Crayola Nature Escapes Coloring Book--Parrot

This is the first page of the Nature Escapes Coloring Book for 2018. There are several images which are my favorites in the book and this happens to be one of them. The pages are designed with repeating motifs and if you color the same motif each time, the page fills itself in. If you prefer, you can bypass the motifs and color everything freestyle.

For example, the feathers are designed as leaves and I decided that I wanted them to be green. The veined part of the leave was a light green. The outline of the feather was a darker green. I then layered a light yellow to blend the two shades of green. The same veined pattern occurs in the feathers in the head. For this treatment, I re-used the yellow as the center color and then layered a different green color on top.

These pages take the alcohol inks very well. The color doesn't spread and the pages don't absorb the color so quickly that you can't mix and layer the colors. I used both wet blending and pen on pen blending on this page without issue. The only technique that I didn't use was color removal with the blender pen.

Since I am working back at the theatre, I have decided to take some of my Copic markers to work since I will be coloring there more often than not. I have a Copic traveling case that holds 72 markers. I decided to take all of my duplicates and then supplement them with colors from my full collection to fill out the case. Here are the color samples of the colors that I decided to take so far. I have already made one substitution  and will probably make others as I go along. I have taken colors from every color family and proportioned some color families based on my preferences. Here are the colors that I have taken. I am using color numbers rather than names for ease of typing and reference.

Greys and Black: NO, N2, N4, N8, C2, C4, C8, W2, W4, W8, T4 and 100
Greens/Yellow Green: G02, G07, G09, G21, G28, G94, YG13, YG17, YG41, YG45
Reds/Red Violet: R05, R20, R27, R46, RV23, RV43, RV25, RV69
Earth Tones: E04, E08, E11, E13, E15, E18, E29, E34, E39, E42
Yellow/Yellow Red: Y15, Y19, YR23, Y35, YR09, YR12, YR16, YR61, YR68
Violet/Blue Violet:V04, V05, V09, V12, V25, BV01, BV08
BlueGreen: BG10, BG11, BG13, BG15, BG72, BG78
Blues: B01, B02, B04, BG23, B24, B28, B41, B45, B63, B66

As you can see, I originally had R01 which was too close in color to R20 so I replaced it with R05. I might replace some of the greys with other colors since I don't think that I will use all of the shades of grey.

Crayola Nature Escapes Coloring Book

I wanted to consolidate the pages from this coloring book that I have already completed so I can refer to them at a later point. If you are following along with this 2018 resolution, this is a great place to start. I started coloring this book on the Coloring Across America Tour. 

I will primarily be using my Copic Markers for this book since it is my medium of choice. I promised to evaluate the book with Prismacolor colored pencils and with Caran d'Ache water resistant wax crayons.

As a reminder, the turtle above was created using the Crayola Super Tips markers. For an extended explanation of this page, visit here.

The bees above were colored with Crayola colored pencils. For a detailed explanation of this page, please visit here.

Finally, the flamingo page was colored with crayons. For a detailed explanation of this page, please visit here.

To easily access this series of pages, you can click on the label CraoylaNatureEscapes. One of my goals of 2018 is to color all of the pages in this book.

Happy New Year and New Year Resolutions/Goals

Happy New Year from the cold environs of New York City. After taking a break from blogging after the Coloring Across America Tour, I have returned today to share my new year's resolutions/goals  with you.

This year is going to be dedicated to Coloring. I will taking on a lot more coloring challenges this year. I will also be participating in Swaps and sending out more snail mail with more postcards and penpals. I also want to continue to develop better lettering styles.

Here are my specific goals this year:

• I want to finishing coloring the entire Nature Escapes Coloring Book by Crayola. I will share each image as it is complete. You can following the pages by viewing the label CrayolaNatureEscapes
• I plan on coloring each day and I plan on coloring in my Coloring 2018 Calendar (label DailyColoring).
• I also plan on completing each week of The Mindfulness Coloring Engagement Calendar 2018 by Emma Farrarons. I will experiment and evaluate with different media but will primarily color with Copic Markers (label WeeklyColoring).
• I hope to illustrate a daily quote from the book 365 Days of Wonder by R.J. Palacio. I have tried to do a daily motivation quote challenge but would spend so much time searching for quotes that I like that I would have little time for lettering. I ran across this book at Target and my hopes were answered. I don't know if I will post these every day. I might do a consolidation post at the end of each week. I have a backup source called Advice from my 80-year-old self by Susan O'Malley if I need extra quotes (label DailyQuotes). 
• Finally, I have accepted the challenge from Lin-Manuel Miranda to join his book club and read The Complete Shakespeare during 2018. We will have monthly reading assignments. I plan to keep my reading assignments, thoughts, and comments in my Hobonichi planner (label AYearWithShakespeare).