Practice making marks by adjusting how you hold the pencil. Hold the pencil upright to create hard clean lines or a series of dots. Hold a pencil about halfway up and use the side of the lead for shading.
Sketch in dashed loose marks for drawing in items such as grass, and create swirls for coloring in large area. Use different pressures to create a variety of tones.
Use other techniques such pointillist and hatching. Pointillism is a technique artists use to color areas by creating many small dots, lending itself well to the sharpness of the pencil. Hatching is a series of parallel lines and crosshatching is the crisscross effect achieved by drawing lines perpendicular to the hatching lines.
Create a glass, polished surface or a metal effect with burnishing. Burnishing is applying a color and then applying a light color. The wax of the pencil mixes creating a slick surface that also fills up the paper surface.