Good Morning Deskers- another week been and gone, where is this year vanishing to? Time for another show and tell, courtesy of our Chief of Desks, Julia, over at The Stamping Ground. Finally we have some spring type weather, lets hope it last for the Easter weekend.It would be nice to be able to do some work in the garden at long last.My desk still contains the images of Molly from last week, but now she has some colour.You can see a mask of Molly on a post-it, for later use, and some colour samples as well.
I'm actually quite chuffed, as I seem to have stumbled upon a colouring method that works for me.
Regulars will know I frequently moan that my colouring skills are less than desirable- blending and shading have managed to elude me entirely. However, quite by fluke, I seem to have blundered into a solution. After I had coloured the purple Molly, below, I was as usual less than impressed. It still seemed 'flat', and I wanted to give her hair in particular, some texture. So I added one of the ultra fine nibs to my black Promarker, and flicked in a lot of short lines.Which I then coloured over in a dark grey.It wasn't perfect, but I did find that amount of colour was blendable. So I switched to using ultra fine nibs on all the colours I was using- and by putting down loads of fine lines, in two colours, then blending over the top with a third really pale one, I got what I wanted. Talk about a Eureka moment!These images have to be my first colouring attempts I'm actually pleased with, and that look pretty much like the version in my head- ( you don't want to go there, its a dark & scary place!). So much so, I think I'll be stamping up a few more, and I can see me colouring just for fun now. I've also just ordered a bunch more ultra fine nibs- so I can have one for each colour group, dark and pale.So apart from this, what else did I discover? Well, I mentioned in last weeks post about how the black inks took to different card, and Julia also commented about how different all the 'white' card looked next to each other. Which they did, its true.
Some had been stamped in Versafine, some in Memento, and a few had been stamped in Versafine & heat embossed.Results? The images were all left for a few days before I tried colouring- and I had issues with the Memento bleeding, surprisingly.
Not sure if that was because I was using the bullet point nib, and I will be testing it out with the ultra fine nib to see if that solves it. It may also be down to colour, as I find the reds tend to spread alarmingly. The heat embossed lines seems to cure that though.
Although it wasn't just the reds, I had a problem with the purple in this Memento image.
One epic fail was the Clarity Silk Coated card- that and Promarkers do not play well together. The image was heat embossed, but it was as though the next colour added 'lifted' the first one, rather than blended with it, leaving the blue in the image looking very streaky and also the black dried out looking very flat.
So thats my desk, go on- show us yours! Have a good week folks, and hopefully a lovely Bank Holiday weekend too.
