Tuesday, December 8, 2015

Una Donna in Milan

I had a great time working on this image from The Look by Suwa_ (that's how her name is spelled in Instagram). The fun started last weekend at the OCC (an acronym for 'over-coffee-coloring' which is a gathering of koloristas), after we broke off into smaller coloring groups I asked my friend Anwy Fua GaƱo to choose an image from this book for us to play around with using my new and never been tried coloring materials - PanPastel.
I handed her two palettes from my small collection of PanPastel Artists' Pastels. I was right, they were fabulous to use. My friend applied the soft pastel powder as if she were applying ordinary face make ups, powder and blush on. In fact the stuff I bought to apply them on my coloring book are from the department store's make up section. I bought a brush and the foam tips normally used for applying eye shadow. They're so much cheaper than the applicators that PanPastel sells.
They went on sale when I bought these cake pastels (my coined term). Got them for only PhP 349.00 a piece, from PhP500+. Still a hefty price but I knew what I was getting.
My friend, who was used to coloring with pencils, just noticed that she had to apply several layers before she could see some progress. Maybe it was the tint she was using, it may have been too pale. Or maybe we were just new at it hence our hesitance to apply too much too soon. Anyhow, that's her initial reaction to using this coloring material, thought you might want to know.

When I got home I decided to work on the same image with the colors Burnt Sienna, Orange Tint, and Red Iron Oxide Tint. I applied them on all the exposed skin, her face, neck and hands.

I spent some time perfecting the highlights of the hair, which, according to my hairstylist is the new way to go with highlights.
For the rest of the image I used my Prismacolor Premiere colored pencils. When I got to the background after finishing all the details on the girl, I decided to use my Derwent Watercolour pencils. I wasn't so keen on spending too much time on this background so I thought coloring the door, for instance, without too much attention to detail, and brushing it with wet brush would cut my working time to half. I was wrong. I spent quite some time coloring the red door meticulously because I wanted to make it appear old and worn out, rustic so to speak. Also, I forgot that before I could add a new layer I had to wait for the paper to completely dry after brushing it with water. That's where I spent half the time on.

But overall I was happy with the end product, which got featured in another page livrocoloriramo in Instagram. Instagram users are used to that, having their works reposted in someone else's page. I wasn't. So you could imagine how thrilled I was to have someone pick up my photo and repost it in theirs. I noticed over time that those that got reposted earned more likes in those other pages than in mine. Oh well, I'm ok, as long as they attribute all my works to me I don't really mind. In fact I'm really grateful!


Update as of December 16: 

The author of this book, Suwa, made a comment on my Instagram page (see bottom)! I'm one happy puppy! 





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