A Day of Learning

Yesterday I spent a  good bit of my day learning a new technique. Well, lets say working on because I don't know that I can say I have "learned" it yet. I think it will take practice to become more comfortable with it. And, maybe it's not really a technique. I don't know - it is a . . . method? style? I don't know, maybe it is referred to as a  technique.


Anyway, what I spent time on was trying to color with my Copic markers to make the appearance of folds in the skirt of a Tilda. I signed up on a new Copic site, CopicColor.com, and after I set up my profile, loaded my Copic colors, built my Copic wishlist and loaded a few images of some of my Copic coloring I started looking at  some of the work others had posted and saw one that I was amazed by. I clicked the users profile and followed their website link to the Make It Colorful blog post where Zoe has a video tutorial on how she colors folds and pleats. And, there was a challenge for followers to make their own and since I loved the way Zoe made the Tilda skirt look so fluid I thought I'd like to try that. 


It took four attempts before I had a skirt I was happy with. One of my biggest issues, in my opinion, is my limited selection of Copic's. I needed a light, medium & dark in the same color family, and they needed to be close enough to blend well. Since my collection is still pretty small I had to try a few combinations until i hit upon one that worked the way I wanted it to. Here is my finished card with my cute little Tilda.

And, here is a side by side of the colored and uncolored Tilda's for comparison. Notice her skirt is rather plain. Normally I would have just colored her skirt solid and then added some shadow to indicate the light source. Until I saw Zoe's video I don't think I ever would have thought to try to create my own folds, pleats, gathers or other shape.

So, now to give you an idea of my progress through this process I will post the first three attempts - in the order they were colored. 

I felt the dark shade was just a bit too dark (not much of a photographer, so I have no idea why I can't get a n0n-fuzzy picture sometimes).

I thought maybe my purples were closer in values and would work better, 

but again, the dark was a bit too dark. Not only that, my dark lines were too shaky and would not blend out very well.

I went back to pinks, but this time I felt that my darkest pink was a bit too light. I did go ahead and color her on out, and I may still use her on a card, we'll see.

Of course I was also trying to work int he color families that worked with the DP I decided I wanted to use. Maybe this process would have been quicker if I had just determined what three colors I had that would work well together and then found a DP to go with it, but then again, maybe not.

Well, now that I have her finished I will post her in Zoe's Challenge #25.

And . . . here is the work-space where I was working yesterday - 

in my den and not in my craft room. 

I have a high-back chair in my den and I found that if I color a little and then rest my head back a little I can keep my problematic neck from hurting too much. So today I have more Tilda's stamped and waiting ion me. :D