Tuesday, September 23, 2014

Coloring With Crayola Pencils and Gamsol (and a video tutorial!)

Hello! I know I said that I would be posting more of my SSS cards, but I was really excited to make a few cards using the latest Studio Calico card kit Poet Society. The rest of my cards from the Life is a Storybook kit from Simon are very similar. I used minimal stamping and a lot of the papers and stickers. I didn't want to bore you with more cards from that same kit! So, we'll move on! :)

I love to color images for my cards, but I don't have Copic markers or fancy Prismacolor pencils, so I usually do my coloring in secret with my BIC markers and Crayola pencils. But I thought that I'd share this project with you guys so that you know you can use the products that you have on hand to mimic coloring with expensive mediums. Let's get started!


I wanted to keep this card fairly simple so that I could concentrate on the coloring. I did all of my stamping with Versafine Onyx Black ink. I got a little impatient and I didn't wait for my ink to dry, so I had a little smudging, but nothing awful. I just erased it with a rubber eraser. But if you're trying this for yourself I recommend hitting the ink with your heat gun before you start coloring!

Anyway, I just chose two shades of each color - a light and a dark. I use the darker of the two colors to do my shading around the edges of the gems and the lighter color to fill in the rest of the gem.

As for the Gamsol, I purchased mine at Hobby Lobby. It was around 8$ for a little bottle, but I used my coupon and trust me - this stuff lasts a long time! I bought a few different sizes of the paper blending stumps, but the #2 is my favorite. It is the most comfortable for me to hold and the tip is small enough to fit in smaller areas, but big enough to color in the middle of my images as well. If I were coloring in larger images I would use a larger blending stump.

I'm not an expert at coloring. I just do what feels right to me. You'll see in the video, but I dip my stump into the Gamsol after each gem. I feel like the colors blend easier the more Gamsol I use. I don't know if this is actually true, or just in my head, but it seems to work for me!



Thanks for reading! I have more cards to share with you from this kit in the coming days! Happy crafting!









1 comment:

  1. I love that you used Crayola colored pencils on this fantastic card! There’s a big focus on consumption in crafting, but we can create beautiful works of art with what we have on hand. I’m about to start a spending freeze and reminders like this are so necessary for me. Thank you for keeping your older work up on the blog!

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