented with colored pencil solvent.

I’d never heard of colored pencil solvent, so I did a little research. Apparently, different people use different household chemicals for this — baby oil, rubbing alcohol — but the stuff in the bottle you get at the art store is mostly mineral spirits.

You brush it on over your pencils and, as the solvent dissolves the wax, the pigments are set free and mix more like wet media. You can see in this side-by-side, before/after of a “test Velma” I experimented on, once you lay down the solvent the blend is so much smoother than just pencil alone.

This was my very first time trying out solvent blending, but it seems you still get a little bit of texture depending on the tooth of the paper. You might be able to cut down on that a bit with something like smooth Bristol Board, but I stuck with the watercolor paper for fear the Bristol wouldn’t be able to take too much solvent.

Personal preference, I like leaving a little texture in the image. It keeps things interesting. But I do want to experiment with the solvent more. If you want to see more shots of the completed Velma/Black Knight illustration, there are some in our Long Lost Friends Studio video this week. We also experiment with a scratching technique for highlights, and blab about the premiere episode of Scooby Doo that spawned this iron-clad villain, What A Night For A Knight.

Here’s the video: