Colouring - 'The Magical City'

Taking a look at 'The Magical City' by Lizzie Mary Cullen this week. I got my book as a gift, but as far as I can tell, Amazon carries it in most places.

I started with this page of 'Baker Street' or Sherlock Holmes, whichever way you want to look at it and found it to be a most enjoyable colouring journey. I really like the intricate line work and the overall design is first class. I started this in the holidays and enjoyed taking my time in colouring all those tiny areas. The paper is quite smooth and white, which makes it great for harder pencils and seeing as the harder ones keep a sharper point I found them a pleasure to use in this book.

For this delightfully quirky version of Bruges I used Crayolas and added some loosely drawn lace to the bottom corner as I simply cannot think of Bruges, but remember the gorgeous Belgian lace produced there.

Trying out the Prisma Colour Scholars on 'Amsterdam' below. I was not planning on buying these yet, but they were heavily discounted and hubby said 'why don't you get them?' I couldn't really find a good excuse (how hard did I try, you may ask?) so I did and although I have not done a whole lot with it, so far so good. They are definitely superior to the Crayolas, that much is obvious. But again, this smooth paper really likes the harder pencils. The wax from these soft ones builds up quickly on the slick surface.

I tried wet media on the paper and it worked well enough - seeing as most of the illustrations cover the whole page, a bit of wrinkling and buckling will go largely unnoticed I think. And it doesn't bother me at all.

For this 'Castle on the Hill' page I used Inktense and Derwent water colour pencils. However I messed up big time on the little stream and surrounding areas, and this was as much as I was able to rescue it and fix the mess. For now anyway. There is no glass for this to hide behind so if I think of something else to try, I sure will...but just look at that nice image to colour! Just looking at it makes me want to pick up pencil and book and colour the afternoon away!

I did add some dry pencil to this over the wc pencil layer (mostly Crayolas) just to add a bit of depth in places. Once the water media dries, the paper has basically no tooth left, so there is not a lot of detail one can add with dry pencils.

I'm busy on a few more pages in this book, so we'll revisit it sometime in the future.