"Don't try a medium you've never used before on a piece you intend to finish" is advice I give to others, and advice I try to follow
And I just ruined some pictures with paint thinner in an attempt to blend out colored pencil. The thinner STAINS the paper?? It has a color of its own?! I might be able to recover something but it's absolutely not going to be what I wanted from these drawings. That's frustrating! I know better than that!
It leaves the paper translucent in a way I don't like and I have zero way of knowing if it'll dry out but I am not counting on it. Damn.
This is supposed to BLEND the pencils, but what it's doing is LIFTING then. These swatches are various attempts at light application, light with burnishing, heavy application, heavy with burnishing, and each one the color got stripped right off. I had to go back over it. They all look lousy and dull even after going back over them with another layer. The two in the right are unsolvented, heavy application of just the pencil, and heavy + white burnish.
Every attempt to burnish or blend is just robbing it of all the color strength... I'm baffled. Colors get MORE intense when I use alcohol for this.