Tuesday, January 12, 2016

Camo Cat

Was super excited to start coloring in Narelle Craven's book "Percy and the Coloring Wonderland" after I received my copy from my Australian friend, Lia Andanar-Yu, who visited for the holidays. Narelle seemed quite happy too with my order and decided to throw in for free the first volume. 

The books are like no other! The pages are made of sturdy, glossy, and expensive cardstock paper. Narelle, being an artist herself, knows the value of working on high quality paper. My sharp pencils had a great time inserting their pigments in between the paper's thick surface which helped create the best blending I've done so far sans blenders. It's spring bound so that eliminates the struggle of having to purposely press down on a spread to color the details sewn in the seam. 

The cat's face was the most interesting feature and, I thought, if I could make it come alive then the rest of the page's story would be easier to reveal through colors. The Faber-Castell Polychromos pencils I used for the cat's head are in the photo above. 
At a certain point my busy schedule in life got in between finishing this project and when I tried to jumpstart it again a couple of times I found myself stuck. I called it "a colorist's block", similar to a "writer's block". 

A couple of posts I read prompted me to get over the hump and to stop over analyzing my color choices and just color. I was rusty and I had to erase the pink off an entire shaded area just to tell you how off I really was. Anyway, I said to myself "to hell with it, I'm just going to go with how I feel and however it turns out I'll just have to live with it". Other colorists don't normally have this angst because they color three even four pictures overnight and a mistake or two is forgiveable given their prolific coloring. 

I, on the other hand, find that I am confronted with this more than the usual because I take days now to finish an art and I find that it's not an excuse to mes up the colors since I have time to think about it. 
 
It turns out that tweaking that mental knob in my mind helped humungously. I was able to let my natural color choices flow and the story of the house morphing into the cat seemed to have come across somehow. Well, I'm not sure really, but I'd like to think it has.

I have recently uploaded this in two international sites and have been quite happy with the number of likes - not that I color for the 'likes', but hey, gotta admit it helps a bit. 

By the way I just realized in this experience that I had been added to an international coloring group without my knowledge. I didn't know this could be done. I just wish Facebook had a way to let us users control where we end up joining, that's all.

Happy coloring, coloristas!







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