Hello everyone,
My name is Colleen and I’m honored to be Guest Designing for Varada Sharma this month! Today I want to show you how easy it is to print and color digital flowers. I will be featuring the Wish You Were Here flower digi stamp. This is an easy, fun floral to color and it takes up alot of geography on cardstock!
I enlarged the image to 8.5×3.5 using Photoshop and printed it on Neenah Solar White 80 lb cardstock on my laser printer. Then I trimmed it down to 6×3 in size because I love to trim the edge of the flowers off the page to frame them nicely.
TIP #1: If you use an ink jet printer, let the image sit for awhile until the ink is dry so that the ink doesn’t bleed when you start to color. If you’re in a hurry, use your heat tool to dry the ink.
I colored the flowers using Copic markers in RV06, RV09, RV19, and RV66. These colors are vibrant and vary in shade from light to dark. These tend to blend nicely together. I started with the lightest color and moved to the darker shades. The darkest color was used for shadows only. I went over the petals a couple of times to get the paper nice and juicy, which helps me achieve smooth blending. Next, I repeated the process with the leaves using G02, G17 and G94.
TIP #2: Copic markers can bleed outside of the lines. To reduce the chances of this happening, use good quality cardstock, a light touch, and blend color while the ink is still wet so you achieve a smooth look. To test how the colors will blend, use a scrach piece of the cardstock and blend the inks together until you feel comfortable with the blending process.
Once my flowers and leaves were colored, I went back in with colored pencil in similar shades to add shadows. This REALLY helps to add dimension to your flowers!
TIP#3: I use two shades in the same color family with my colored pencils because it reduces sharp lines and adds shading naturally. Keep your pencils sharpened!
Once I finished adding shadows, I did some simple ink blending around the edges of the paper with yellow die ink. I left the areas closest to the flowers lighter so that they appeared to glow!
I finished with details – always remember those details! I added white dots around the stamins with a Gelly Roll pen, yellow Nuvo drops to the center of the flowers to tie in the yellow background, and gold shine with a Gelly roll to the tiny blue buds. I placed it over black cardstock base and my card was finished!
I hope that you learned a few tips to easy Copic coloring. To shop Varada’s release, click here. To reach my Instagram page, click here. For my blog, click here. I hope you stop by to visit me!
Hugs! ~Colleen
