Color and Relax Saturday - Umbrella Girl

If you had a chance to read the blog during the pandemic lock-downs, you will remember that I had been doing a "Coloring Therapy Thursday" post, every now and then. Since I have started to work with some of my design teams again, I cannot always post on a Thursday, so...I will just pop up a "Color and Relax" post when I can get to it! These posts will usually feature coloring projects from coloring books or larger size coloring pages, not card projects.

Today, I want to share a coloring that I made last summer but never really had a chance to feature on the blog. 

The book is Whimsical World Coloring Book: Fairies, Mermaids,  Witches and More by Molly Harrison. This is the only book I have by this illustrator, but the illustrations are super cute and remind me a bit of Precious Moments drawings. The are very sweet and appealing, especially when I need a coloring "veg out" day! 

I think this is a self-published book from Amazon, so the paper is not very good. I scanned and printed the image onto Springhill White 80# Bristol Vellum cardstock, which has a bit of texture to it, making it great for colored pencils. 

I wish I had ordered the 90# or the 110# Springhill since I like a thicker cardstock for my projects. I am not sure those papers would go through my printer, but I will order one of them next time I need to replenish my stash and see how it goes!

Once I started to color I wish I had sized the image to be a tad smaller, since it is a big, children's coloring book sized piece of art! The book is 8 1/2" x 11" so the pictures are large and the line art is pretty thick. But, I love the cutie pie images, so I decided to keep going! 

I used Prismacolor Premiere colored pencils, the 150 set. The price is all over the map on these pencils, so check around for a good deal. I linked to Amazon, but sometimes they are not the cheapest place for these pencils. The set I have is old, but I purchased a second set in August 2020 for $90 and they eventually came down in price to just under $70. They are now back up to around $120! 

Note: I DO NOT have any affiliate links. I just like to show you where you can buy stuff! 

I am not a huge fan of Prismacolor pencils because they are a very soft, wax pencil, which is not my normally my choice of pencil. They don't hold a point very well, and they can be prone to breakage, but they do make it easy to add heavy layers of color and to blend colors together. 

I lost the list of pencils I used for this page, unfortunately. I colored this during our move last year, and who knows where I stashed my swatch cheat sheet! As you can see, I chose aqua blues and bright reds for her outfit. And I colored her to look like my daughter, so she has golden brown hair. {smile}

Once I had the little girl, her umbrella, and her kitten friend all colored, I decided to take a huge leap and try to add a background...of sorts.  I drew in the puddle, which didn't turn out too bad considering my vast lack of drawing skills.

I used Prismacolor NuPastel firm pastel color sticks (basically chalk pastels) to create the grass and sky. I have the 96 set, but I can only find the 48 set on Amazon for you.

I used a stencil made from a die cut cloud shape to create the clouds in the sky. I just rubbed the chalk over the stencil, and ta-da clouds! For the grass, I went back in and drew in some grass "spikes" with a green pencil, over the top of the chalk. I used a cotton make up remover pad thingie to rub the chalk onto the paper. (So scientific!)

I confess that the photos do not do this little picture justice. In person the color is very vibrant and rich looking. I had a lot of fun with the folds of her dress, too. I think it looks a little like velvet.

The only issue I had was coloring her skin with the pencils. I am so used to using Copics that using colored pencils for skin sort of threw me off my groove! I just need to practice! All in all, it was fun to just coloring something that gave me the illusion of childhood for a few hours!

I hope you can spend some time coloring something today...just for the fun of it! I will be back soon with more Color and Relax posts.Plus I will have Power Poppy images at least twice a month for you during Inspire Me Monday and The Blossom Challenge! 

See you soon!