tortillon

What is it for

A tortillon is a conical piece of pressed paper pulp. It is used to blend colors when you are drawing with graphite pencils or color pencils.

When you use a tortillon to blend a color, pigment is transferred from the paper to the tortillon. Which means that the next time you try to use that tortillon you can’t use it for a different color. If you would it would ruin your drawing.
For that reason I’ve been using pieces of toilet paper to blend colors. You can trough them out when your done.

Mixing colors

But when you mix colors you have to apply much more pressure while blending. That means that you really do need tortillons. So I’ve done a little bit of experimenting and I found that it is in fact very easy to clean a tortillon if you rub it over a sheet of middle grain sanding paper.
The tortillon gets a little shorter and the pigment is left behind on the sanding paper.

Mixing colors 5C

Do you like my work? Subscribe to See me draw!

Mixing color 5D

Featured on See me draw

Ford Smith is a contemporary artist who paints very beautiful colorful landscapes

{ Comments on this entry are closed }

A tortillon is a piece of compressed paper you can buy in the shop or can make yourselves. It’s used to pull the pigment over your sheet of paper.

I’ve used it ones to find out what I could do with it. But I was a little disappointed. I thought that it should be possible to create a nicer effect. After some experimenting I’ve found that an ordinary piece of (single sheet) toilet paper works wonders.

Nova

Do you like my work? Subscribe to See me draw

If you’ve ever looked at the texture of drawing paper you’ll know that it isn’t completely flat but kind of bumpy.

When you hold your pencil almost on it’s side when you draw, you only grace the bumps. The lower parts of the paper texture stays white. When you first start with drawing you learn to see the white parts as an disadvantage but actually it isn’t.

By using a piece of kitchen or toilet paper you can spread the pigment evenly accros the paper and get a kind of glassy feel.

You’ll have to try it for yourselves to see it because it doesn’t scan that well.

For this drawing I used a second sheet of paper as a kind of painters palette and a piece of toilet paper as a brush. I colored the edge of the “palette” and used the “brush” to pull a little bit of pigment onto this sheet. Then I moved the “palette” and pulled some more pigment on this sheet.

To be fair there is one exception to the rule that blending with (toilet) paper gives nicer results then blending with a tortillon and that’s when you’re in a tight spot. A (commercial) tortillon has a pointed top which makes it ideally suited for small spaces.

A problem with tortillons is that pigment will stick to the top. If you don’t want to buy a tortillong for every color you’ll ever use you can use a blank piece of drawing paper to rub the pigment of the top.

While drawing this picture I accidentally found a new technique. I’ll try it as soon as I have the materials I need and I’ve thought of a picture to draw.

(I’ve send this drawing off to a source of inspiration.)