Two Adult Drawing Pages

The second of three posts for today.

I have done a couple more adult drawing pages, both downloaded from here.

I wasn’t that thrilled with the first one, to be honest – not such an interesting picture, and I did it with coloured pencils which didn’t come out very bright. Being poppies, I think I would have done better to use my Sharpies to get more intense colour.

Here is the original printed drawing.

This is what I did with it.

The second one, however, I was very pleased with. For starters, I much preferred the picture, which had lots of potential for shading and different colouring.

This time I decided to use my Inktense pencils, which, true to their name, have intense colour. Being ink, once dry, they do not run and you can add more layers on top if you want, without re-activating what you have already done. Not that I did that in this case, though. I love the way they blend so well together with the application of a little water on a brush. They are quite sticky and waxy to use, and don’t run on as smoothly as regular coloured pencils and I certainly wouldn’t use them if I wasn’t going to add water afterwards. Adding water with the brush reminds me of another favourite childhood activity – magic painting! Who remembers that (or am I giving away my age!)… You had a greyish looking page with outlines drawn on it, and you would paint it just with water, and the colours would spring to life!

If you look carefully, you can see that I added some lines to the drawing, to make the trellis weave over and under, and added some little nails to hold it together! I think that makes it look better, particularly with the shading.

For the butterflies, I used a combination of Twinkling H2Os and Perfect Pearls. I bought a couple of little packs of the former at Hobbycraft recently and hadn’t yet tried them. Frankly I was a bit disappointed, after reading raves from people about them online. For starters, the packs I got seemed only to have pinks and browns in them which wasn’t terribly useful for butterflies. When I started using the Perfect Pearls instead, I think I was getting more intense colour and more shimmer from them than from the Twinklings, which surprised me a lot. Maybe I need to experiment further.

After I’d added the shimmer colours to the butterflies, I went around the outlines again with a permanent black marker because some of the lines had become indistinct where I’d gone over them.

Anyway, I was very pleased with the results – the butterflies are really shimmery! They stand out in contrast against the background. Of course, most of this doesn’t show up on the photos, but I’ve done my best to do them justice.

I am having fun experimenting with different media for these adult colouring pages. I must try good old-fashioned watercolours, acrylics, mixed media, foiling, embossing, pastels and chalks… the possibilities are endless! One thing I have learnt, especially from my experience with the poppies one, is that you need to choose the correct medium for the picture, so that you do it justice. Soft, subtle colours do not work on an image which calls for bright, vibrant shades.