Elven Ardella...Guest Designer for Make It Colourful!

(Looking for the Copic Coloring Guide Blog Hop?? Just click HERE...you have until midnight to enter for your chance to win the autographed copy of the book from my blog!) 

Hey crafty friends!! I'm honoured to be one of the guest designers for the new challenge over at Make It Colourful ...Zoe, the owner of Make It Crafty, and all the ladies on the design team are insanely talented colourists! They never fail to make my jaw drop when they post their challenge projects. If you are a colouring enthusiast, I strongly encourage you to become a frequent visitor and participant at the Make it Colourful Challenges. As these are colouring challenges, you will find yourself stretched to work on various aspects of your colouring. The challenges might be on shading, use of specific colours, capturing reflected light sources, creating backgrounds...these ladies tackle all sorts of challenges that are sure to inspire you to try your hand at something new, and perhaps even out of your comfort zone. :)  They also provide fantastic tips and tutorials to assist you in the challenges.

This challenge is Colouring Green...your choice of medium of course! So you can feel free to use markers, watercolours, pencils, pastels, or whatever medium tickles your artistic fancy. :)

I reached for my trusted Copic markers to colour this gorgeous digital image from Make It Crafty...this is Elven Ardella. I have to say that ever since Zoe released this stamp, I have been itching to colour her up. :)  She is available as a digital stamp or in red rubber for those who prefer traditional stamps. The greens used to colour her were all pulled from this fantastic KaiserCraft paper (Blae and Ivy). For embellishments, I used a Martha Stewart border punch, a flourish cut with an MFT die, a small Prima rose, a couple of leaves, pearl sprays and machine stitching to finish it off. All paper edges were sponged with Bundled Sage and Walnut Stain Distress Inks.

Elven Ardella was printed on Neenah cardstock. The beauty of digital images of course, is that you can resize them to suit your specific project. I chose the circle Spellbinders die I wanted to use, measured the opening and then resized Elven Ardella on my computer so that she would be a bit larger than the die. I like having my images "pop" outside of the borders. The background was sponged with Antique Line and Walnut Stain Distress Inks.

I wanted to create a very  natural "earthy" look for Ardella, so I chose to not add any glitter to her wings. The veining in her wings was created by lightly drawing the lines in with YG95. I then coloured the wings in sections beginning with a base coat of G20 followed by YG91, YG95 and G99. I used the veins as a guideline for where I wanted shadows and highlights to fall to create some dimension. Although I used the same greens that were used for her dress, I wanted the wings to have a slightly different tone so I went over them with some browns in the E40 range. The addition of these browns toned down the intensity of the greens. For the very deepest shadows, I added some C10. (applied sparingly with tip-to-tip blending)

Hmmm...noticed now that I forgot one very important step. I should have ran a black marker around the edges of the portions of her wings sticking out from the paper...totally forgot!! This is something I always do when cutting images out because it conceals the white paper core...it just gives a nice finishing touch to your projects. 

Skin: E000, E00, E11, RV95  Hair: E50, E31, E33, E37, E59  Dress: YG00, YG91, YG95, G99, C7, C9  Wings: G20, YG91, YG95, G99, E40, E41, E43, C10

Would you like to play along with the Make It Colourful girls?? Make sure to pop on over to the BLOG where you will find all the rules and a link to the gallery where you can see what the MIC team has created for this challenge.

I would like to say a huge thank you to Zoe and her team for inviting me to play along for this challenge!!

Enjoy your Friday!

Blessings,

Melanie