Step-by-Step colouring of Tilda's curly hair

Hello lovely bloggers, I have a little colouring tute to share today, but first some nice news.....I am being featured today on a fabulous blog called Craft Corners in their 'Best of the Web' section. The blog is about all sorts of handicrafts, not just papercrafting, and it has some great ideas that I wouldn't mind trying myself. Nice if you want a browse round a new site sometime, it's the kind of place I like mooching around in when I can't sleep. There are a few other bloggers featured in this edition, too: a quilter, a mixed-media artist and a stitcher.

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I've been colouring again. My good friend, the lovely Chrissy, sent me a Tilda image and asked how I would colour her very curly hair. I had no idea how to and I put it on the back burner of my mind to think over......for about a year or two! Anyway, in the mood to play recently, I found the image she sent me and decided to sit down and see if I could do something with it at last. I promised her I'd take some step-by-step photos and here they are.

I used this image recently to make a gift box...you can see the blog post about this box by clicking HERE.

This Tilda looks as though she has African American hair, or at least very very tight curls, so my usual hair techniques would not work here. This is how I planned and coloured the image.

Such tightly curly hair is a mass of darkness, which I decided I'd colour using E47 as my main colour with E49 as shadows, but to begin I needed to define some curls - I decided to colour the curls with a lighter edge to define them from the rest of her hair.




Step 1
I began by mapping out some curls by using a lighter-coloured marker - I'm guessing and feeling my way at this point so if I make a mistake it won't be such a big deal because I'll be coming in with a darker colour soon. The drawing of the hair is made up of lots of curves, and I'll be using these as the curls. Leaving the outer edge of the curves uncoloured, I laid down some E35 in all the areas that are going to be coloured darker later:

Mapping out with a lighter marker

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Step 2
When I'm happy with where the curls are, so I go in with the colour I want her hair to be: E47. I put this ink in exactly the same places where I mapped out my trial colouring, but if you are more confident you could miss out the mapping stage and go straight in with your main hair colour:

Laying down main colour

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Step 3
Next, I take my deeper hair colour that I am going to use for shadows (E49), and I add some to small parts of the image: round the bows and on the outside of the curves within the hair. This will give some depth to the image and accentuate the curls:

Adding some shadow areas

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Step 4
Then I go back in with my main colour (E47) and blend in the shadows:

Blending the shadows

You can see that I did the 2 sides of her hair in different ways: on the left side I used the E47 minimally to blend in the shadow areas, and on the right side I actually coloured over the whole of the E47 area. At this point, I didn't know which side I preferred, remember I'm working this out as I go along.

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Step 5
OK, so after this I want to add some colour to the curls themselves, so I use the paler colour E35 on the white areas only, I didn't blend in with the darker colour as I didn't want the highlight to get lost at this point:

Giving the curls some colour

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Step 6
Now, at this point I switched to a dotted stroke for 2 reasons: as the image is now quite dark, it's harder to be precise about where the dark marker tip lands (for me anyway, maybe my eyesight isn't so great but I can't distinguish the end of a dark marker tip against dark colouring) so a dot is safer.....less ink comes out and less chance of messing up. PLUS dotted strokes add to the textured feel of the hair.

So, I dot some of the darkest marker (E49) into the shadows again to deepen and extend them:

Dotting to add in and extend the shadows

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Step 7
And then I dot some of the main (E47) colour around to blend the dark dots and add more colour:

More dots to blend

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Step 8
I'm not happy with the curls - there is too much E35 showing and I want to reduce the size of the highlighted areas. I take another colour, E44, and dot this around, extending into the highlight areas to make them smaller:

Reducing the highlights with a shade slightly lighter than
the main hair colour

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Step 9
I could have stopped at this point as I'm happy enough with it. But I decided to take my E44 marker and again added some dots over and around the curls to tone them down a little, and you can see the result of this in the finished image below. The hair is still warmer because of the E35, but gives more the effect I was hoping for.

Here is the finished image:

Hope this was of some use. Please let me know if you use it - I'd love to come and see your work.

Happy colouring!

Tutorial - The Country Cottage

I thought I'd show how I broke down the colouring of the country cottage scene as it's such a daunting image to approach.  My friend Jean sent me the image and asked for help in colouring it, so for her and for anyone else that is interested, I hope you find it useful.  the actual stamp is from a Papermania set called Gardenia.

Just to say before I start that it's simply my style of colouring to use a lot of shades to colour anything, I'll never use 2 shades if I can fit in 3 or 4! You don't necessarily need to use as many different colours as I did; as long as you don't colour anything in just one shade you'll achieve some depth without getting overly fussy. I'm not a certified copic teacher or anything, this is just to help Jean get started.....don't shoot me if I don't do it very well! lol.

I've listed the pen colours that I used at each stage, but if you just want a rough idea of the differences between these shades, or if you use something other than copic sketch markers and want to find an equivalent colour in your chosen medium, you can look on the many copic colour charts available on the net and compare with a colour chart for your own markers.....here is one, but bear in mind that the colour reproduction on screen isn't always accurate: http://www.copicmarker.com/products/markers 

Basic planning:

Because the scene contains a lot of different areas of foliage next to each other, I began by thinking about the greens that I would use. I didn't want the green areas to all merge into each other so I needed some contrast between the different areas of foliage. I decided to make the bushes and grass more yellow-green and keep the truer greens for the leaves in the trees.

It seemed best to concentrate colouring efforts on the cottage as it is the main focus. After the cottage, the eye seems to be drawn up to the tree on the left behind the building, so I wanted that to look good too. The other areas I felt would be Ok as long as the different green areas were distinct from each other, but I wasnt going to be overly concerned with them.

Another thing I did first was to determine my light source....I don't know why I decided to have the light coming from the right side but I'm glad I did, it worked out well and created nice shadows on the lawn and with the far left of the building (where the little room is on the end).




The Cottage Roof & Walls:

Roof and walls of the cottage

So the first step was to do the roof of the cottage......I didn't know what colour a thatched roof is, so I just went with a black colour as I felt this would give a lot of contrast with the surrounding areas. So I used 4 shades of grey C3, N4, N6 and N8 for this, colouring in the direction of the lines in the drawing. Having my light source from the right meant that the lightest areas would be on the top and right side of those bumps in the roof over the windows, and the left side of the bumps would be in shadow. So I put my lightest shade C3 down first over the whole roof, then went in with my next lightest shade, N4, covering all the roof except the parts I wanted to stay the lightest (the top and right side of the bumps), then my next shade N6 into the darker areas. Then the darkest shade N8 in the shadows of the roof bumps and the shadow side of the chimney. There's no special reason that I was combining neutral greys with a cool grey, I just didn't have a paler neutral than N4.

Next I coloured the walls of the cottage which I did in warm greys W1, W3, and W5. The lightest shade, W1 went over most of the wall at the front of the cottage except where the light was likely to hit, and the darkest shade, W5, under the roof area and to shade the very left side where the little room is on the end. The gable end would be lit by the sun from the right, so I only used a little W1 where there might have been a little shadow - just up under the roof. I used W1 and W3 on the chimney: W1 and a little W3 on the side facing away from the sun, and just a little W1 round the edges on the side facing the sun. This doesnt show up so well in the photos though.


Trees:

Stippling in some G21 and G24 over athe first layer of ink (G20)

I built up colour on the trees in the background by using about 6 or 7 shades of green. I took a very pale shade (G20) and covered all the leafy areas with a fairly solid layer of ink. Then I took 2 slightly darker shades (G21 and G24) and kind of stippled these colours over the leafy areas by dabbing with the very tips of the pens to make dots over the whole tree.





Darkening parts with G85, G94, G99

 Then I used the same method of stippling with a darkish green (G85) over just some areas of the tree where I wanted a bit of shadow. Then I took 2 even darker shades (G94 and G99) and further darkened some of the areas where I'd used the G85.



 

 

Darker areas blended in, and YG00 added for sun-lit parts



 After the G94 and G99, I went back in with the G85, G24 and G21 (in that order) and stippled over the whole area again to blend these darker areas in a little, and added some stippling in a pale yellow-green (YG00) over the parts that the sun would hit....this yellow really brought the tree to life.

I used the same colours and method to colour the tree behind the chimney, just added a little more yellow so that it wasn't quite the same shades as the 2 tall trees.

The tree at the gable end on the right of the cottage is more sparse and less bushy than the others, so I simply dabbed and dotted the various greens and yellow-greens on without too much care.

Not sure how clear this is in the photo, basically, I just dotted on G21, G24 and YG00 randomly over the leaves.

Bushes:

Next, I coloured some of the bushes in the garden, starting with the one on the left hand side of the cottage. I used various shades of green and yellow-green (YG00, YG03, YG63, YG67, G99 plus a dark grey to add further shading low down in the bush). I started by scribbling roughly with the palest shade over the whole of the bush, and worked down the bush using a darker shade each time in my trusty dabbing technique rather than scribbling as this won't overload the paper with wet ink and also gives a mottled rather than smooth look which is good for leafy areas. With each shade, I covered less and less of the bush. Then I did the same sequence but backwards to smooth the blending and deepen the colouring. Using the yellow-greens means that the bush is a different type of green to the tree right next to it, adding a bit of contrast there.

With the bush on the righthand side of the cottage, I used the same shades of yellow-green and green (YG00, YG03, YG63, YG67) to give another yellowy green foliage.  First I laid some YG00 over the whole bush, and as I moved to the left and into the shaded area I used the other shades over less and less of the bush, until my darkest shade was used only on the shadow areas. 



The Lawn:

I did the lawn in the same shades as the bushes as to me grass always looks yellow-green in the sun. I covered the whole lawn area with YG03, then added YG63 and YG67 to form the shadows that the bushes would cast over it.....for me, this gives a realistic look which is one of the first things the eye is drawn to





More Bushes

There are a couple more bushes on the left hand side of the garden, one to the left of the front door, and one at the far left of the image, both coloured in the same shades I used for the other bushes and the lawn. For the one by the door, I used the palest shade over the whole bush, and the darker shades as I moved to the left away from the light. I added a bit of pale yellow to the right hand side where the sun would hit it. For the other bush, the palest shade covered the whole bush, and the darker ones were used lower down where less light would hit the leaves.

Flowers

I added some colour to the flowers in the garden next. For the 2 tall foxgloves, I used one shade of orangey-red on the side facing the light, and a slightly darker shade on the left side where less light would be hitting the plant. The other flowers in the garden were coloured in pinky red, with a darker pinky red dotted on here and there so that they didn't look so flat. For the flowers in the planter under the cottage window, I used the same pinky reds, the lighter shade on the side where the light would be hitting them.

  

The foliage around the garden flowers was first given a layer of YG00, then some YG03 was dotted into that, and then green G21 and G24 were dotted in to darken. Any individual leaves on the bushes in the foreground were coloured with YG63 and then some YG67 was added for a bit of depth.

Details on the cottage

I then took some brown shades - E34, E29, E49 - for the wood above the windows, using the palest shade where the light would most hit them. For the door and planter, I used E31, E34 and E29, again using the lightest shade where the light would touch them. I can't remember what shades I used for the curtains, but I wanted quite muted colours. Two tips for details in this picture such as the flowers and the curtains: there is so much green in this picture, so use the complementary colour to green, which is red, to make them stand out and give maximum contrast with the greens. Other tip is to make the curtains quite a muted colour. Even if you imagine brightly-coloured curtains hanging in that cottage, they wouldn't look so bright from this distance...vibrant colouring would look wrong. If you feel the colour is too bright, try toning it down by adding some pale grey over the top.

Nearly done!

The path is simply some warm greys dotted on top of each other....the darkest shade near the door and to the left of the patch of flowers as it rounds the corner, and the middle shade at the edge of the lawn and borders as the foliage would cast a little shadow at their base.

I was at a loss to know how to colour the windows, as leaving them totally white was too stark. So although I am sure there is a better way to do them, I simply scribbled a little C1 over them in a diagonal scribble. Anyone with an idea how to do windows, please let me know!

The tree trunks were simply E31 and E34, with some YG95 added for shading (I like wood to be a bit greenish!).

Sky was added very simply with just BG000.

For a final touch, I used pencils just to deepen any shadows where I felt it was needed, such as on the bush at the right side of the lawn, and at the corner of the lawn where this bush casts a shadow.



The finished image

There we are! If you do have a go at colouring this image or something similar, I'd love to see it so leave me a message in the comments for my latest blog post, whatever that is, and I'll pop along to visit you.

Carole x

Putting a coloured aura round your character



Tilda with an aura

Hi all, hope you are all managing to keep warm and cosy in this snowy weather.  It's lovely to see the white stuff on the ground, but the shivering I don't like so much!

Teresa from Docrafts asked me how I did the glow around Tilda in my recent card for Fluffles Tilda challenge/Copic Creations challenge.  It's really easy to do, and is a step up from the grey or blue shadow that we all put around our characters.

You'll need your blender pen and your chosen shade for the coloured glow.  I find the paler shades easier to blend out: in the Tilda challenge card, I used YR000, and in this first example I used R00. 

 

Basically, I add some colour around my image, then use the blender pen to fade that colour away to nothing.  I work in small sections at a time (so that the ink doesn't get a chance to dry or else it won't blend out so well), starting at the lower-right or lower-left of the image, just above the ground Tilda is standing on, working up and over the image and down the other side, stopping when I get to ground level.  If you start at the top, you'll get a 'join' in the ink where you began as that ink will have dried.





Blending out the R00



The finished image

Another way of achieving this look, but without the fiddliness of colouring around all the nooks and crannies of the outline, is to colour the glow onto plain white paper, then colour up your stamped image, cut it out and stick onto your coloured glow background. 

You don't have to do a whole aura glow, you can simply put in a fuzzy version of a shadow round your image, by just adding your grey shadow as usual, then using your blender to fade it out to nothing.  This gives a nice subtle edge to your shadow around your character.  Again, work in small sections at a time so that the shadow doesn't dry, or else you won't be able to blend it out very well.

B63 blended out as a shadow

B63 used to make an aura

This does use a fair bit of blender ink, so make sure your pen is full or have a spare marker handy.  I ran out of ink AGAIN during the colouring of the first example, hence my tip in my last post.

Have a go, and leave me a comment or a link to your coloured image or card, I'd love to see your results.

Happy colouring!

Carole x

Colouring faces - a simplified version

Afternoon all.

As promised, here is a second post about colouring faces, this time a more simplified version. If you find that the fully-blended method shown here makes your ink bleed a lot, or if your paper isn't the best, then this method might suit you better. This quicker method will cut out some of the blending steps, which will reduce the likelihood of your ink feathering over the line. We're using the same shades as before - E000, E00, E21 and R20. Rather than starting with your lightest shade and getting darker with each marker, we're going to apply the shading first and work up to the lightest colours. Usually, I wouldn't recommend using your darkest colour first as it is harder to blend a lighter colour into it, but with faces you are using such pale shades anyway that it won't make a difference.

Click on the photos for a bigger clearer view.

So, take your darkest colour (in this case E21) and apply to the areas where you want a bit of shadow - under the fringe and down the sides of the face:

Then take your midtone (here I'm using E00), and colour over the shadows, taking the colour further into the face, using small circles to get an even coverage:

Next comes your palest shade, your highlight (in this case, E000) - go over the entire face, again colouring in small circles to get even coverage and to blend well with your previous shades:

While this ink is still wet, take your cheek colour (I'm using R20) and just lightly dab the point of the marker into the wet ink so that it feathers out a little:

Then, go back with your E00 and your E000 over the entire face but especially over the cheeks to feather that R20 out a little more to get a nice rosy glow rather than a hard line of pink colour (alternatively, you can just use the E000):

Finally, if you like, add 2 or 3 dots with a white gel pen on the cheeks to draw the eye and give that finished look:

So, why do the fully-blended method rather than this quicker one? Well, if you look at the last photo, which shows on the left the fully-blended Tilda face and on the right this quicker colouring method, you might see the difference. I think the fully-blended face has more depth due to the extra layers of colour I laid down. It comes down to preference - I like lots of colour and richer colours, even in skin tones, but I'd still use the quicker method if I wanted a paler complexion to my little character. You might feel differently and prefer a lighter coverage. So, I hope you find one of these methods useful in your colouring.

Happy colouring!

Carole x

Colouring faces

This post is showing one method of colouring faces on character stamps. It's worth learning how to do faces as they are the first part of a finished image that your eye is drawn to, and your attention is held here more than anywhere else, which means that you can get away with less than perfect colouring elsewhere if your character's face looks good.

There are probably many ways to colour a face, but this method works well with stamps like the Magnolia range and simple characters, and is a good basic technique that you can adapt for more complex images when you're more practised. It lays down the different shades in sequence, fully blending each layer with the last each time.

All the pictures are clickable to get a bigger and better view.

You'll need 3 skin tone colours, one very pale for highlight areas, one a little darker as your main skin tone, and one a little darker still as a shadow. You'll also need a pink or yellow-red pen as a cheek colour. In this example I've used E000 (highlight), E00 (midtone), E21 (shader) and R20 (cheeks).

These are the shades I'm using:

I use my palest shade (E000) and go over most of the face; I don't go all the way up to the outer line as a way of reducing the likelihood of the ink feathering:

I take my midtone (E00) and use it over the 2 sides of the face and the forehead:

Then I use my palest shade (E000) and go over the whole face again to blend in the second colour (again, I don't go right up to the black line):

Then with my darkest shade, the E21, I apply some shadows: under the fringe and down the sides of the face:

Next, I go over the face with the E00 and the E000 again to blend in each colour:

The next step is to add the cheek colour: I just dab the marker lightly over the cheek area while the E000/E00/E21 are still wet - this will cause the R20 to bleed into the wet ink and give a nice blurry edge and avoid that unnatural 'painted doll' look. I had to break for a minute to take this photo, which allowed my ink to dry too much and so you can see on the right hand side where the dabs of R20 didn't blur very well. Usually, I would have done this quick enough:

Then, I go back over the face with E00 and E000 again to blend in nicely, covering the same areas with these colours as I did before; this makes the cheek colour more subtle and disguises the harder lines of some of those dabs of R20:

I thought the image needed a bit more shading, so I went back and put in a little more E21 to darken the shaded areas a little, then finished up by a final layer of E000 which I took up to the edges of the face:

As you can see, this method is laying down a lot of colour so you are at risk of the ink feathering over the black lines, and this photo shows some of the skin colour has bled into the collar. The 2nd photo shows the ink being pushed back using the Blender pen.

This is the finished result - the feathering has been corrected, and I've used a white gel pen to put dots on the cheeks which draw the eye in and just finish the face off:

This method makes the most of blending all the colours well. Tomorrow, I'll show a simplified version of this method which will reduce the risk of feathering.

Happy colouring!

Carole x