Day 2: The Daily Marker 30 Day Colouring Challenge

Just a real quick post today as I'm back on nights & sleep is more important than colouring.

Christmas is under 2 months away & I'm making Christmas tags at the moment to go on the presents under the tree.

I've been colouring up this wee elf with my Zig Real Color Brushes on watercolor paper & it's so quick & easy. I really do adore these markers as the brush tip is just a delight to work with making drawing the thinnest line real easy & they blend beautifully on watercolour paper with water, another Zig marker or the Wink of Stella brush marker. Unfortunately this stamp set does not have a matching die so I have hand cut all my elves, just as well I think he's very cute but I do like the "peeking look".

I only have the 36 marker set so only had one red to work with but I don't think it mattered. The bell on his hat is coloured with the gold Wink of Stella pen & I blended out the grey on his hat with my clear Wink of Stella pen & it is really sparkly in real life.

Recipe:
Stamp sets: Peeking Friends (Gerda Steiner Designs), Oh, Goodie (SU!)
Ink: Versafine Black, Festive Berries distress ink.
Zig Real Color Brushes: Pale Pink, Oatmeal, Flesh Colour, Mustard, Carmine Red. Light Gray, Light Green, May Green, Green
Other: Green glitter paper (CTMH), watercolour paper, Tag Builder Blueprints 6 (MFT), Copper cord (SU!), clear & gold Wink of Stella pens, waterbrush,

Well this is my 2nd post for Kathy's 30 day of colourings. I have another cute tag to share tomorrow so I'm off to a roll if you would like to join in or see what everyone else is creating do pop into The Daily Marker's blog .

✿ Karen ✿

Day 1: The Daily Marker 30 day Colouring Challenge

The amazing Kathy Racoosin is doing her SIXTH 30 day colouring challenge - she blogs & colours for us everyday for 30 days. Her colouring is divine & I am so in love what she did for the first day reveal that I definitely am going to CASE the idea somewhere in the next 30 days.

Now I can't see it being feasible for me to colour & blog for 30 days straight, as when I'm on my 4 nights on (midnight-8 shift at the hospital) I really do spend the next day being a blob & sleeping but when I'm off for 4 days I hope to colour & blog every day if I can. I have a couple of colouring projects I haven't shared that I have done recently to kick off the challenge for me whilst I am sleeping over the next 4 days.

This wee mini Gorguss girl I coloured in her face after doing my online class on colouring faces with Mindy from My Creative Scoop.

I was a bit of a duffus with my stamp placement as having her so close to the edge meant I could only really cut her out to place on a card. I used a scalpel to cut between her legs and then placed her on some DSP circles.

But I'm happy with how it all turned out. And she really is stinking cute!!

Recipe:
Stamps: Mini Gorguss girl (Santoro), Mondo Hydrangea (Ellen Hudson - sentiment)
Ink: Memento Black, Smoky Slate (SU!)
Paper: XpressIt blending card stock, thick Whisper White, DSP from a scrapbooking kit (Fancy Free Collection by Fancy Pants)
Copics: Various
Other: White Signo gel pen, clear Wink of Stella, dimensionals, circle framelits (SU!)

Simon Says Stamp Wednesday Challenge where anything goes has "thinking of you" as there theme this week, so guess I can enter my wee cutie into that challenge too, what perfect timing.

Catch you soon with my next coloured images & hope you can join in on the challenge too :)


✿ Karen ✿

Copics 201: Colouring Hair & Skin

Wow it's hard to believe time flies so fast, hope I can recall the learning process for colouring skin & hair for me. I'm actually really happy with colouring skin  but need to work on hair heaps as when you colour hair you do lines to get the hair strands.

Again it was like where do you start, there's heaps of colour combos out there so in the beginning I copied down combos I liked & tried the ones I had the markers for using an image I found on Pinterest. I've annotated them with who's colour combo it was. I've stored the combos in a wee notebook & have fair, medium & dark skin combos for a quick reference. Same for hair too.

At this time I also discovered digital stamps, now that's quite a scary thing as there's so many awesome images out there & they range from being FREE (yes free) to only a few $ per download & they take up no room in your craft room & when you print them out they are perfectly stamped! The wee girl below is called Jillian was a freebie but I bought a few as well from her designer as well Sylvia Zet, fromWee Stamps.

There's so many great resources on Pinterest & I find Elaine Hughes AKA Marker Geek a great source of colours that work really well. I've tried the 3 I have "marked" below.

About this time I did my first online card class with Kristina Werner, Jennifer McGuire & friends on Copic Markers - it was phenomenal value at $35USD & as well as colouring heaps of images from balloons, presents, birds, flowers, if I remember rightly it was a 14 days of lessons. One of the lessons was also on colouring hair & skin.

One of the other persons I noticed on Pinterest with great pinned tutorials was Mindy AKA My Creative Scoop. She offers from her website a free 3 day introduction to Copics & free digis if you sign up & again I found it really useful. Below is my Big Haired Bridget from Mindy's 3 day course which still makes me laugh as I never coloured behind her glasses!!

I've now taking Mindy's paid course & I'm really happy how my face colouring (fair, medium & dark) is progressing but still feel my hair colouring needs a lot more work from me. I have a lot more lessons to go i.e. need to colour in dresses, backgrounds, sky etc so watch this space.....

One of the cool things Mindy shares in her class is you only need a few colours, it's how you use them. The 3 skins all have the same markers used as has the fair & medium hair.

Mindy also has a Facebook group which is very inspirational The Copic Scoop. The other Facebook group which I find really inspiring is Kit & Clowder & they have lots of parties & lots of free digital stamps. When I have finished my classes with Mindy I will enrol myself in one or 2 of their classes & then hopefully we'll have a Copics 301 blog post.

✿ Karen ✿