Coloring Magical Sunset Sky and other techniques with Caran D’Ache Neocolor II

I have been a bit obsessed with coloring sky background lately. After a nice blue sky with fluffy white clouds from my last blog feature, I wanted to try a magical sunset sky with bright red, orange, purple and dark blue. I searched through my coloring book collection to find the perfect page for this background. The result was this “mice in a kettle” page from Daydreams by Hanna Karlzon. I do this often when selecting my coloring project. It seems backwards, most people I think pick the page then decide on what to do with it. What about you? How do you select your coloring project?

The media

The star of this show is Caran D’Ache Neocolor II. I absolutely love these water soluble “crayons”. This magical sky would have taken a million years to complete if I used colored pencils.

I also have another blog and video about this coloring medium, click here to read more about it. I highlighted some areas with colored pencils to create more depth. The other pens I used were Sakura Pigma Micro pen 005 for the mice’s short fur/hair and Sakura White Gelly Roll pen 10 for the star outline and the bubbles in the water.

The magical sky

As mentioned, the background is all about this magical sunset sky with shades of reds, orange, yellow, violet, grey and all the lovely blues. I am not sure if in real life there are stars with sunset or even a cloudy sky but I guess in real life there’s no mice in kettle sailing through the ocean either. So all is good, Let’s not get too technical with Astronomy. One other special effect I added was the horizon or far away land in black and a bit of water before the wave. I love this detail and it added more depth to the whole scene.

The mice

I find coloring animal furs difficult and I am still learning. I could have made the mice soft cuddly creatures like in fairy tales but in this case, somehow the real life mice with short black hair better fit the mood. I used the finest Sakura micron pen #005 (extra fine) to draw the hair. To make it realistic, you need to have the fur go outside of the line drawing. Real life mice don’t have outlines.

The waves

I repeated the colors of the sky in the waves. The water closest to the far away land got the red/orange reflection but as you moved farther away, I think it should be just the violets, grey and blues. The added touch was the bubbles in between. I used the Sakura Gelly roll white pen #10 to draw over the black outline of the circles and colored pencil to add some shadow to the inside of the circles.

The kettle

I did not capture the coloring of the kettle in the video because the technique is the same as the sky. I used beige, grey light brown and black neocolor for this and darkened the shadow areas as shown in the picture. Note that I colored the area next to the lamp extra bright with yellow.

The video

Here’s YouTube video demonstration for your reference. Enjoy and I hope it helps you in some way in your future coloring projects.

Happy Coloring!

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