Colouring - Escape To Shakespeare's World

One more colouring book I treated myself to last year was 'Escape To Shakespeare's World' by Good Wives and Warriors.  

I really like the smaller size of these books and the paper takes wet media and softer pencils well.

I really notice more and more that I have a serious colour problem : unless I preselect and physically remove a selection of colours, I will end up using every colour in the box.

Guaranteed.

I used Inktense, Derwent Water Colour pencils, Neocolor pencils (water soluble), and Crayola pencils for all the images here. Crayolas work really well on this paper

I thought it would be nice to have the ROMEO look like it was carved stone, so I drew in some extra lines to get dimension and added cracks and dots for a stoney surface. I also added black ink in the background. I like how the black background makes the colours pop.

A seascape, especially if it has a boat/ship in...well that is always one of the first pictures I will colour. This is such a great drawing!

Now for the unicorn I had thought I would add greens, blues and purples in the background all gently flowing into one another. This is the basic base coat done...and then I liked it so much like this that I decided to leave it. I may still come back and add more colour if I feel like it at a later stage, but for now it's staying like this.

As with all the other books that I have, I have multiple pages on the go at all times it seems. I'll have more to post another time!

Colouring - Escape To Wonderland

I'm still colouring in 'Escape to Wonderland' by Goodwives and Warriors. I posted the first batch of pages HERE.

Here's a few more pages - I've used a combination of water soluble pencils (Derwent & Inktense) and Crayolas for most of them. I find the paper takes water well, it buckles but not so much as to make the reverse hard to colour. I also find that I prefer the more waxy pencils for this paper. They seem to lay down better than the harder leads do.

This double page spread was quick to do with all the black ready printed. I will add a bit of glitter glue later on when the bumpiness of the glitter will no longer interfere with the colouring of subsequent pages. This stars will need some sparkle, but I would actually like to get my hands on some glow-in-the-dark paint for those.

A riot of colour. The only way I can work in a limited palette is to choose colours and then hide the rest of the box. For this one I just reached for whatever colour I fancied most at the time! I did doodle a frame around the text. Just because.

Tiny areas to colour, so I did a quicky with water colours rather than spend lots of time sharpening pencils

For this Cheshire cat one I was considering giving it a solid black background to make the colours pop. I still think a deep purple or indigo blue background could look really nice with this, but for now I'm leaving it as is. I doodled a basic banner around the text. 

With great effort I kept this 'coin' within a limited palette...

This one was fun to colour! Such a goofy image for a goofy concept - I mean do fish walk on their tails or do they hop?

I intended to lay down a wash of colours and then added pencil over top of that 'snakey Alice' but then I liked it well enough as is and decided to leave it. A sky behind might look nice though and it will hide the faint shadow shining through from the other page next to her head.

A great page for colouring. I like the perspective and the large shapes. Reading that line in a normal voice is almost impossible...

 I hauled out my ink filled waterbrush yet again for the background on this page. Love how it turned out. The black makes all those colours shine. And I used every colour in the box for this one. And then some. Including gold.

And so the fun journey continues in this and other books...

Colouring - Alice in Wonderland

Ever since I first read it, the stories of 'Alice in Wonderland', and 'Through The Looking Glass' have amused me (I cannot say the same of the recent, and few years older movies based on the characters - but I shall say no more about that here) What amuses me is the seemingly randomness of the connections and the crazy reasoning she get's up to in the stories. Reminds me of the sort of thing that happens in my dreams.

Naturally I was interested to try the 'Escape To Wonderland' colouring book by Good Wives and Warriors. I got mine from Amazon. And although I cannot say I like every single page, I certainly like the majority of them and am enjoying the process of colouring the story in sequence, which I thought might be a different way to go about it, rather than the random way in which I colour through other books.

I took the book and a pack of 24 Crayola Pencils (I know right?!?) with me when I traveled last year and I had a blast. The pencils performed beyond what I expected, and together with a 12 colour set of water colour crayons (Caran D'Ache) I was set for any picture in the book.

The title page - I did this one before leaving home to experiment with different media and pencils to see how the paper would handle it. I really like the paper in these books. It is sturdy, and off white, takes limited water well and stands up to some rougher treatment just fine. I also like the size of the book, which was a deciding factor in my taking it along while traveling.

This double page spread is so far definitely my favourite page. I think the design is outstanding and all those flowers were a joy the colour. The solid black background really makes those colours pop. I often add a very dark or black to the background of a page, and really have to watch myself that I don't do it too often

Here is a page was done using the water colour pencils - sometimes I just need to get away from my usual bright, saturated colours. I also find it much easier to do the details with a brush than to have to continually sharpen pencils to get into those tiny places.

Here's a good example of a page that was a 'groaner' and I might never have coloured it, had I not decided to do the book in sequence. Now that it is done though I really like it and I must admit that it was indeed enjoyable to do. - Just look at that waxy crayola shine at the top!-

The 'Bayeux tapestry' double spread was a great page to colour...I did use quite a bit of gold gouache paint on this one. I would have liked to add more layers in the back, but the paper had had enough at this point, so I had to move on.

I'll be posting more finished pages at a later date. I'm halfway through the book and still enjoying the journey. I seem to be much faster at colouring than I am at taking pictures....