Someone has to clap when I go by

It's been a busy week and I have been trying to fit in some creative time in between studies, work and other responsibilities. I do often grab for my WaterColoringBook when I want some color therapy and this is one of the pages I made recently.

The composition is made with stamps from VLVS! and I have used a lot of watercolors from Wanderlust Watercolors by my friend Kata. She does small batch updates and I bought a few LE sets from her last last year and am excited to be finally using them! This is the first layer of color and excuse the lighting, these were taken under the harsh desk light, but you can see some sparkle of one of my fave colors Winter Frost. I mixed it lightly with Cypruss green for outside the bell jar. I really love the shimmer!

To finish the page I added the text "We all can't be princesses, someone has to clap when I go by." and added some texture with the bubble wrap stamp. I really love how the page turned out and I lve the fact I can'just grab my watercolor pocket book and pocket tins and just color when I really need it. 

Stamps used from VLVS! are: 

Girl with Wings 

Bell Jar 

We can't all be Princesses... 

Bubblewrap Texture 

Playing along with January's challenge at VLVS! Isn't this mood board just gorgeous? 

And you still have time to join the fun as well :)  

Also entering:

Simon Says Stamp Wednesday Challenge Layers

Try it on Tuesday - Fire and Ice (love this theme!!) 

HLS- january watercolor challenge

Thanks so much for stopping by and have a wonderful day!

A Coloring Adventure: Faber Castell Polychromos review

In episode 8 of Art Supply Posse podcast Color Me Pencil the subject of, you guessed it, coloring pencils were discussed. As always it was a fun, chatty episode. I know the goal of their podcasts is to be inspired to use your own stash more, but through a comment in the episode - Ana of The Well Appointed Desk said in the podcast that these polychromos were on "time-out" for her at the moment- I got curious to know as to why that is and wanted to try them out. So I got a few of them myself when I was at Flockstra in Groningen (Pricing was 1,80€ open stock which was not bad at all!) and I picked out a series of blue hues to experiment with. 

At first glance and test they behaved a lot like my Derwent Artists Pencils, which are waxed based. The polychromos are oil based pencils though and do not have the "wax-bloom" problem most wax pencils have. My vintage Derwents do not have this problem either, but it's how you use your pencils that can create that effect. 
I love the fact they have a solid color barrel, like my vintage derwents have. Also, I know this is for the scanning purposes of the product in retail, but I really dislike the fact there are bar-code stickers on them. if you place bar-code stickers on them, do it on the back so you don't have the sticky substance on your fingers while you are coloring when you remove them from the front. Ok, rant over. And yes, at the end the bar-code stickers were removed as was sticky residue. Time to give them a proper testing.

At Flockstra I also picked up a Paint-On mixed media A5 pad from Clairefontaine which I wanted to try out. It's a sturdy 250 gms white card stock and I'm excited to try this paper with different media's to see how it holds up. For pencils it's also great, not too toothy, just the right amount of texture to build some color on. I drew a fantasy Zentangle Rose with my Pentel Tradio Pulaman pen and proceeded to color it in. You can really do some wonderful shading and blending with these polychromos for sure! I've created some in between blue hues by overlaying lighter shades on a darker surface and the lighter overlay does pop out. Also there is minimal smear and the pencil tips have not broken once (I applied smooth and even pressure while coloring).

And the end result was this. The colors really blend nicely and you can see how the colors pop! I think I am smitten! Also you can see how much of the color pencil I exactly used for this piece, I added several layers and did not sharpen them once. I'm sure they will last me a long time!

Now I already have a full set of Derwent Artist pencils which I am very happy with (you can see my Coloring adventure with them here) so I won't be getting a full set of these polychromos, but I could not resist getting a few more colors on my way back home via Groningen.

I picked up some green hues and colored this page from Tara McPherson's Somewhere under the Rainbow coloring book. I made copies of images of this book because I love the images so much I would like to have a chance of coloring them more than once. This was printed on HP 100gms laser printer paper. Though I preferred the 250 Paint On paper, the pencils held up good here too. Looks like my turquoise hues finally need to get sharpened :) 

Hope this review was useful for you and be of help for you in your own coloring adventures :) 

Thanks for stopping by and have a great day!

namasté

A coloring adventure - La Plume (Mucha)

At the American Book Center in Amsterdam I came across this Alphonse Mucha Coloring book by Pomegranate Publishing. And of course I just had to have it. But since I didn't want to color in the pages in the book, I bought some heavy duty printer paper at Van der Linde in Amsterdam (the Fabriano Academia paperpack 160gms suitable for inkjet printers) and printed a page which I scanned from the book, La Plume.

I used Derwent Artist Pencils, a caran d'ache blender and a faber castell pencil eraser for this project. I love these Derwent pencils, they have such beautiful and smudge proof leds. And with the blender the colors just pop and look creamy. Definitely love how the page turned out.

I actually started with it last year and gradually added color to the page when I had time for it. Showing you the process is a lot better than talking about it, so here is a slideshow:

See a behind the scenes for this coloring book on the Pomegranate blog which contains a free download from the book.

And check out my Pinterest with a few Mucha Coloring book pages I found via google search (La Plume is also on there) 

Thanks for stopping by!
Have a colorful weekend.

namasté

Querkles Coloring Adventures!

So another great activity book by Thomas Pavitte has been released over the summer and since I really enjoyed his 1000 dots activity books which I got last summer, I was pretty excited about this one!

It's a coloring book and it's based on 'paint by numbers' but more intricate. And it's called Querkles. I got the masterpieces book from the bookdepository.com and could not wait to get started.

I decided that it would be a great way to use up some of my fountain pen ink samples to color the pages with. I still have a lot from my past inkdrop subscription from the goulet pen company and from swaps with pen pals.

The first page is King Tut and thought a nice selection of browns would do the trick. I selected the colors from darkest (layer one) to lightest (layer 5).

The set up and see all the overlapping circles!

Layer one is done with Noodler's burma road brown

Layer two is done with Toucan Umber

Layer 3 is done with Pelikan Brown

Layer 4 is done with Noodler's Polar brown

The face becomes a lot more visible here which was a fun thing to discover.

The final layer is done with Noodler's Golden brown.

I was pretty impressed by this 'puzzle' and uncovering the whole picture by coloring it is awesome.

Though something bothered me (because I am OCD and nit picky maybe ;) and that is that not all circles were numbered and therefore not everything needed to be colored in. But I felt like experimenting further and distilled the Noodler's golden brown to a golden yellow color and colored in the remainder of the circles.

Which resulted in this:

You can see a bit of blending with the other inks but I think that gives it a more interesting effect. 

A close up

I am very pleased with the end result :) 

You can see the whole coloring process here.

My findings are that the paper in this book, like with the 1000 dots activity book, is very fountain pen ink friendly! There is no bleed through or ghosting and doesn't warp as much when using wet inks! 

So definitely a great experience to color with fountain pen inks in this book and am already excited to pick the colors for the next one in line.

If you like coloring and want something different than the coloring books that are already out there, definitely pick up a querkles coloring book :)

Thanks for stopping by!

namaste