Colouring Experiment: Day Four

I wanted to thank everyone for the lovely comments left on this project. I've had much encouragement and several suggestions for other techniques to try! This should keep my going!
I'll be taking a break on Sunday, but back at it on Monday.

Have you ever started a project and had everything go wrong that could go wrong? That was me today. First up I kept forgetting all the stuff I know about colouring. With crayons and water colour pencils it pretty much doesn't matter what surface you're colouring on (I mean underneath your paper) but with harder things like coloured pencils, you can't have a soft surface. Well, my work area has cork mats (makes for a great stamping surface). Oops. What it means is that your pencils can't get the nice dark colour you'd get on a hard surface. Oh well, I'd started I'm going to keep going.

So next I find that the pencil I picked to be my main colour, brown, is broken. Every time I sharpen it it'll break off again, usually a ways inside the wood so I have to sharpen a bunch. That was certainly annoying. I tried 5-6 times and gave up.

Then I decided, well, even though I've done a purple dragon I'm going to do another one... this time more jewel tones. I couldn't decide which jewel tones and, frankly, I had lost a bit of interest after being denied the earth tones... so I used all of them. (There wasn't much of a selection anyway). At this point I'm grumbling about not being able to find my Prisma Colours.

I really wanted to do a blue based purple so started with that and worked into the purple. I highlighted her cheeks and eyelids with the pink to make her a bit "warmer". After all that I ended up going over it in the pink anyway because it didn't look "right"... part of that is due to the purple pencil. There was something in the purple that was scraping, even after sharpening, the colour back off as I coloured. I tried sharpening, rotating, adjusting the angle, nothing.

The wings turned out great. I had to remind myself that it's "okay" to blend colours that are seperated on the spectrum (red/pink, skip orange, to yellow, for example) and it gives a neat effect. I suggest starting with the darker colour and blending with the lighter colour. If your pencils are fairly soft (like my beloved and missing Prismas) you'll want to watch that your lighter colour doesn't get "dirty" when you go over the darker colour.

Another thing to consider, with any medium really, is your colour selections. I love to work with complimentary colours (colours across from one another on the colour wheel... so red/green, purple/yellow, blue/orange) and if I have a significant amount of one, I want to add that in as well. It can be a pain because I love red and I love green, but I don't like all my coloured images to look like Christmas themes. Also, I love blue but I'm really picky about oranges and dislike many shades of orange.

Here's my finished dragon, who will NOT end up on a card or project, but since we can learn from mistakes is still making it into my blog.

Thank you for checking in! See you Monday... I haven't decided yet, but some more colouring!

Stamp image from Paper Pretties.