What I have learned so far, about colored pencils

#1- Prismacolor rocks!
#2. Blending pencils rock!
#3. There is a very fine line between blending and smudging!
#4. Erasers rock!
#5. I have so much more to learn!

I thought you might like to see the progression of a colored pencil dragon. This fine fellow was one of the Color Our Collections pages from last week, from the Wangensteen Library.

The uncolored page. I laid down a very light coat of purple over the whole image using a Prismacolor art stick (just a quick scribble).

Basic colors quickly sketched in.

Basic colors blended with the blending pencil. No additional color added (see? I said they rock!)

Deep shadows added,.

Highlights and some green for iridescence added. White gel pen for the white highlights.

Background blended and arty shadows added. Voila!

(all in all, about an hour of work)

The end of Color Our Collections Week

I have had such fun with the coloring pages distributed by those participating in the Color Our Collections worldwide event- over 50 libraries, museums, and universities released coloring pages from their collections: book illuminations, illustrations paintings. I played all week, and in playing, my coloring skills improved. Exponentially. I tried all of the media I had on hand: crayons, markers, and colored pencils (sometimes combining all of them). The books and pages are still online and available for downloading. You can find them here, and here, and if you follow those links, you'll probably find more. The event was so popular that many libraries, including my local branch, have instituted Coloring Nights.

Here are the rest of the pictures I colored this week:

I posted all of the pages to Instagram, and the museum who released this page said they were the most gorgeous intestines they'd ever seen. I will treasure that compliment forever...

I do not know who this giant cow-stealing child is.

This one is my favorite of the whole week. I call him Roygbivoceros

I made a GIF of the progression of this one. I've seen this painting in person, at The Getty. I started with markers, and then used colored pencils to deepen and shade the page.

Here's a still of the end product. Note that hands are not my forte... heh...

I did one more official page, but I'll save that for tomorrow, with an explanation of how I got from printed page to finished dragon.

Heads Up, Colorers!

This week, over 50 universities and libraries worldwide are participating in a Color Our Collections event- each institution will release a coloring page every day from Feb 1-5 (and some have already released their offerings as PDF booklets to print). The pages are all from archives, pages from books, paintings and other publications in eras from Medeival- The Present.

The variety of pages is pretty astounding, and it's going to be great fun. Here's a link with all of the links.  And if you are on Twitter, here's another list.  Colorers are encouraged to share their pages on all social media sites, using the #colorourcollections. I'm posting mine on Facebook and Instagram (I stay far far away from Twitter).

I jumped the gun, and have colored several pages already from books that were available early:

From the Biodiversity Heritage  Library - they very helpfully provide coloring suggestions... heh...

From the New York Academy of Medicine coloring book.

From the Bodleian Library

There's no way I can keep up with all of the participants, but I'm going to snag as many of the pages as I can!