The Leopard from Animorphia

When I got to this page in Anirmorphia by Kerby Rosanes I was already entertaining thoughts on enlarging the pieces before coloring them. I came across this digital printing shop inside the University of the Philippines (YZA Colored Digital Printing) Diliman, Quezon City through an artist friend who said they can duplicate my works exactly like the original for framing. That's good since I didn't want to remove the seams of my coloring books just to frame a page or two.

Anyway, to continue my story, I was done coloring the head of this leopard when I noticed that some spots were more faded thatn the others because I unconsciously colored on them with my colored pencils. I used Colleen pencils here by the way. So without thinking that I might ruin it I worked black ink over a spot or two and ruined it.

My first attempt on the leopard. It's a good thing this was an enlarged copy from the book. The book image is safely intact. Whew!

For this new image I left the jaw white since almost all the photo references of leopards I looked at had white areas on their faces.

The following day I had another enlarged print made. I realized then that the shop digitally fixes the image to make it look like a flawless (no seam showing) image on the printed page, that's very professional of them. It took me another two days to complete this one. I was very careful not to color on top any spot so that I would still have dark spots in the end. I kept my black marker pens as far away from my work area as possible. No more retouching with ink as far as I'm concerned.

For the background I simply experimented with oil pastel, dark yellow and black. Tissue came in handy, that's what I used to spread the medium around.

I had it framed weeks later, quite happy with how it turned out.

Sunflowers Not by Van Gogh

Some years back my husband bought a coffee table book on Van Gogh. We enjoyed looking at this genius' master works from the book. When I recently saw the coloring book released by Harper Design in collaboration with the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam my husband decided I should get one as well for my collection of coloring books. Leafing through the elaborate pages I was intimidated at first, and only thought of using oil pastel for coloring it so that I won't have to get nitty gritty about the details.

The illustrations, which must've been digitally made, were very faithful to the original. I thought when I got started with the sunflower (fourteen) I didn't have to labor too much in choosing colors, I would just mimic the original work. The rest wasn't easy. I had to match the colors to the exact right spot. I was doing color-by-the-number without the numbers! It was as if I was completing a Van Gogh puzzle, coloring the page was that challenging as it turned out.

Side by side, the coffee table book and the coloring book. The portrait to the left though is with a straw hat, while the one on the coloring book's cover is with a felt hat.

The image at the left is the original, the right is my work-in-progress (WIP). The Vincent signature on the pot was placed below the line in the coloring book image which made me wonder if I was referring to the correct painting. Apparently there are many similar sunflower paintings like this done by Van Gogh, some 12 sunflowers, and some 14.

At the end of the day I was able to finish this piece with much help from a fixative spray since I had to keep the dry soft pastel background in place (and not on the bottom of my palm) to complete the work.

I kept to Van Gogh book nearby since I had to keep glancing at it as I worked on the piece which I propped up on my table top easel.

Those clamps came in handy since I used my daughter's canvas board to keep the page upright.

The final output which I completed in a day. I thought it was best appreciated from afar so I took a long shot of it. But the truth is I just wasn't keen on seeing the fine mistakes in coloring I've made, in Filipino we call it "lampas lampas".

The Ram

At first I was uneasy doodling four or five images on this Ram spread from Kerby Rosanes' Animorphia. I had cold feet, I didn't want to ruin my coloring book. When I stepped back and realized that it could actually work I went on the finish the entire horn to my right. I did a mix of the little critter-like creatures and zen doodling for its design. Halfway through the morning I made a similar image on the right horn, and before the day was over I was done doodling!

For outlining the pencil drawings I used Dong-A Hexaplus Fineliner 0.4 mm black, and Artline 853 Fine Overhead Projection Marker. I knew I wasn't going to color them using wet tools so I was confident the inks would hold.

For doing the background the same afternoon I used oil pastel, it was the second background project I did in this book. I used two different shades of blue at first, I colored the entire spread with the lighter one then only half with the darker one. In the photo below most of the darker blue was already covered by black. For some reason I found myself shading higher and higher with the black to achieve the gradual fade effect. I'm not sure I was able to do that 100% but I'm quite satisfied when I stopped at this. My family also was scheduled to leave in a few minutes to watch Hotel Transylvania the movie so I called it a day.

I did this background for an entire afternoon using oil pastels spread with tissue paper. I would apply lightly on the paper and watch it closely as I rub it. I wanted it to come out soft and even so I was very careful not to leave any blooming. The tissue paper was efficient in helping me take care of that.

Doing the animal's fur was easy since this one was not in motion and all its muscles were relaxed. I just had to follow Kerby's line shadings except for the one on top of its nose. All the photo references I used showed that the hair growth in that area were horizontal. Kerby's lines were vertical. I followed the pegs.

The following day I got started with the colors and chose the bright ones to contrast with blue and black background. The story about the golden fleece kept coming to me so I looked up images of that online and decided to make the horn mostly gold by influence.

Every now and then I would take photos of my WIP to play with the contrasts and lighting in my phone's camera to see further what needs to be highlighted and deepened. I just love that I can do that. Because sometimes when I'm working too close on my piece I miss out seeing the bigger picture. The phone and certain photo apps help me with that.

Happy with my completed work I propped it on my wooden easel and set it on the table for this photo.

A close up on the headdress where I used glitter and metallic pens. So much fun to do!

This work, among all of my works, by far earned the biggest number of Likes in the international group Coloring Books for Adults with 1, 212 Likes. In less than 24 hours it had 1,000 likes already. That really is something memorable for a simple person like me.

Secret Garden Door

I knew what I wanted to achieve the minute I saw this picture from Johanna Basford's Secret Garden, the question was how. I left it and did other projects until I gained enough confidence and curiosity to attack it. I had my Colleen pencils beside me and the rest of the day to color, so I began.

It took me two days to finish this. I started with purple, red, brown, green, light green, even yellow I believe for the door. I thought I'd highlight a part so I left it white while I was doing the coloring only to realize when I was done that it made no sense to highlight that part. I should've highlighted the lock of the door instead of that meaningless part. Haha! I just laughed at myself and the bungle and went on.

I had a peg from the internet which I will not show here since I can't attribute it (note to self: I should take note of where I take the photos from so I can always include them in the blog if I need to). The photo that isn't here also shows an enchanted door that's recessed amidst leaves and branches, in the middle of the forest. I studied it closely until my eyes popped out. My brain was going at 100 GB per millisecond trying to decipher the colors in the photo that I could render on this image.

And just like that, ting!, I realized that blue was what created the 'glow'. I took a light blue pencil hoping it would do the trick. Violet was what I used as shadow to contrast.

Here I decided to introduce colors on the 'floor' though there was none on the original image.

While I was coloring the leaves with violet and blue shades I worked as if essentially all of them were green anyway. That the blues and purples were only the enchanted effect caused by the 'glow'. That's why some leaves would be fading from blue to violet to green.

To complete the image I made a pointilism background using black pencil. I wanted the background to be muted and recessed.

Those who appreciated the effects of my coloring pointed out how looking at this seemed to suck them from the outside and into the center of this picture. I'm happy they that this work generates that feeling, that's exactly what I wanted to achieve.

The foreground colors were black and brown.

Cheetah

I colored the cheetahs first before I got started on the rest of the googley gang

Among the fastest creatures on earth, and inarguably the fastest on land, the running cheetahs of Kerby Rosanes was a joy to do. The color wasn't the hard part, practically just one shade, it was instead determining the highlights and shadows that went with the muscle movements. I studied about 10 photos of running cheetahs that I've downloaded from the internet to see how their powerful muscles contracted and relaxed as they zipped through the wastelands of their habitats.

One day I'm going to put a background on this spread. When I did this I wasn't that into backgrounds yet, haven't gained the confidence to attack those mighty white spaces that left everything to the imagination. Come to think of it I should really do that to reintroduce my old works with a new dimension.

One thing I'd like to mention about the color choices on the fur, there were some cheetahs that were more gray than orange. I wanted to introduce that in the last, smaller cheetah in the picture but decided against it since it was a fail, it looked like I didn't try that hard to color it haha! I reshaded it orangey, which was actually mostly the khaki shade in my Colleen pen. The orange was only used as a base to deepen some parts.

The Visayan Wrinkled Hornbill

I worked on this Millie Marotta image in September (2015) for two days. It's from her book Tropical Wonderland. I used my very reliable Colleen 785 set of 36 dual tip. I first looked up which variety of this bird it was. I'm pretty sure it's a horn bill but which among the many kinds I wasn't particularly sure. I even quizzed my husband who thought it was a fisher king. I hope the artists would include the names of the animals they've drawn so that coloristas wouldn't have to guess or search for that information. Sometimes I'm left clueless having no idea what it's called in the first place.

Anyway I found out that this beautiful creature is from the Philippine islands! It's called the Visayan wrinkled horn bill that can be found in our country's beautiful island of Panay, where the famous Boracay is.

Excited that its habitat is close to home I started working on it with a bit more enthusiasm. For the beak I used only various pencil shades apart from the shading technique. I found myself subconsciously creating the highlights on the beak as I colored, hence the shimmers. The 3D effect that achieved was something that I didn't plan, I just followed the groves of the lines and noticed that I was darkening the trough parts of the grooves while I left white or uncolored the crest parts.

This was my photo reference which I took from a site in the internet, panaynewsphilippines.com.

The brown color of the chest was, for me, not entirely brown. Like the cockerel's lower wing in a previous post, I could see a red tint in it. Realizing I wanted to approximate this hue I then encountered a limitation in my colored pencils set. I didn't have that exact color :( I decided to blend brown with violet and maroon. As you would see I arrived at various shades of brown and red. Oh well, life's not perfect. Maybe in heaven one could do that.

Maybe one day I'll put a background on the original work which is still here in my book.

I had the page photocopied and printed in color by a professional so I could give the image to a friend who is a cancer survivor. It's now framed and ready to be gifted!

Enchanted Creatures

Johanna Basford's Enchanted Forest fills one for a longing for magical things. That was my initial reaction while leafing through the pages of the Italian printed version I found in National Bookstore in Manila. The day I decided to color a page I started with this image of two unicorns which reminded of an emblem of a royal family.

The first thing I did was create a shadow of the entire 'emblem' using gray soft pastel. Ever since I was in grade school this was a thing I'd do to my art works to give it a different twist or look. I'm glad it still worked because other coloristas noticed from the final work that the image seemed to be floating on top of the page.

I also began with the idea of making the design between the creatures heads brightly lit so as to cast shadows on the rest of the imag, hence the black color behind on the otherwise purple unicorns.

I relied on Colleen wax pencils in my initial works such as this one.

It was a simple project and I loved doing it, took me about a day to finish everything. One colorist commented that the red and purple colors reminded her of royalty, how nice, I didn't even think of that.

The shadow all around seemed to lift the entire image off the page. You should try it, too!

The day after I did the unicorns I came across this dragonfly from the same book and decided I wanted to spend the day with her. The colors were unplanned, I just picked them from my stack. For the shadow effect I decided to use the Mungyo light green soft pastel. After completing it I wasn't quite satisfied with the result so I decided to rely again to the same gray I used for the unicorns. Then darker, it somehow worked.

I should say that I finished the dragonfly to the tune of Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy by Pentatonix. Had a wonderful, magical experience doing this. 

In my iPhone screen I would play with this image by simply sliding the screen up and down to the point of only showing the tail (when up) or the head (when down). "Look, it looks like its wings are fluttering!" I'm such a kid this way haha!