A little colouring practice

With a lot of translation work and chancing upon our new dream home, only 700 meters away from our current home, I haven't had much time for crafting in the past weeks. I did manage to wind down in the evenings after work by watching all the inspirational videos and tutorials of the most recent Online Card Class, Copics for card makers. I don't own any Copics (yet), but I assumed I could learn a lot of tricks, tips and techniques that would also be useful for the alcohol-based markers that I do own, and I was right.

One of the great things about this class was that it came with several printable practice sheets, so we could try out colour combinations, blending techniques and so on and colour along with the teachers and guest designers, who were all using the same images. Plus these sheets will serve as excellent reference material for future colouring projects.

So here's a peak at my colouring attempts. 

This first sheet is perfect for keeping track of colour combinations that do and don't work. For this class I practiced with a selection of Promarkers and Flexmarkers that I own. These exercises also made me realise I could use a few more colours, such as a wider selection of reds.

The second sheet is perfect for practicing two and three colour blending and shading (on the presents).

Last night, I was able to do some more colouring and decided to jump to day 8 to try my hand at a technique shown by Debby Hughes, namely using a colourless blender with your markers to achieve a soft watercolour look and blending into white. After colouring the first two leaves (top right) and two petals, I thought this would never work. My colours were too dark and there was a lot of bleeding going on because I had to go back and forth with my markers, but I kept going at it. When I looked at the image again today, I decided the result wasn't half bad, considering this was my very first attempt at this technique and having to figure out my own colour combos. And once I have fussy cut the image and used it on a card, no one will know I had any bleeding issues LOL.

BTW, this last image was one of the images that had been donated by several generous sponsors for printing and use during class (and after LOL). This lovely flower image is by Clearly Besotted and is available for purchase as a clear stamp (Happy Everything set).

That's it for today. Thanks for looking.