Coloring A Fox

Good morning and Happy Monday everyone! It has been a long time since I have posted. My last post was in 2014! I have missed the blogging community so much. It offers a unique opportunity to share my interests in Art, Crafting, Sewing and Embroidery (among many of my other hobbies). I have decided to jump back in and see where it takes me. I am not planning on a specific posting schedule. I do not want this to start to feel like an obligation because then I wont have fun with it anymore. I will however try to post at least once a week. We will see how it goes I guess.

Much in my life has changed since I left. The biggest change perhaps is the wonderful new addition to our family. My beautiful 7 month old Abigail!

Among other things, I now live in a better town with an awesome school system for my kids. My husband now owns his own business. Which means he is working all the time. That is ok for the moment though. That just means I have time to be artsy uninterrupted!

In the past by blog featured sewing and mostly embroidery projects. This time around I will be posting about many different art hobbies. I will try to make it obvious in the post title what the content will be containing.

On to the fun stuff! I have always loved to color and the new trend of adult coloring has made me very happy. About a year ago I purchased a couple of coloring books. The first was from Michael's and I was too intimidated by the beautiful artwork to actually start coloring in it. Then I found a couple at the dollar store that I liked. I started a page or two and then got stuck. I felt trapped because I didn't want to start more pages before finishing the first, but I had lost inspiration to finish the first. So the books got tucked away and almost forgotten about.

Anyway fast forward to a couple weeks ago and I stumbled upon some Youtube videos that reignited my inspiration for coloring and other paper arts. The artists name is Dede Willingham. She is a wonderful teacher and has demonstrated coloring techniques I would never have though of. Moreover she is a big advocate of working on a little at a time over many pages with no pressure to finish one at a time. I just love this! I don't know why I was putting unnecessary pressure on myself.

So now I have started coloring again. The piece I am going to show you I started this weekend. It is out of a coloring book I purchased from Michael's (Fanciful Foxes) for about $5.99.

So here I started by lightly coloring some of the leaves in Jade Green. I am just using standard Crayola Colored Pencils. To achieve a blended look, I used many light overlapping layers.

Here I am prepping to paint my background. I am using acrylic paint that I will water down. I am using a rather good quality brand because I have it on hand, but less expensive craft paint works just as well.

Here I have put in my acrylic paint wash background. I decided to paint the wolf blue and some of the flowers pink. I will go over them in colored pencil later.

I then colored over the black background with a black colored pencil.

I decided to add white paint speckles to my background to create a starry effect. The paint did cover other parts of my page but it will all be covered up with colored pencil anyway.

Here I have gone over my leaves with 2 light layers of Pine Green. I have also colored in the background spaces in the lower third of the page in 1 layer of Pine Green.

Here you can see the difference between 1 layer (right side) and 2 layers (left side).

Here I have started shading parts of the leaves in Navy Blue and doing a final blend in Jade Green. I still need to complete the remaining leaves. I have also gone over the backround spaces at the bottom in Navy Blue and Jade Green.

For the flower centers I used Golden Yellow, Light Orange and Mahogany. I then blended them with a top layer of Golden Yellow.

I am not sure when I will get back to this, but stay posted for more Artsy fun! Be happy and stay Positive!