Many thanks to Lianne Issa for this amazing tutorial. Check out her portraits gallery. Circulism Technique The colored pencil technique called circulism was invented in 1992 by Maggie Toole and i use it in all of my close up graphite portraits to try and achieve a realistic skin texture. The idea behind circulism is that when shading you draw no lines at all rather, the technique uses varied, unending, overlapped and intertwined circles, building transparent layers.