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!

Colur along challenge!

In one of the lovely groups I belong to, the Daydreamers, there was a colour along event. If you own and love Dagdrömmar, you should definitely join this group! You can even join in on this current event as it will run for another couple weeks or so. :)
We could choose from two images and were given a limited, pastelly colour palette plus a couple of darker hues for shading only. It was quite a challenge because as much as I liked the palette itself, I had problems with both images. The jellyfish I wanted to save for a different colour palette, with more bright and aquatic shades. And the dragonfly isn't my favourite design in the book to say the least... I just wasn't feeling it for some reason. Also I have seen so many gorgeous dragonfly colourings, especially from Enchanted Forest, that I was certain I wasn't going to do it justice. 

The beginning of the project was a real struggle. I wasn't feeling the colours and it just didn't look right. To bring the colours together, in desperation I grabbed a chalky white pencil from the Derwent Drawing set and went over the whole dragonfly with it. It proved to be a vast improvement as the colours now looked much more coherent. Yay me! 

On the body of the dragonfly I wanted to keep the black outlines so after I was done with the white pencil I took a black pen (the Faber-Castell Pitt artist pen in size Small) and inked the outlines I wanted to keep back in. Here are photos of the white pencil and then the bits I inked in afterwards. 

In the bottom picture you can see how I coloured the wings as well. The whole wing was then covered with the white pencil but on the wings I didn't bother inking the outlines back in as I wanted a sortof see-through iridescent look for the wings. In the group some people did an amazing job creating real iridescent effect using colourless glitter pen over the wings, but as I don't possess such a tool I had to come up with a solution of my own. I think it turned out OK, especially for being a design I didn't much care for from the beginning.

The flowers proved to be another challenge. Making the "petaly" flowers pink and blue was sort of obvious but what to do with the round ones? At first I used a pale greyish green. To say the least this wasn't a success. The green colour looked so incredibly off next to the pink dragonfly and blue-pink flowers. In the end I ended up taking an eraser to the green and lifting off as much of it as I could without messing up the paper. Fortunately the paper in this book is really really good so I actually got away with erasing coloured pencils, haha. Also the pencil I had used came from the Derwent Drawing set which puts down a creamy coat of colour that doesn't scratch or burnish the paper so it's easier to lift off than an ordinary coloured pencil.

After most of the green was gone I used my shading colour, Dark Indigo, to add some definition to the edges of the flowers then went over them with the white pencil again. The double leaves and the little berry thingies were shaded using my light blue and the shading colour. At the end I went in with a silver pen and added some embellishment to the design (as seen below). It turned out really nice! I may or may not add a background at some point but for now I'm really pleased with the result. This project took me one evening and an hour the next morning plus the time it took to photograph.