Colouring Challenge: non-blended hair

Hi everyone!  Hope you all had a good weekend and that the week ahead has only nice things in store for us. Thanks so much for the lovely comments for my last card, you make my day you really do.

News

It's all change at Make It Colourful. The fortnightly challenges have now ended BUT the colour addicts still love a challenge so we've all moved over to the Make It Crafty store blog and have become Colouring Inspiration design team members. We'll be choosing our own colouring challenges from a list that Zoe has given us, and as we all post on the blog on different days during the month there is something new to see and hopefully be inspired by every couple of days. Look for us in the Colouring Inspiration section.

Also on the store blog, you'll find inspiration for using Make It Crafty projects in the Design Team Inspiration section, and lots of colouring and craft tutorials in the Techniques section. So something new to see every day.

My card

My card today is my first project in my new role, and it is hopefully OK to blog as it should have arrived at it's destination by now (wink!).  I chose Zoe’s challenge of Hair With Fine Detail, i.e. no blending, and I used Copic markers with a little pencil overshading in parts. The hair I did with Copics only.

The digi image I chose to colour is Ginger House Wife and it doesn’t have a lot of fine detail in the hair, so it can be coloured fairly quickly without blending. I used short, light feather strokes with just the very end of the tip of my copic markers to achieve this layered look. The shades I used were: Y17, YR23, YR27, E37, and E19. Y17 is the colour that I wanted my hightlights to be – the parts where the light catches the hair and we see a shine. So I laid down a base layer of this colour first. Then I took the next colour (YR23) and made feathered strokes from the hairline towards the highlight and from the ends/outside of the hair towards the highlight, then with the next darkest shade I went over the same areas but with slightly shorter strokes so that the lighter-coloured layer underneath still showed through. To make sure that the inks didn’t blend I let each layer dry before putting the next colour on, just to be sure that I complied with the challenge!

Ginger was merged with another Make It Crafty image, Home Sweet Home. I think they go well together, don't you?

Tip: Get the stroke right

When making these feather strokes, practice using only the very end of the tip, keeping your stroke light – you are hardly touching the paper at all really. At the end of the stroke, lift the marker upwards so that the marks on the paper taper off to a point. This gives finer strokes with a tapered end so that you can more easily achieve the effect of strands of hair and texuture with strokes that are defined and not smudged together. This is the sort of line you are aiming for:

You can see how the copic marker brush tip makes a much finer tapered point than does the promarker regular tip, I don't have a fine promarker tip to compare (sorry).

If you're going for defined layers, let your ink dry before putting the next colour on - you can see the effect of feathering onto wet and dry inks:

The wet ink on the left causes the strokes to blur into each other, whereas the dry ink on the right makes the strokes much crisper.

Marker Recipe:

Hair: Y17, YR23, YR27, E37, E19

Skin: E00, E01, E11, R20, R22

Dress & Shoes: R32, R35, R37, R39

Stair carpet: YG61, YG63, YG67

I kept the card fairly simple as the coloured image is quite large, so just a couple of sheets of Papermania paper, some gold mirri card and a Prima flower were enough.

I'd like to enter this in these challenges:

Bunny Zoe's Crafts - Girls Girls Girls
Crafty Ann's - It's a Girl Thing
Oldie But A Goodie - Anything Goes (my papers are a few years old)
Papertake Weekly - Anything Goes
Stampin Sisters In Christ - option 2) Just an image on your card (no sentiment)
Touch Twin Challenges - Getting Hairy

Thanks for dropping by today and for any comments you'd like to leave. Have a good day and happy crafting!