Color choices – Inspirations are everywhere

How many times did you look at a coloring page and ponder what colors to use? I do that a lot. However, I find that inspirations are everywhere. They are all around us, we just need to pay attention. Here my dog Dexter is modelling a scarf that I knitted with lovely pinks, purples, yellows.

I then matched my coloring pens using those colors as inspiration.

I also make a color chart with these pens to make sure they are the colors I envisioned. Sometimes the colors shown on the caps of the pens are not exact match. So do up a chart to avoid surprises is great idea.

Step by step demonstration

I use Tombow dual brush pen and the blending technique I discussed in my previous post. Click “Tombow Dual Brush Pens – seamless blending tutorial” if you have not seen it yet. I want to show you how I varied the pinks and purples to create depth on the main flowers of the featured color art in this step by step illustration.

Step 1: color the top petals – my criteria is those that you can see the entire petals.

Main Color: #725, Blending color: #761

Step 2: Pick the next layer of petals – I picked those immediately next to the petals in step 1.

Main Color: #665 Blending Color: #761

Step 3: Color the remaining petals

Main Color: #636 Blending Color: #761

Coloring Book Review – “100 Glittering Mandalas”

I picked a nice Asian themed flower mandala from the coloring book “Relax with Coloring 100 Glittering Mandalas” for this project. I am not normally a big fan of mandalas because I don’t like to repeat coloring of the same thing multiple times. However, this book has some very unique designs that are artistically presented. The 100 Mandalas are grouped into 6 different themes:

• Botanical
• Slavic
• Celestial
• Asian
• Scandinavian
• Floral

All the manadalas have black background and some “silver” pre-colored areas to give it glitters although I would say the silver is more like grey, so not much of a glittering effect. The paper quality is very good. Unless you really rub hard with markers, there’s no bleed through. I have not tried it with alcohol markers though. I highly recommend this book if you like different themed mandalas. Here’s a few other pages that I have colored in this book:

Slavic mandala 1: Faber-Castell polychromos color pencils, Derwent intense (all the blues)

Slavic mandala 2: Faber-Castell Polychromos color pencils

Botanical mandala: Faber-Castell Polychromos color pencils

Inspirations are everywhere Challenge

Look around you, inspirations are everywhere. I challenge you to show me

1. a picture of what inspires your color choices
2. the color art that you create using that inspiration
3. include your name, social media link of your choice: Instagram or Facebook if you like others to see more of your color arts

Please email me betty@colorart.ca by December 15, 2016. Depending on the response, I will try to feature some or all of them in my future blog post and on my Facebook page “Color Art by Betty Hung”. One entry will be randomly drawn to receive a copy of “100 Glittering Mandalas” coloring book.

Happy Colouring!