If you’re working on some Christmas colouring, you might find yourself needing to colour a shiny bauble or two! Despite their simplicity, colouring a realistic bauble can require some key colouring techniques, especially blending and burnishing for that shiny finish.
If you’re new to colouring, take a moment to read our how to colour guide for beginners, which contains lots of handy tips and resources.
Download this free Christmas colouring page.
The secret to colouring a beautiful bauble is learning how to colour a round object in a realistic style. In our YouTube video about how to blending colouring pencils, Jenny gives you some tips for this!
You’ll want to start off with a fairly light colour and work on a base layer using a circular motion, to avoid creating visible lines.
Pick a highlight area for your circle, depending on where your light source is coming from. On a Christmas tree, for example, it could be coming from the fairy lights around it. The highlight should be slightly off-centre, as a highlight will never fall in the centre of a round object.
Build your layers up gradually with darker pencils and more pressure, keeping your highlight the lightest area, and blending your colours so there’s no obvious distinction between them.
Your circle, or bauble, will be darkest at the edges. Don’t be afraid to go quite dark – because baubles are so shiny, there’s a huge contract between the highlight and the shadows!
You can use a technique called burnishing to make your bauble look perfectly smooth and shiny!
This involves using a colourless blender, or a very light colouring pencil, to add a final blend to all your colours. The finished effect should be glossy and smooth, flattening the tooth of the paper. And perfect for a bauble – as it will look lovely and shiny!
Colouring some baubles on a beautiful Christmas tree? Don’t miss our colouring tutorial about how to colour a Christmas tree!
If you love Christmas colouring, take a look at our colour in Christmas gift tags that you can download and colour at home for free.
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