Colour Experiment - Final

I give up! I was loan four Copic markers by my Close to My Heart consultant, Leisa, 2 shades of pink and 2 shades of gray (plus a blender pen). I've been trying to do something presentable but I'm afraid it's just not enough to show the blending capabilities... not even anything worth taking a photo of. So, this is the end of my colour experiment for now.

Some of you expressed concern that I wasn't making a final project with the finished dragons... well, the water colour dragon was given to my son, the marker dragon to my older daughter... but I rescued the coloured pencil dragon and crayon dragon to make into projects.

All the paper is from Stampin' Up, as are the two sentiments. The sparklies are from Close to My Heart and the dollar store (see the itty bitty sparkly on the pencil dragon's finger?). The ribbon and the corner punch are from Michaels, I'm not sure of the vendor names. The dragon is from Paper Pretties.

I'd like to thank all of you for following along on this colour experiment, your words of encouragement kept my momentum up and made it tons of fun. I must admit, whenever I make a post I check my email often to see if anyone has replied... it's like getting mini Birthday presents to get a comment!

On a closing note, please take a moment to enter my Draw for the Cure. October is Breast Cancer Awareness month, hence why my blog and icon have gone PINK!

Colour Experiment - Day Six

New day... same media? Today's experiment comes from two sources. The crayon technique was shared with me by Kathy over at Lucky Stamper, the "white wash" look was linked by HappyCrafter in reply to Day Two. I almost split this into two days, but since Laurie Wilson already did a wonderful tutorial for the white wash with markers, I figured I'd stick to the crayon technique.

The first part of the experiment was figuring out what crayons to use. Do you have any idea how may different types of crayons, not just brands, there are out there? Well, I own three kinds (or my kids do at least). All three are from Crayola... there's the traditional crayon, "twistables" and "washable" (which aren't really washable, by the way). I did a test with two of each colour (tried to make sure they were all the same two colours but crayons get lost, broken, eaten, et cetera).

I ended up picking the "normal" crayons, I liked how they blended the best. The twistables were a harder wax and so came up paler and harder to blend. The washables were a much softer wax and glommed all over my page (remember Day Three?) and didn't seem to blend as smoothly.

After picking my colours and stamping my image I made sure to sharpen the heck out of my crayons (the apricot is actually a washable... honestly I could only find three "normal" crayons. I used two of them and threw in the one washable. Washables do NOT sharpen well!). Then I drew a thin line around the edge of the dragon, tossing in a few dabs of blue and apricot for accents. Heres the fun part... I used a smudge stick (typically used by artists using charcoal or softer graphite pencils) and a teensy bit of baby oil and blended the colour inward. To do a true white wash I've used way too much colour, but hopefully it still looks okay.




Thanks for checking in! My next colour experiment post should be this Thursday as I've found someone to loan me some Copic markers!



PS. Today my youngest, Elora Dawn, is four months old. Have a cup'o'cute!

Don't ask where the camera is.

Stamp image from Paper Pretties.

Experimenting with Colours - Day Three

Crayons!! I didn't have any of my OWN crayons so I stole my kids. So, I ended up with "Large" washable crayola crayons. It's not easy to do detail work with crayons!! Today's colours are my pick.

I should note that this is not the only crayon technique I want to try, I have to visit the craft store for some materials and then I'm going to try something Kathy told me about. That'll probably be day five or six.

So... same image, new technique. After picking my colours I worked in the opposite direction as the water colours and markers. I started with the DARKER colour, in this case red. Once I'd gone lightly over the whole body of the dragon with the red crayon I started working with more pressure on the crayon with the dark orange. For the belly it was orange and then yellow.

Crayons are messy. Did I mention that? I wasn't too worried about going outside the lines, both because these crayons were HUGE and because you can always go back and "scape" the paper to get most of the colour off again. (I used a craft blade, but any flat sharp object should do the trick).

Whatever you do, don't "wipe" the paper to get the crayon bits off. Oi.

If your image has only a little bit of the stamp colour you can kind of cheat and just go over the lines. Unless you're using a "white" base colour (in other words, any pastel colours) it won't show much.

Not much to say about this experiment really... I mean, it's crayons. You're going to end up with a BRIGHT and waxy image. The finished product will be easily scraped and so it might not be the best technique for card making.

Here she is in her glory. I finished it with two shades of green... again starting with the darker colour. I wanted to cover some of my more glaring "outside the lines" moments, mostly to impress you folks with my childlike ability to colour with crayons! Are you impressed?
Thank you for stopping by! See you tomorrow for my pencil crayon experiment.

Stamp image from Paper Pretties.