As ridiculous as it sounds, I was embarrassed enough by the poorly colored Christmas trees I posted yesterday that I wanted to post an example of my good work.
How silly is it to take pride in your coloring skills? I worked hard in kindergarten and want you to know it!
For my samples today I used these awesome stamps from LaLa Land Crafts. I just love them. Seriously, these are my favorite character stamps. I know everyone loves Tilda images from Magnolia, and it’s a great line, but I think LaLa is so much cuter.
LaLa Land’s owner, Irina, was my Copic instructor. She teaches at one of my favorite local scrapbooking stores, and she’s amazing. I’ve already taken 3 of her classes, and am planning to take 2 more.
I colored Sitting Pretty Rosie and Sitting LaLa. When I color samples I like to stamp off at least two of each image: one for practice and one for serious. You will notice that the left-hand image on both of these is the practice. They’re messy because I use them to test color combinations and blending styles, sometimes on top of each other.
Let’s start with LaLa.
V01, 12, 15 and 17 is one of my go-to color combinations for clothes, so they were a natural choice when I went to color in the jumper. But, when I decided to use cool grays for the shirt and tights, I liked it so much that I changed everything. It’s easy not to think of the grays as colors, but I really like how it turned out. I used C1, 3 and 5, and in the second image I used R20 and R32 for the shoes, shirt and headband.
The hair gave me some trouble the first time around. I started by combining E59 with E35 and 31, because I didn’t think 37 was dark enough or 55 was light enough. It ended up being a mistake, and came out very streaky. After I layered on some E55 it evened out some, but I still don’t love it. Gray dress LaLa’s hair was done with E31, 35 and 37, which turned out to be plenty dark enough. I really like the softer, richer look. Purple dress LaLa’s hair is dull in comparison.
Rosie’s hair gave me just as much trouble.
Wanting to go blonde for her, I chose YR31 as the base color. In my first attempt I tried to feather blend all of her hair. This didn’t work out so well, mostly because the bottom left portion is too large and oddly shaped. I also used too many layers of YR31 before I switched to Y26 for darker accents. It just ended up looking splotchy, so I tried to smooth it with YR00. Mistake. For the second image I colored all her hair with an even layer of YR31. Then I feather blended in an extra layer at her part, behind her ears, and behind her head/neck, which would be natural shadow areas. Finally I did a few sweeps of Y26 in those same shadow areas and went back over with YR31 to blend. I’m much happier with it this way.
Her dress was equally challenging. The image makes me think of a little girl sitting out in the sunshine, so I wanted to give her a bright, fun dress. What better color than hot pink? I love the shades of RV02, 04 and 06, but for some reason I find they don’t blend as well as other color families. RV02 actually slightly changes the tone of 04 and 06 when layered on top. You can’t tell as much here because I went back over it with 04, but it looked almost as though I’d been using the colorless blender on the first dress. Anyway, I decided to use RV04 almost exclusively, and feather blended it over the entire dress. The slight tone change is from layering, though there is a hint of RV06 at the shoulders and knee.
Oh, on both girls I used E21, E41 and E000 for skin. This is slightly deceptive, but E21 is actually the darkest color here, which I used for shadows. E000 is the main color, and E41 was used for blending.
Can you tell that I’m obsessed?