Coloring Therapy Thursday: Volumes of Beauty

Hello, Blogger Buddies! I am here with another NEW feature that will be appearing this year on the blog....Coloring Therapy Thursday! On selected Thursdays I will share coloring projects with you, either coloring pages (including digital stamps) or coloring books. These will not be card projects, but rather coloring only. I have started to share with you some different tutorials and reviews about coloring therapy, but I really want to make this a regular feature of the blog. Let's see how we do!

What is coloring therapy? Much like other hobbies and artistic pursuits, coloring as therapy has the ability to relax your brain. Coloring induces a more relaxed state by reducing the thoughts of a restless mind. This generates mindfulness and quietness, which allows your mind to get some rest after a long or difficult day. Many therapists are now using coloring to help people with addiction, PTSD, depression, anxiety, and other mental health issues.

I have loved to color my whole life from my first 8-pack of Crayola crayons to this day with my many various coloring tools and mediums! (I still have Crayola crayons, but now I have the 120 pack! {smile}

I started this project a few weeks ago. You can read about the Work In Progress (WIP) HERE. I had some trouble finishing the piece due to migraines and arthritis, but I FINALLY finished up the other day! When I color a complicated image like this, I always feel a burst of joy when it is finally finished! 

My main focus for this project was to color it 100% with Crayola colored pencils! I really wanted to see how I could manage with budget pencils. It was really fun and I think the piece turned out very well, considering!

The digital image is called Volumes of Beauty and can be found on the Power Poppy site HERE. The finished panel is 7 3/4" x 6 1/4" and is triple matted with cardstock. 

There were a lot of techniques to tackle with this image! I had to Google the flowers to see what they look like in real life (Caladium and Peony). I also had to try to color clear glass and pearls as well as old books! And then I added a background! It's a lot! But, I really enjoy this type of "busy" coloring the most!

There are loads of different styles of coloring pages and coloring books available, as well as digital stamp images like this one. There are books at every price point as well.

The difference between a digital coloring page and a digital stamp is that coloring pages are usually PDF files and cannot be manipulated in any way. You just download them and print them. A digital stamp image is normally a JPG or a PNG file that can be resized and manipulated using your photo editing software. I can print this image at 3" tall or 11" tall and keep the same crisp resolution! 

Now, for the nitty gritty on the Crayola pencils! They did an excellent job! I was able to get nice colors by layering. These pencils do NOT work well with heavy pressure, but they do lay down well in light layers. I found trying to do the background a but problematic, so I resorted to using a blending medium (Gamsol) to smooth out the layers a bit on the background. 

I used the white Prismacolor pencil to add the "bokeh" dots to the blue background. The Prismacolor white is very soft and waxy and went over the top of the Crayola pretty well. I also used the Arteza white gel pen to add a few tiny highlight details.

Because the Crayola pencils are a hard wax pencil, I was able to draw on lots of details even after I had colored lots of layers. The veins of the leaf, for example, were drawn on after I had colored the leaf. 

I enjoyed coloring the old books and making them look worn at the edges. The lettering was not as successful, but the more I tried to fix it, the worse it became, so I ended up just leaving it. The bottles were also difficult, but coloring clear glass is always an interesting process. I am pretty satisfied with how they ended up looking.

I hope to be able to offer more coloring therapy posts each month, even if they are just works in progress (WIPs). I think that it is fun to see how other artists approach a picture, and to learn what mediums they use.

If you enjoy coloring as therapy, drop me a note below and tell me about it! 

Digital stamp: Volumes of Beauty

Cardstock: CutCardStock Squid Ink, Hammermill White, Pink unknown

Colored pencil paper: Bienfang Bristol Vellum 146lb

Colored pencils: Crayola 120 set, Crayola Colors of the World 24 set, Prismacolor White

Blending solution: Gamsol

Whitel gel pen: Arteza

Gold gel pen: Copic Atyou Spica Buttermilk

Dies: Spellbinders Grand Rectangles