Amazing birthday haul!

My boyfriend was real sneaky this year. I have a wish list on Amazon with colouring books and while he gained some inspiration from it, he never the less got me no less than three colouring books that weren't on the list but that were really spot on with what I love! I must say I'm really impressed. Not only with his choices but the fact that he encourages extending my colouring book library that already occupies an entire - albeit small - bookshelf. 

First I'm going to talk about these two beauties. I'd never heard of these books before; they are illustrated by Korean artist Jae Eun Lee and it's always interesting to see what an artist from a culture with very different artistic traditions makes of European themes and vice versa. I was impressed with the illustrations; they depict very accurate renditions of artefacts, fashion etc and in one of the pages I even recognised the palace gardens of Sanssouci! The illustrations are drawn with a touch of the Asian attention to detail and delicacy that really sets them apart from other books. That said, they are not that insanely detailed as say Tomoko Tashiro's books, aside from all the detailed work they do have plenty of larger areas for adding gradients, shading or your own details. I always love that balance in a book. I also love how both books are based on the original stories that have very little to do with the Disney versions. A bit of history and culture/literature lesson combined with colouring, can a girl ask for more?

The most awesome thing about these books is the versatility of the illustrations. In Beauty and the Beast, you will find interiors, costumes, portraits, fantasy creatures, landscapes, still life (food, beauty etc), flowers, and even decorative patterns. So no matter what you feel like colouring this book is guaranteed to have several pages to suit your mood.

In the Snow Queen there aren't so many interiors and rather more pages with animals such as deer and birds, and also beautiful landscapes. Both books are, in my opinion, pretty advanced. How about an entire double page filled with mirror shards?! Whew. But of course, like any book, this one is also what you make of it. I actually found my Pitt artist pens to be excellent in them, as the ink will make colouring progress quite quickly and the detailed bits will sort of create their own highlights and shadows so there is no need to overwork them with coloured pencil. But I do look forward to trying out my Polychromos as well!

The paper in both books is quite white but a little bit more ivory than in Lost Ocean. So it's a warm white hue. The paper quality is, thank Goodness, very good, Pitt pens don't bleed or shadow so there shouldn't be a problem with water-based supplies. 

Below I have videos of flipthroughs of both books. Enjoy!

 

The Snow Queen:

The third book is by indie artist Scot Howden. The books is called Colouring Fantasy and contains 24 images of all kinds of fantasy ladies: shieldmaidens, dragon trainers, mermaids, steampunk girls, fairies and so on. The images are fairly sensual without being too erotic. The lineart is more grey than black which makes it easier if you want to make them disappear under layers of colour. The only drawback of this book is the paper quality: it's an Amazon print-on-demand book and unfortunately Amazon only offers one kind of paper for anyone. So Amazon, will you please pay attention to all the artists out there so we can get books on paper that is worthy of all the amazing artwork out there? Thank you.

However the pages are single-sided so you should be fine with any media that isn't too wet because the paper would buckle considerably even with Pitt pens or Inktense used with very little water. I recommend coloured pencils for this book. 
For colouring inspiration I recommend visiting Scot's Facebook page where most of the gals in the book can be viewed as his original art. He really is a sublime colourist and I will so steal his colours! ;)

Here is a flipthrough of the Colouring Fantasy book:

A sponsored post... sort of! Mielikuvia vol 1

When I started this blog I made a kind of statement out of having purchased every item I post myself. I really don't mind reading sponsored blogs but sometimes I feel a bit overwhelmed by marketing that seems to be seeping into every corner of life nowadays, and I really want my little social media outlets to be a kind of sanctuary away from all that. Also I'm apalled by the widespread practice used by mainly Chinese vendors on Amazon who seem to blanket people with goods "in exchange for an honest review" and somehow I rarely find those reviews either particularly honest or very helpful. Marco Raffinés, I'm looking at you! 

The other day though I saw post from an indie illustrator I follow on Instagram, Päivi Vesala. She wondered if there were any people interested in reviewing her first colouring book as she's hard at work on the second. I really like her work so I volunteered to receive a copy from the publisher. So strictly speaking my blog is no longer sponsor-free, but I don't feel bad about spreading the word about an independent artist  - whose Facebook page currently stands at 540 likes - and hopefully this can't be considered to compromise my integrity. I would see no point in reviewing stuff that appears widely commercially, just for the chance of a free copy (although if Faber-Castell ever wants to throw a set of Albrecht Dürers my way I probably get off my high horse faster than you can say sellout). For future reference, all items presented will be purchased by me just like before - unless stated otherwise. Regardless of the source, my reviews will continue to focus on books and art supplies that are a bit unusual and that I don't see all over the place.

Hopefully this long introduction has left at least some people awake to look at the actual book!

Mielikuvia vol 1 comes with an attractive reddish cover and is spiral-bound, something that will please a lot of people out there. The book has 100 pages which means 50 illustrations as the pages are one-sided. Anthing else would have been madness because the paper is the one big drawback of this publication. I'm not very picky about paper quality - just about any paper will handle Polychromos well enough. But I do wish that more publishers and artists would pay more attention to paper quality, it would be a real treat if all the beautiful illustrations were brought to us on nice paper. There is not one colouring tool that doesn't perform much nicer on good paper! 

The paper in Mielikuvia vol 1 is not very different from printer paper. It's OK with Polychromos and Triplus fineliners and even handles Pitt artist pens without pilling the paper, which is impressive considering the thinness of the paper and the fact that the Pitt pens are rather wet and therefore can a bit difficult on low quality paper. All in all I'm OK with the paper but I hope for sure for an upgrade for the next volume!

The illustrations are lovely and right up my alley with a mix of quirky, imaginative and expressive images ranging from very detailed to very bold. Some pages are drawn with thin spidery outlines while in other images, the black ink almost dominates the design. On the Facebook page there are plenty of inspiration colourings, I especially liked this one with the little fleet of bizarre flying fish soaring very purposefully in the rain. :) Apparently Päivi is an expert colourist in addition to skilled illustrator! Definitely stealing this colour scheme for the future.

The above picture is from the Facebook photo gallery of the coloured pages in the book.

Here are some photos I took from my own copy:

All in all I'm going to have great fun colouring this book and am really looking forward to colume 2, here's a sneak peak from Facebook:

Open stock Inktense

So the other week I wrote a long post on Instagram on how I discovered that I could have gotten away with getting a much smaller set of Polychromos and never missed a fair few of my 60 set. The post got a much better reception than I had anticipated, it seems I'm not the only one who doesn't think it necessary to go and get the full set of every art supply on the market. I'm not judging, honestly, if it gives you joy and you can afford it, then way to go! I love seeing poeple's haul posts! But personally I take a more practical - and tight-budgeted - approach to colouring supply purchases and look at what I actually need and will use.

Having written that post got me thinking about my next purchase. Ever since discovering Peta Hewitt's tutorials I'd wanted to use my Inktense pencils much more, but I really felt the 24 was too small. I missed some nice greens and rich yellows, among other shades. At first I was glancing at the full 72 set but upon closer inspection I realized that it, too, containted plenty of colours I couldn't see myself using, and/or shades that were very close to each other. So I started looking around the open stock pencils on offer and in the end I purchased 18 additional pencils to my 24 set. So now I have 40 colours plus the black and the outliner. And I couldn't be happier! I got exactly the colours I want the most and don't have to pay for any I won't use. I chose some beautiful cool teals, warm yellows, warm greens and rich neutrals - don't you just adore the Red Oxide and the Madder Brown especially?

Here's a swatch of my current collection.The colours are quite accurately photographed, the paper is really this cool hue drawing paper.

I decided to store the pencils tip down in a round container. At the bottom I put some sheets of paper towel so the tips will stay safe when I put them back. This way i can conveniently see both the colour coded ends and the names - a necessity since Derwent doesn't bother colour coating the entire pencil. 

Another change I made was go through my Polychromos, pick out the ones I really didn't like and put the rest in a beautiful glass container that I decorated with découpage paper and a silk ribbon. I ended up with 40-something pencils which sort of pushes the boundries of the container but I make it work because it looks so much prettier than the big ol' tin! The pencils left inside the tin I'm using for a #rarelyusedchallenge where I colour a page using those very pencils I usually avoid! If you want to challenge yourself using colours you're usually not comfortable with, go ahead and use the #rarelyusedchallenge on Instagram to display the result! The contributions are starting to come in, I will also post mine as soon as I finish at least some of the 20-ish WIPs I have going at the moment. There are no prizes or anything, it's not a contest, just a thing to try if you need a little extra challenge in your colouring!

Sick Setup!

My injured foot is making it difficult to sit at my desk so I set up a colouring corner in the small couch in the craft room. I moved some lamps for really good lighting and fashioned a high foot rest. The most important colouring supplies were moved to the little table and a laptop tray serves as a book holder. It's super cozy and I have prime view of the TV where the LOTR trilogy is running in the background. Sweet evening :)

This weekend's WIP

Loving this technique where I lay down a base colour with the F-C Pitt Artist pens, then do some shading with Polychromos. I think my favourites among these pens are the light shades. They go on so smoothly and I rarely see such light, pale shades in water-based ink markers. And the best thing of all, the Pitt artist pens and the Polychromos are colour-coordinated with the same numbers and colour names! 

On Facebook there were some requests for a video on contour shading so I made one. Here it is:

Injury report + an awesome tutorial!

So I ended the Easter holidays with a nasty accident. We had been out shopping and I was in the process of putting the purchases away when I tripped, on what I cannot really tell, perhaps a shoe or my own feet - and crashed down two steps in the hallway. Somehow my foot got caught under me in a weird angle and I crash landed on top of it with my full weight and all the speed of the tumble. It was rather terrifying to lose control like that and fly through the air not knowing what the landing would be like, knowing only that this was bad. It felt like a rather long moment. 

When I landed I let out a primal scream that still today leaves my throat sore. My poor fiancé came running to see what happened and found me on the floor, shrieking. At first he thought I had injured my head as I was laying with my head directly next to the main water valve and he was afraid I had crashed my head into that big lump of metal with sharp things protruding from it. So I must consider myself very lucky that that didn't happen! 

Just some pretty to brighten this boring post

We rushed to the hospital where we spent a total of 5 hours, 10 minutes of which was actually healthcare, the rest waiting for the nurse, the doctor, the X-ray, the doctor again... Fortunately nothing is broken, it's "just" a nasty sprain of the foot between the toes and the heel. It is now roughly the size and colour of a largish eggplant. I was fitted with an elastic bandage and a pair of crutches and we could finally go home. (The doctor must not be into colouring because he didn't write me any sick days.)

This week I'm working from home which gives me a little bit more free time as I don't have to travel to and from the office. This is nice but that extra time is pretty much consumed by the fact that a bathroom visit takes 15 minutes - travel time only - and preparing a cup of coffee almost 20. My fiancé had the genius idea to move my rolling desk chair to the kitchen where I can sit and work in incredible comfort with my foot up on a kitchen chair. Also I can use the chair to move around the house, because honestly the crutches are a big health and accident hazard. Twice I have hurt my injured foot when I lost my balance on those demonic contraptions. 

Before he rushed me to the hospital I managed to instruct my fiancé to pack some colouring supplies into my purse. Just the same day I scored an adorable little pocket sized book called "En liten målarbok för vuxna" in my local bookstore. I took the 36 set WHSmith pencils, a blender pencil and a stump along with a sharpener. This is really the perfect travel kit! So I wasn't bored while all the waiting at the hospital. 

These days I'm not sitting at my desk so I'm not getting a lot of advanced colouring done. I just colour in my little new book with the WHSmiths and some fineliners. The ironic thing is I was just getting ready to start on Bennett Klein's awesome book Colour My Sketchbook when the accident happened. May have to postpone that a bit but better late than never! Until then check out the amazing tutorial for one of the pages in the book. Trust me, you need this tutorial in your life! I tried the outliner trick on another drawing and it really works wonders!

Tutorial to Butterfly Ninja

Drop EVEYTHING! Inktense pencils!!!

So I've had my 24 set Inktense pencils in my possession for a while. A while being a couple of years  - I got them for some freehand drawing, not having any idea what they were or what they did. Even after I started colouring I never really used them, preferring coloured pencils and Pitt markers over water-activated media. Then I saw this awesome video where the artist (who incidentally looks TEWTALLY like deNiro and has a very entertaining style to boot), tried actual watercolours in adult colouring books, among others a book I like very much, Color Me Calm.


This book did better than exptected at taking watercolours and so I decided to try out wet media in it! Also the Mind of Watercolor teaches an important lesson: you don't need to have the fanciest stuff to make great art. He paints a wonderful image on the crappiest paper using talent, hard work and patience. Something to remember for a shopaholic such as myself!
Inktense came in handy for trying wet media in my colouring books and so I started looking for inspiration which led me to Peta Hewitt. The Queen of Inktense. The High Priestess of Inktense. I cannot even begin to explain how wicked this woman is with this medium! Just look at her speed colouring of Coverack from the Magical City book.  Super awe inspiring!

As fun as the above speed colouring is to watch, the Holy Grail of Inktense tutorials is the video below where Peta explains all about the Inktense pencils: what sets them apart from watercolour pencils (quite a lot so you want this info before starting out with them!), how to manage the fact that they are permanent as soon as you wet them, how you therefore must blend your colours before wetting the paper and so on. This video is time well spent if you want yo get started with your Inktense pencils!

Last night I started experimenting with my Inktense for real. A point made by Peta Hewitt is that painting with Inktense is much quicker than colouring with dry coloured pencils. Another great pro for me as I often get frustrated with the pace I keep going through my colouring books. I half completed this landscape which can be considered my first try with Inktense.

I'm particularly happy with how the large trees in the middle turned out. My 24 set of Inktense has a really crappy selection of greens (of course I think ALL my pencil sets have crappy selections of greens! I'm just super fussy with my greens.) so I used some different colours to shade and create the illusion of some naturally occurring greenish-y colour. Then I realized the curly bits in the bottom left were... ferns. GREEN ferns. So the ferns are really crappily coloured as I was sick of the poor green selection in my 24 set and was equally tired of trying to blend a nice fern colour.

Then I did the next page with the cloud swirls, done in 4 colours. Here I used the technique where I touch my waterbrush to the pencil and then paint in one continuous stroke so that I get a beautiful smooth gradient from dark to light as the pigment dissipates from the bristles.

And last but not least this nature pattern mandala, also with just 4 colours. The photo shows the pattern before and after adding water.

The Waterbrush

I use the Pentel waterbrushes or rather the medium size so far, and for the most part I'm really pleased with it.. There are occasions when water starts flowing from the bristles but that is quickly fixed by dabbing the brush on a bit of kitchen towel. The water in the reservoir lasts forever and the bristles stay clean at all times, I don't have to wash and wash them to get them clean. Much prefer the waterbrush to a regular watercolour brush!

Paper Buckling

As you can see even the fairly thick paper in Color me Calm gets all buckly. But it still holds up for all the water I put on it and as Peta Hewitt says, the buckling adds character to the page :)

I think the images speak for themselves so if you don't already own a set of Inktense I highly recommend you place an order now! :)
(I think I should put a disclaimer here: all the art supplies and books you see on this blog are purchased - and photographed - by me. So it's all my own shopping and my own photos, I only write about stuff I have actually tried & I'm not endorsed by any manufacturer. So if I rave about something it's because I really love it, not because they sent a free sample) :)