Day Eighteen

Today’s coloring assignment is from a collection of coloring postcards called Winter Dreams. I purchased my copy from Amazon. I liked the designs although some of them are microdesigned in that there are a lot of little details that can be colored or overlooked. The paper is of a nice quality and holds ink well but probably is best suited for colored pencils. I am going to try and see how my Copic markers do when I return home. The cards are a larger postcard and measure 5 inches by 7 inches. I like the theme because it is holiday related without being in your face about it. They also can be appropriate to send for Winter Solstice and New Years.

I ultimately decided to use colored pencil after my marker fail (see and explained below). With colored pencil, the color spreads nicely on the paper. More importantly, the paper doesn’t become so saturated that colors can be layered. If you look at the bird above, the blue grey of the head was the base color of the entire bird. All of the other colors on the body were layered on top of that base color. For the tail feathers, a fuchsia color was laid down and then red was layered on top of it. I am still trying to solve the background dilemma that I face when I am presented with so much open space. I don’t know if it is the Crayola brand of pencils or my technique that I don’t like.

Well—they all can’t be masterpieces. I started today’s assignment with a different card. Because of the high quality of the paper, I was excited to try and color this set with markers. Because of the rag content of the paper, the color gets easily absorbed into the paper. While I liked the color variation acheived with the berries, when I tried to layer color on the bird it just didn’t work. The bottom layer of color gets so absorbed into the paper that when the second color is used, it simply does not blend. I will try and color blend on blending paper and then apply it to the postcard in a future attempt. I wam happy to say that the markers did not bleed onto the reverse side of the postcard.