Have you ever wondered why some colored pencil and gel pen artwork looks so incredibly vibrant and alive? Well, today I’m letting you in on a little secret that completely changed the way I color! In this video, I’ll be revealing a super simple technique using a common everyday tool that can take your colors from flat and dull to vivid and dynamic. Trust me, once you try this, you’ll never want to color without it again!
Video Description
Secret coloring technique to get more vivid and dynamic colors out of pencil crayons and gel pens! Discover a simple and common tool that can really make your coloring pop.
Download the test color charts shown in the video here: http://www.coloringpagesbliss.com/secret-coloring-technique/
The Giveaway has expired, but subscribe to my channel to be notified of future giveaways! You can see this giveaway winner here: https://youtu.be/b9ae7T30Rco
These are the products used in the video:
Prismacolor Premier Colored Pencils: http://amzn.to/2aW2D4j
Faber Castell Polychromo Colored Pencils: http://amzn.to/2b1wfc6
GelWriter Gel Pens: http://amzn.to/2aZK7mP
Sharpie Highlighters: http://amzn.to/2aZKoWM
Subscribe to my channel to see more coloring tips and tricks. You can also follow me here:
Website: http://www.coloringpagesbliss.com
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ColoringPagesBliss/
Pinterest: https://www.pinterest.com/coloringbliss/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/coloringbliss
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/coloringpagesbliss/
Transcript
My Secret Coloring Weapon: Highlighters as a Base Layer
Hi everyone! This is Jennifer Stay from Coloring Pages Bliss, and I am so excited today to reveal my latest and greatest new secret coloring weapon. I discovered this about a month ago, and I’ve been experimenting with it and using it ever since. I’m quite obsessed with it, honestly. I don’t know if I’ll ever go back to coloring without it, and I’m excited to share it with you — because I think you may be just as obsessed as I am by the time we’re done here.
Make sure you stay tuned until the end of this video, because we’re going to do a giveaway, and I want to make sure you have a chance to participate!
The Big Reveal: Highlighters!
It’s just simple highlighters. You may even have some sitting in your junk drawer right now — in your office or at your desk. You may have even tried coloring with them before. They’re pretty fun little things, and I’m going to show you what I’ve been doing with them in a way you might not expect.
We’re going to use highlighters as a base layer. A base layer is simply something you lay down first, before you pick up your main coloring tool. It gives you a foundation to work from and produces more professional-looking results. As I started watching more and more artists work, I noticed that professional illustrators almost always lay something down first. I realized that was a step I had been skipping — and highlighters have become that step for me.
Why a Base Layer Matters
One of the things I’ve always disliked about colored pencils is that the white of the paper shows through. You have to work really hard and go through a lot of steps to make that white disappear. In future tutorials, I’ll go into much more depth about why that happens and the many techniques you can use to deal with it, but here’s the short version:
The white you see is caused by the texture of the paper, which in the art world is called tooth. When you drag a colored pencil across the paper, the pigment sits on top of the ridges — the peaks of the tooth — while the valleys between them stay white. To fill in those valleys, you have to press harder to push the pigment down into them. But here’s the problem: if you press too hard and flatten the tooth entirely, there’s nothing left for your pencil to grip, and you lose the ability to layer and blend effectively. You need a happy medium.
That’s exactly what a highlighter base layer gives you. It fills in the white spaces without damaging the tooth of the paper, so your colored pencils still have something to grab onto. It takes care of the problem beautifully.
The “Secret” Part
Here’s why I call it a secret weapon: the highlighter hides underneath your colored pencil layers. Nobody knows it’s there — except you. Instead of bare white peeking through, anywhere that might have shown white now glows with a rich, luminous color underneath. You end up with deep, vibrant results that look like you spent hours building up layers, when really you just laid down a quick coat of highlighter first.
And here’s a bonus: because the base layer does so much of the heavy lifting, you actually save time and use less colored pencil. You’re building up color with a cheap highlighter instead of wearing down your expensive Prismacolors. So cool!
Testing the Highlighters
Since it’s back-to-school season, I headed to the store and picked up a bunch of different highlighters to test. I used simple, thin kids’ copy paper to check for bleed-through — and they passed. Most highlighters don’t bleed through, though some water-based ones can smear a little, so just be mindful of that as you work.
Another great thing about highlighters is that they don’t damage your paper. When used the way they’re intended — one pass at a time — you can barely tell where you’ve been. If you scrub back and forth over the same spot repeatedly, you could start to pill the paper fibers, but a single, smooth pass won’t hurt your paper at all. That’s especially reassuring if you’re coloring in a lower-quality coloring book.
Here’s what I found at Walmart:
Sharpie Pocket Set — These have a nice chisel tip, which lets you get fairly detailed coverage. This is a great all-around option.
Sharpie Chisel (Large) — I love these for big areas. They give you a lot of coverage quickly, and honestly, pulling them out of the package gave me a total flashback to being a little girl and turning them into pretend swords. (Comment below if you did that too!) I’m a big fan of this size.
BIC Set — These were the least expensive option, around $2 for the set. The colors came out a little duller compared to the Sharpies, but for two dollars, they’re worth having.
Case-Mate (Walmart Store Brand) — I was genuinely impressed by these. The colors are quite vivid, and the set even includes a watermelon-pink shade that adds a fun extra option. They come in retractable barrels, which feel a little flimsy — the mechanism is just a small plastic door inside — so I’m not sure how long they’ll hold up with heavy use. But the colors are lovely and they lay down beautifully. I paid around $5 for a set of eight, which is a solid deal.
Overall, highlighters are inexpensive, available everywhere (grocery stores, dollar stores, office supply stores, Walmart, Target), and wildly underrated as an art supply.
Side-by-Side Comparisons
To really prove out this concept, I colored a sphere using a single color — Prismacolor Cerulean Blue — once without a base layer and once with a blue highlighter base layer underneath. Same pencil, same amount of pressure. The difference is stunning. The version with the base layer looks deeper, richer, and more finished. The same goes for a sphere colored with Prismacolor Grass Green — the version with a green highlighter underneath is dramatically more vibrant.
I also tested this with Faber-Castell Polychromos pencils, and the results were just as impressive. Whether you’re a Polychromos person or a Prismacolor person, the base layer technique works beautifully for both.
I even tested it with odorless mineral spirits — a blending agent I’ll be covering in a future tutorial — to make sure the highlighter wouldn’t react badly. Not only did it hold up perfectly, but the blended result actually looked even more beautiful with the highlighter underneath. No worries there.
Mixing Different Hues
Up to this point, I’d been using matching colors — blue highlighter under blue pencil, yellow under yellow. But then I started wondering: what if the base layer is a different color than the pencil going on top?
I made a big chart to test this. I laid down strips of blue, green, yellow, orange, pink, and purple highlighter, then colored across them with a wide range of Prismacolors — including metallics and white. The results were fascinating. A base layer doesn’t have to match your pencil color. A different-colored base layer can actually shift the final color, giving you entirely new shades from the same pencils you already own. If you have a 36-pencil set, your highlighters can effectively expand it into something much larger.
My biggest takeaway from the chart: yellow is incredibly versatile as a base layer. It brings out the depth and richness of almost any color you put over it. When in doubt, I’ll be defaulting to yellow underneath, because it makes nearly everything look more vivid and dynamic.
Highlighters and Gel Pens
Of course, we can’t have this conversation without talking about gel pens! I tested the highlighter base layer with gel pens as well, using a similar chart — yellow, green, blue, purple, pink, and orange highlighter strips, crossed with glitter gels, metallic gels, pastel gels, and white.
The results were just as exciting. Gel pens sometimes show the white of the paper through them, just like colored pencils do. Laying a highlighter underneath really makes those gel pen colors pop. And here’s a fun side effect: if your gel pen strokes aren’t perfectly even, a little bit of the highlighter peeks through the gaps — and instead of looking like a mistake, it creates a beautiful, glowing effect. With glitter and metallic gels especially, that peekaboo highlighter underneath adds a magical quality that people notice without being able to explain why the coloring looks so good.
To demonstrate this, I colored a flower using gel pens over a highlighter base layer (on most of the petals) and without the base layer (on a few smaller petals). The difference was immediately obvious. The petals without the base layer took longer, used more ink, and still showed more white. I kept wanting to stop and grab a highlighter mid-way through. The conclusion was clear: the highlighter base layer works just as well with gel pens as it does with colored pencils.
Wrapping Up
Whether you’re using colored pencils, gel pens, or markers, highlighters are a game-changing addition to your coloring toolkit. They’re inexpensive, available everywhere, easy to use, and they produce results that look like you spent hours on a piece when you really didn’t. I’ve been sneaking them into my coloring bag for weeks and hiding them from the camera so I wouldn’t spoil the surprise — but now the secret is out!
One of my goals is to help you enjoy your coloring more and get more bliss out of every page. I hope this tip does exactly that.
Giveaway!
Thank you so much for sticking with me to the end! To celebrate, I’m giving away a beautiful set of Sharpie Highlighters so you can start using this secret weapon in your own coloring right away.
Here’s how to enter — just three easy steps:
- Subscribe to my YouTube channel
- Like this video
- Comment below using the phrase “Sharpie Highlighter”
I’ll choose a winner from the comments, so make sure you’ve done all three!
And the best part? This giveaway is open internationally! Yes — everyone can enter, no matter where you are in the world. I’ll be posting a follow-up video with the winner in a few days, so watch for it.
I hope you have a beautiful and colorful day. Bye! 🌸
