Transcripts
1. Coloring For Adults - Introduction and Welcome: Hello, welcome to the basic skills and the wind per whelk of coloring as an adult. Amir in skeletal and shake it very personally and very sincerely trying to teach you accurate class to whet your appetite. I am showing you a couple of coloring pages that are collected from various books and that I've really enjoyed doing. And by learning some very simple techniques, you can easily also get these kind of effects and bring your pages to live. We're going to end the course by Jane, this picture that I've drawn in specially for you. And I'm going to also show you how to get this interesting kind of bulky effect in this class. I've drawn three pages for you to Color, and I'm going to share through very easy steps the way to do things like shading, crosshatching weekend could discuss different types of colored pencil that there are. And of course there are many different ways of coloring. You don't only need years colored pencil, but this particular class is going to be dealing with color pencil coloring. And I will create classes later to deal with coloring with watercolor pencils, coloring with markets. So I do hope you enjoy the class and please do the class project and please share everything with me as I really want you to enjoy this. And I want you to find that still place, that meditative space and that place that can help with depression and everything through, during our coloring and enjoying the journey into the world of color. See you in the next lesson.
2. Materials needed: We're now ready to discuss some of the tools and techniques that we are going to be using in the class. We can start with a discussion of the different types of colouring pencils there are. And then a discussion of some of the coloring books that are available on the market. What you will need for this class is some type of colored pencil, some sought of sharpener. I use an inexpensive sharpener and, and I always have a receptacle to place the pencil shavings into. So that adds up to hop up and down to the dustbin, any razor. And this is just an ordinary eraser. Or sometimes it is quite useful to have an Achilles artiste raises that are a bit like Apache. They help with creating highlights. If you don't have one, it's not essential. So without further ado, I'm going to start discussing the color pencils that you can use. There are an absolutely enormous amount of choices to use. And galloping also divided into various types of good student grade. And you get artist grade. And you also get Rackspace pencils and oil-based pencils and watercolor pencils. Further, this class we came to use any color pencils you can get your hands on, but not water-based. So any we're not going to activate them with water. So i would choose either a student or an artist grade. What is available in the student grade and less expensive or Crayola color pencils. And they come in a huge variety of colors. I've I taken mine out of the container, they arrived in and put them into this little sheet. These are all the different colors of Crayola. Then you can get also student grade by fair, but still, these are not terribly expensive fabric Castile classical pencils and they're really good color pencils. I use mine fairly often. You can create great things with them. And both of those brands, Crayola and favor Castile classic or not terribly expensive, came up to the medium price range. You get teaser colored pencils and they come in with trade with three layers of colored pencil book. See, that's a fairly flimsy thing to separate them. So I would put this to let students grade. And then getting up a little bit from that, you get very nice Blick Artists, colored pencils, but still not as expensive as the professional ones. They come in is 726. These are beautiful pencils. And then you get in the professional artist grade, you get an oil-based colored pencil and cooled Faber Castile polychrome emirs, polychrome layers, or polychrome mass. This is a big a 126. There are circulated foam, comes in three layers. I'm not going to change your bottom line, ours now. And they are really lovely pencils. And then you get also my personal favorite, the PRISMA color, which are Rackspace pencils. And they got a 172 sij there come in. A 150 is the largest said. And then I have, I think I have a 150. This is my backup set of actually got others that I use in a working pencil case. And then there are very many other brands as well. But if you are going to be buying color pencils, especially for this class, and you want to get a good student grade, I would suggest the teaser or the vapor Kate Stone classic. If you can go up a little bit in price, avid suggests the Black Studio pencils. If you want to invest in artist grade, I would first start coloring and seeing whether you like using a light hand or a heavier hand. Because people that use a heavier hand tend to prefer the polychrome farmers and people with a larger hand tend to prefer the prisoner color. And it really does become a personal choice. You can by birth the polychrome us and the prisoner color in as small as a twelv sit or individual pencils. So that's also an option to go with. So next we are going to discuss the different coloring books that are available. And I'll see you in the next class.
3. Coloring Books and Pages: One of the first coloring books that was printed for adults that I think actually settle for the whole craze was by Johanna basket. And that was the secret garden. I have the artist's edition of this, so it doesn't have all the pages. But it is a really beautiful book that's one of the pictures of coloured in there. And it comes with very nice paper. You can see beautiful pages to color. A Johanna best-fit has subleased a number of books and other one appears is IV and the Incubator fly, which is covering book printed on very nice paper. And it comes with the story picture that I've colored. Another picture that I have colored. And it's a really pretty book. She has a lot of folks in the buying of coloring books. She is an artist that I would highly recommend. Then there are a number of what I would call generic type of coloring books available. This is one such, and this is a bible based coloring books. Ed's got a couple of quotes and viable VS, and then pages to calories. Well, I haven't done much in this picture. I've done another one in there. It's on fairly nice paper, but not as good as Johanna best-fit ones. Anthem publishing publishes these beautiful magazines called coloring heaven. And each month they feature a different artist. And if you can get today usually available in the stores in England, I know they're readily available even here in South Africa. You can sometimes get them in America. You can get them at Barnes and Noble. I'm not sure about in Europe. Printed on not very thick paint, but, but it actually is lovely to color and this is one of my favorites. There's a picture of Dan from that. And this is the artist is can occur. The Goos are dark drama by Hannah Carlson or daydreams is another book that I would highly recommend. She's a Swedish artist and has the most delightful style of illustrating. You can buy her books at Amazon as well as various other places. Published under the creative haven titled whoever publishes a huge number of budget Frankie coloring books on fairly nice paper. And I'd suggest you look into them. You can also buy PDF copies of various pages, and I bind mine often into a book using either wire or plastic binding coils. I also enjoy having these books with various artists. I will put links to some of the artists I enjoy it and it's the shops where you can buy a digital pages. And normally mark on the back of my page paper I've used and which artists the picture is from. And can also use a binder of some sort and plastic sleeves to stall your completed pages in. I like digital files because you can print on whatever kind of paper you would like to. So you can use the paid, which is suit a particular coloring medium that you are using. There are also artists that give away free pages legally to you so that you're not breaking copyright. So that's also an option. We'll be discussing different types of paper that you can print your coloring pages on. The next video. This is your first project page, and this is your second project page which you'll be working on.
4. Discussion of papers to print your coloring pages on: There are many different papers when you've bought a PDF copy of an image from an artist that you like, and you want to print it, and it's quite tricky to decide what to choose. There are so many different types of paper available. And it is always best for coloring to choose paper with the little bit of what is called truth. If you buy paper that just come straight from the like that you reduce your printer. It is really thin. And although you can use it, it doesn't allow you to actually add many layers and make things like shading and the sort of thing that you've, you can do on beta paper you again to look for paper with what is called a tooth. And that means that paper comes with hills and valleys. And as, as you colors so you fill in the hills and valleys and you lay the truth fledge and adjusted allows the paper to accept more layers than normal thin papers is able to do. I'll give you some suggestions overall, if you choose a Bristol paper with a vellum surface, that is good. Strathmore Bristol paper. This one here is Bristol and its heavyweight. But it says smooth surface, sir, I have used this occasionally, but I tend to use this move from Marcus. You would buy Bristol a nice heavy weight, 300 grams, or you could get less, doesn't have to be that heavy for coloring, but you would look for vellum surface that is different to fail him paper, villain paper is actually made from calf skin and is see-through and stuff. But valence surface on Bristol paper, you could buy yourself a normal sketchbook, but this paper is fairly nice recoloring. It's blemish, but it's okay. It's not my favorite. A very good coloring flavor is by Strathmore. Strathmore says colored pencil paper. And this is in Ledger size and it comes perforated. And this I will hold it close to the camera and I'm not sure if you can see that it has a pitch more texture to the paper, not a load of texture. That's quite expensive, sir, Another thing that one can buy is a ream of paper and look for a general. So I've got what's called Altera worked and it's basically an uncoated paper. And this one is occurred actually remember advocates 200 GSM quite thick and that works very well for colored pencil. And that is in South Africa, such as basically an uncultured wide and in, from Amazon at GARCH Spring Hill digital. And that says a vellum Bristol covers. So basically if you put into your search engine, vellum Bristol covers stock, you look for anything from 80 pounds, 170 to 200 gs m. Then you would have a very nice paper to use for your printing. Just to add some tips for printing on your own paper. If you do print from your computer, it's probably best to print from a pdf file, as the format is easy to print on any printer and you can make it fit to your page. A laser printer is usually based, especially if you're using water media, because an inkjet can smudge. Most coffee shops use laser printers. But if you only have access to an ink jet wet a little while after you've printed before you start coloring. I sometimes lay a pillar slip or an handkerchief over the image and iron it just to try and sit the ink and try and choose the settings so that the printing is not too heavy. Said the printer to something like draft quality. If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to ask older, I'm not an expert on printers. I usually check my PDF files up to the coffee shop. I do find that as based.
5. Coloring technique no 1 - to and fro (up and down): We're now ready to start with our basic pencil techniques. Look at these gorgeous, lots of lovely pencil colors in calving there just a few basic mark making techniques freely. And everything else is a variation on a theme. To start with, we're going to use the basic to and fro coloring technique, which is simply moving the pencil up and down or backwards and forwards with art lifting it off the paper. This is how many of us learned to color when we were children. When using this or any coloring technique, the amount of pressure used on the pencil makes a difference. So let's start with a light pressure. This is you pressing with minimal pressure onto the paper, but enough to get some amount of pigment down. If you struggle with showing enough restraint to get a nice light layer down, I recommend you hold your pencil. Epa is higher on the shaft towards the back of the barrel. This makes it more difficult for you to press harder and therefore easier to get a light coverage and a light pressure on the paper. Moving your hand down the barrel of the pencil towards the tip allows for a heavier pressure, getting more pigment down on the page. You'll notice that I'm now going over the lower area of the sleep over that first light layer of color. This is called layering, and we'll deal with it more soon. It helps create a smoother and more blended effect. Also deciding to only count towards the base of the lead allows some gradation of dark to light and allow us to look more interesting, looking at the leaf as it now stands, there's a distinct line between the dark and the light areas. And now I want to blend that art. I'm still using the to and fro up and down method of coloring, but are now holding the pencil at an angle and use of the side of the nib instead of the chip and likely King over the whole leaf, again. Looking at it with a darker interesting effectors more or less been blended outside aside to just use a little bit more hard pressure and add a slight extra layer of this darker base area to the leaf. Now it's your turn to practice the to and fro or up and down method of coloring. Choose any color pencil you like. It doesn't have to be green. And practice your layering a pencils and to and fro and different weights of pressure.
6. Coloring techniques no 2 and 3 - scumbling and flicking: And so now on to our next pencil stroke, which is called Stumbling. It slightly more sophisticated, them coloring back and forth and to and fro. And it's very reminiscent of those long continuous ee loops that are used to make when you started learning to do cursive writing at school. If you put enough them close together and overlapping them, then you have a great way to pull the page C just like that e, and then you make them smaller and go closer and closer together. So now I'm going to be using this method, coloring another leaf, but I'm also stepping up the anti-electron for it and making the next leaf in three colors. I've chosen a dark, medium and light. So starting with the light green, I've start with a very like layer of to and fro, just putting a very light layer over the whole leaf to make a bit of wax there. And then I start likely skull bling. And you can see I've moved my hand forward again, so it's in the middle of the pencil barrel at it's just likely scrambling over that leaf and filling in the whitespace. And if you remember that our paper has got texture 2D and we want to fill in all the valleys of the tooth of the paper completing the first like layer and ready to start the second layer of shading using the medium green pencil, I'll be using the scrambling technique as well as a little bit of to and fro. And the aim here is to get a smoother transition between the light and the dark. And start again, just doing a light to and fro to give myself a bit of a shape and to get into the lines. And then the basic scrambling just seems to flow out of my hand. It's a very natural way to color and you'll probably find that you do both of these methods of coloring without actually even realizing that's exactly what your gene called scrambling. So we go over the light green with this medium green. And you'll notice my hand has gone down to the edge of the barrel of the pencil so that I can press a little bit harder as I want to fill in the truth of the paper. And now I'm going to use a different stroke called a flicking stroke, which is like a line. And you put your pencil down on the paper and then you flip it up. And I just do this to help blend the two colors together to try and stop that line. Also, the leaf has occurred and my flick is sought of following that curve just helps to give movement through that leave. Using the pale green and likely flicking down into the medium green lines that first flicked up. And I'm doing a mixture of scrambling and up and down. Whatever feels comfortable in my hand. Having got that to my satisfaction, and I now bring in the dark green as you bring the darkest chapter to the base of the leaf that have decided to shape the sleep. One can do shading slightly differently act, we will be doing a class on that. I'm now going to introduce my magic white pencil, white PRISMA kinda pins or is one of the best tools you will have in your coloring arsenal. If I use this to shade over night shade, to blend over everything that I've done already. I would really suggest that you purchase a white prisoner Calla pencil if you are enjoying coloring, we'll be talking more about it when we get to the class on blending. But you can see how it brings it all together. And a final layer we're going to do with our pale green pencil just to brighten it up a little bit. And I think that looks very nice. So I would encourage you to try this method with the three pencils and the scrambling with a little bit of flicking and a little bit of to and fro on one of the leaves on your worksheet. Enjoy doing it. And if you don't have a white PRISMA Colombian soil, try any white pencil.
7. Coloring techniques no 4 and 5 - hatching and stippling: There are two more artistic techniques that we're going to use in our coloring. And the first of these is called hatching, which is just straight lines. And then if you go in the opposite direction, it's called cross hatching because it goes across. You can do these wide apart, are close together or small. And these, this technique can be used for shading, is used most often when people do sketching or charcoal drawing, but occasionally used in coloring. The other is courts pointillism or stippling. Stippling is what you're doing when you are creating tiny dots. And the idea comes from an artistic technique called pointillism and a French painter called George so rat and also Paul SR. This one is by Paulson yak, doesn't always dots and I thought you would like it. And it's a great technique to sometimes add to your coloring pages just to add some interest and some texture in what you're doing. All of these techniques that we've been learning are used together to create a coloring page that shows lighten shade. And the reason we use different techniques there's often to create texture. And a lot of what is important is shading and allowing light to show such a leave light areas when you're coloring it, just the hatching used in the hair here. Next up, we're going to be talking about layers and blending.
8. Discussion of Color: Before we get onto layers and blending, just want to have a quick chat about color that is such a huge subject that it can actually take an entire course all on its own. So there are many YouTube videos dealing with color and the color wheel and everything. And I'll put a link to a good one in the information where your projects are. But before we do that, I want to show you a color wheel. You can buy these color wheels. This is a small one. It's called a pocket color wheel at any stationary shop or art shop. And basically, the color wheel shows you the colors from primary colors, which are red, blue, and yellow, to the secondary colors which you will remember from your school days to when you mix blue and yellow, you get green. When you mix blue and red, you get violet or purple, whichever you want to call it. And then the tertiary colors, when you mix the secondary colors, you get the ones in between. When it comes to adult coloring of the use of the colour wheel. What I do is I take the color wheel when I'm wondering watch and what colors I'm going to college something in. So for instance, now I've decided I'm going to color this little flower in our practice sheet. And I want to make it reds and yellows. So I look at my color wheel and there are certain things that always work. Kelly's next to each other, which are called Analogous Colors work well. So I've chosen a palette here using red, red, orange, orange, and yellow, orange with mixed different, different Calibri and souls. I've got an old Lagrangian of going to Colleen. I've gone to favor Castile, polychrome and another Colleen and then an old Laurentia and what to blend with. So we'll talk more about the blending in a few minutes. But I've basically chosen colors that are next to each other. And analogist Keller's work very well. When you're doing things like flowers. They really work well together. And then if you want to add a background, it's often good to choose something in the opposite, which is called the complimentary color. So if I wanted to, if I did this flower now, and the reds and oranges, if I look opposite that red, that red is green and blue green. If I drew the background in either blue, green or green or a mix of the two. It will make the flour kind of pop art. Again, before I get on to the blending, I want to talk about affect that. What makes a picture interesting is also having a light area so that there's contrast. So if you look at these two leaves, this one is done in stippling. I'm gonna bring it up close to you. And this one is just done with a mixture of to and fro and scrambling. The leaves are curved. And if something is curved, if you look at my hand, the light, if I bring the light over here, the light is shining on the curved part of my hand and it's darker on either side. So I've lived that white and I've blended it into each other. So if I look at this flower, they are curving into the center. So I'm going to make the darkest area at the center gang arched towards light. And I'm going to leave the tips of these petals fairly light. I'm also going to bring out with the little dents are in the petal. So onto the next video, which is finally our layers and blending. I do them together because one kind of blends using layers at the same time.
9. Layers and Blending: Isn't it exciting? We've now reached the layers and blending portion of our lesson and we nearly finished this course. I'd like to say, well done to you for doing it so far. And I hope you've been enjoying yourself and trying out the various techniques on this practice sheet. I'm going to be using this flower to demonstrate the different blending techniques that are available. And I'm coloring each of the petals in the same way using different layers. My desire is for them to be darker at the base of the petal and lighter as you move upward towards the top of the petal. So too achieved this. We're going to be starting with this, which is the lightest color. And you'll see that I'm holding the pencil very likely and using very large pressure. And that even though coloring so likely, I'm still leaving some actual white spaces that have no pencil on them at all as yet. These are gang to eventually be our highlights. No. Okay. Okay. You'll notice that as I bring in each new color. So my pressure is also getting a little bit heavier, but really not very heavy at all. Where you see the little lines drawn in ink, there usually indications that they could be a fold and I find it helpful Ling Jing petals to color around those and to make them have a slight dark indent. And that brings the illusion of the light as if the petrol has folded back down there. You can see, especially on this petrel that I'm coloring in, it starts to look almost as if the quieter but is standing up out of the petal and it's giving the whole petal and more 3D illusion of stone. Left my whitespace largely open, but I'm starting to bring in little bits of color there. And I still use, as I said, this light pressure. I'm going to speed up the next layer of pencil and put on the topic more music for you again, because there is not such a lot that you can watch just by watching, recolor it in real time. It's just the pressure and watching where the highlights sketch lift. That is something that took me ages to actually realize what people were doing and how they're managed to create this illusion of 3D space and different raised areas in their pictures. Okay. Okay. Yes. So now after many layers that this flower is pretty well blended and the truth of the paper is pretty flattened. But when once you to have an even more blended look. So there are various methods of blending. The first one, and I'm going to do each petal in a different method. So the first one is to use a white pencil or the playlist color that you've used here is with a white pencil and suppress hard dancer with a heavy pressure and go over the entire pickle. Now on this picture, I've printed it in my, on my home printer. And sometimes the Turner, You can see a little bit of gray coming off there. Sometimes the turn a bleeds. They work very much better when you take the pictures to an office store and get them printed on a better printer. Mine is launch. Fantastic. Sadat's time quite Well. That's quite a hard white pencil. This is a Lorentzian. They're actually, they don't make them anymore. It's an old pencil. And then if you feel that that's gone a little bit, dao. You can, it has flattened the truth so the paper won't take too much, but you can very likely go over with a bit of your colors to brighten it up. And here, for instance, I would like to add some texture. So I'm going to do a bunch of hatching little lines. And in the darker colors. Just to fill that in and make that petaled look interesting. And you'll see that I tend to follow the shape of the curve of the potato. And we still have our little bit of white sharing and looking like a reflection. So that's the first row you can see because it's blended it slightly shinier. Next method of blending is to use Vaseline. You can use Vaseline or baby oil or any petroleum jelly. I don't know if they pulled Vaseline in all countries. So I always put a little bit on my finger, take a cotton badge. And either Nick have gotten us there, but doesn't want to have loads of the petroleum jelly. Put it on the edge of the cartoon bad. And then we've done that by now. By moving to this one. You use the petroleum jelly over the coloring and you can see how it shifts that pigment around on the petal. This one is actually even taken away the watch, but that I had there. So what's nice is you can use it to moisturize your hands again. The now again, I'm going to, with this one, you'll see I'm doing the darker bits on either side of the lines, which is giving the look to this petal as it's the middle of the Patrul is standing up. So I'm just adding a bunch more there as a little bit more of the orange there. They told layer. And there's that run furnished. Now in this one, I'm going to try and be careful not to shift the color onto the white. And you have various solvents that can be purchased in different countries that cooled different disease called odorless solvent. In many countries you get what's called gamma l, which is very similar to this. But even though it's called odorless, it is highly toxic and it's best to use in a ventilator drum and obviously to keep away from children. So I normally take a teen z, let me put the CIA a Team Z, budge atrophy or you need very little, oh, a little bit there. And then the two ways of applying this, you can use a paint brush. And it was this one. So I'm going to move from the light to the dark and blend in. And it works like magic. And it just melts the pigment. Now one needs to take k. You can see this is bleeding slightly over the edges. So when you do that, you need to take care not to be too on the edge. Clean the brush. I'm gonna leave that to drive a little bit. And then again with this odorless mineral spirits aren't going to use a cotton, but just put it in this marriage and came from the light to the dark and leaving a better light, leaving that bit of white there and allow that to dry. And then there's another blending solution available called Zai stage that is made it's called blending. What's weird existed pencil blend. It's made with staff about what word to use from a citrus things, it's still toxic, but suppose to smell better. I bought this one that's on a sponge. You can kind of see it's weight John Day. So I'm going to turn it upside down. And again, you can use either repaint, brush all your cartoon bad, and moisten the bad, or the paintbrush and gain to get this right on there and get it massively served in the stage. And then use that to blend the pencil. And this allows that pigment to soak into the truth of the paper and funded completely so that you don't have the little bits of white paper lifts and be sure to close your things afterwards. You'll see that this is quite weight on the back from all the solutions. So once they have dried, then we can just touch up the petals afterwards and make them stand out. We have finished this little flower now and we still have one more blending tool to share, and that's called a blending pencil. I've decided to carry these little berries in and I'm gonna make them blueberries again using an analogist group of colors from blue to lilac. And this is called a Rembrandt splendor. It's made by Lyra. You can get blending pencils made by all sorts of different companies. Do went PRISMA color. All of them make both what is called a blending pencil and burnish. And I find them much the same what they are basically made up of the wax core of the pencil with no color added. And one uses that to press down and press quite hard with a heavy pressure on your coloring. And that brings the pigment into the paper and fills the tooth of the paper. And often you land up with a kind of a shiny Look at the end. And then once the pencil has been all blended in with something like this blending pencil or a white pencil. And it has that shiny look. It's called burnished color, something like a berry. Which I'm doing here and then I'm going to speed it up. It's always nice to leave again, that little white area which will be your highlight. You can enhance the whiteness at the end by putting a little line with white job pin or what is called a postcard paint pin, which also helps to add to that white look of reflection, but it's nice to color with that as well. Making the darkest color at the edge and then going to towards the light. So in this particular instance, unlike with the flower petal, I'm starting with my darkest color and moving inwards towards the lightest because I weren't too move towards where the highlights came to be. But I'm still using very light layers. When I do something like a berry, I tried to make the alkyne H as dark as I can. Sometimes even use a black color pencil to give it that feeling of roundness and 3D. And you'll see with these berries and all the layers in a way they don't really even need more blending because the circular motion kind of moves the pigment of the pencil together and blends the colors together any way. But I'm going to be introducing this Lyra splendor, blending pencil to her now to show you how it works. Sometimes if you haven't use as many layers, the blending pencil shows more of a difference. But I wanted to show you how, what a difference it makes using the stock around the edge. You can see the berries now look round. I think this should have been cherries, but at asides to make them blueberries. So you can see that it has no color. Again, it's nice to sort of start towards the White, but I wanted to show you that sometimes it news the pigment slightly even into the wide. So you can see that that pigment is moving around and it's being pushed into the tooth of the paper. The truth of the paper is flattening. And often When's done this, it's very hard to add more color. I do still sometimes add a little bit over the top to try and brighten the colors up. But you can also see that the colors look brighter Of the blender pins. So I find, I have quite bad arthritis in my hands and I find this personally for me. It's sometimes pushing too hard and it hurts my hands. So I prefer to use a solvent if I use a blender or a use of white pencil and then go over it. But that is the use of the blending pencil. And I'm just going to quickly do the leaves on the stems with R2, much rhyme or reason. And the next video, we'll be doing the background, but I'd love for you to try doing some of these flowers and trying the different methods and using different texture and blending and basically having front, please share them in the projects. I am again using all greens, but a dark, medium and light just to make the leaf and little bit interesting, I could never bear to leave something, just just Dan. That's a good basis when you're looking for Kellogg's to do something is to find a dark medium and Latin a color, so that you can add interest to Bagchi again. And I finally finish up this little leaf with the library's splendid lender. Contacts all dried. Now.
10. Coloring Backgrounds: We're not starting about coloring a background. There's so many ways of dealing with the background to a coloring page. The first and most simple one is to just leave it as it is. And if the coloring Stanford period, proud and make its own statement. If you've been coloring for awhile and glad to bring your picture out a little bit more and make it look more artistic. There are various ways of doing the background. One can use many different media and Jane backgrounds and coloring books. But I'm just going to mention a few to get you started. The first and easiest is obviously to use the color pencils that you already have and color a flat contrasting background. During this can be fun and one can achieve a greater effect, often with the help of using one or other of the blending mediums mentioned in the previous list. Another method is to use soft pastels. One can by various brands, but the kind I use and recommend on manga and not expensive under state law, switch me a lifetime. I call it the background for this picture using various colors of soft PESTEL. I wanted to make it look soft and dreamy to bring the mood of the picture out. Favorite medium for a flat background is to use a postcard paint pin. These are acrylic paint bins and one can by various snip sizes. I'd recommend trying these for a black background or any other contrasting color to the picture that you have. I usually use a thin enough to go around the intricate details and a medium-size network for the rest of the page. If there is a lot of blank space than a nice fat would come in handy. I used to post campaign to begin to do this black back ground. They in fact are colored pencils. One can use shading to make the background interesting. In this picture, I tried to portray the illusion of light emanating from the door. Whereas in this picture I tried to give the impression of soil and sky using shading. One of the methods that's become very popular lately is to use this bulky effect, spelled B, k, h. This is actually a photography effect and it uses light, but people give this illusion in the coloring. I've done. So in this picture that I've drawn for you to color, I'm going to show you a very, very simplified version of doing Berkeley in the little flower image that we did earlier. On my YouTube channel, I've got a playlist of various easy backgrounds and you'll find the link to this playlist and the information about the class with projects of to start with, I use a stencil that got various sizes of circle. And then I'm using the painless to color that I'm going to be covering with to trace the circles. And I use various sizes and not all full circle. So to give the image of part of the circle. And the thing with doing about K effect is that the white cheddar playlist stands out in the foreground the most. And then. One can colors some of the circles in a very pale color of the background as well to give the illusion of different distances of lights and smudge genus. So I'm going to speed this video up a bit because it is simply coloring. I've decided to use the colors in the contrasting on the color wheel and the contrasting shade to the yellows and reds and oranges. So I'm using Green's and turquoise. And I'm going to be starting with the darkest color on the outside and working in and leaving the circles. And then trying to blend in a little patch of Kennedy semi-circles. Some games push a little bit, just music on and speed this up so you can get an idea of how I do this. I've gone around with all the k's blend suggests you can see it doesn't look great speech now, flattening the tooth with my white pencil using letters like blending method, you can see that there are lines between the various colors. And I want you to show this to you. So after I have used the white pencil everywhere are come in again with my bright green and our tape it over all the colors to try and blend that line away. You'll often find when you're doing a picture that it reaches what I like to call the atleast stage. And I feel that this background has at this stage reached that end. What one needs to do is use your eye more to decide what needs doing. So I'm going to be gained back with all the colors and blending them arch to gauge a more seamless blend. And this is where the use of layers comes in once again, as you can see, I've spit up part of this video of justice tiny teens, he wins the little square background. And you can see that the background takes quite a lot of time. So that's why if you looking to do a quick background, I often go for a soft PESTEL because that's a really quick background. And I'm going to be doing another class on doing soft PESTEL backgrounds on your coloring pages. And that would be something that I think you'd enjoy very much. I'm now using Vaseline to blend these credits together and to start shifting this pigment a little bit more. Gasoline at the end of the day wasn't actually the best blending method for this because it didn't move the pigment As much as I'd hoped it would. I then go over things again with pencil. So I first start with the payload turquoise to try and bring this in. But I was having a hard time and I've left this in, especially to show you because one sometimes just does have a hard time getting things blended, but don't give up because you need to look and see what's wrong and what was wrong there is that the dark color was too much of a line. So now I need to say that that in and lightened my stroke as I bring the dark color in more. So I'm lightening the stroke there. And it's already starting to look better. And what would have also been nice with this? One would have been if I had done more white circles. I wanted to just show you quickly because I feel as if classes getting quite long already. And so I wanted to give you a quick view of how to do a Berkeley background, but there is no quick way of doing it. Okay, background with pencils. So I've brought the dark in and I'm going over again with quite heavy pressure. And at the end of the day it all balances out quite nicely.
11. Final Thoughts: So now that you've finished, it's closer to hope you'll upload your pages to the project page. I'd so enjoy seeing each flower, pectoral leaf and background that you've colored. You may be wondering how you can improve your coloring even further. Well, I'd like to encourage you to watch various YouTube videos. I have a channel on YouTube and possibly join my Facebook group and various other coloring Facebook groups. It's through posting and sharing your work both with your family and online. On Facebook and Instagram and looking at other coloring that you get inspiration and encouragement. While you're looking at a few more of these colorings that I've done at various artists pages. I'd like to remind you to always only compare yourself to yourself and not to other people. Everyone starts our journey from a different place with different abilities and people Keller for various reasons. Many California mental health and for self-expression. You are wonderful and your work is an expression of who you are. In my opinion, there is absolutely no AGI, coloring and the, the beauty of a soul giving expression to them in color. Before ending, I'd like to mention that Shaquille share coloring pages anywhere. Please remember to mention who the artist is. Artist's work very hard and have quite a difficult time trying to support themselves. So we bought a page on Etsy or if you've colored in a book, please mention who the artist is or which from which bucket is. It's not right to share pages on Pinterest and download for free unless the artist has shared these generously with permission. I really hope you've enjoyed this class and if you have, please consider following me here on skill share. And I'll be uploading more classes in the future and then you'll be notified about that. Please do remember to share your lovely work in the project's. Thank you and goodbye.
Liz Wright, Colorist, Watercolor Artist and Singer
