Whisky glass

Birthdays are no respecters of how you’re feeling and annoyingly come along even when you have a horrible flu-y cold. And so it was I had to create a masculine card for my neighbour all while reaching for the tissues and breaking into a sweat. Ideal conditions to try something I haven’t done before 🙄

And that’s how I came to be colouring a vaguely realistic glass of whisky with Copics and coloured pencils.

This was one of those “I’m really not sure what I’m doing” projects, so — once I’d got a rough outline sketch — I just picked up my lightest Copic for the whisky and started by putting down a layer of colour. Taking the first step is the hardest, after that you just keep going until either it looks good or it’s beyond hope 😄

Once I was happy with the Copic colouring, I defined the edges of the glass with multiliners and added details and highlights using coloured pencils.

Weirdly, the hardest part of this was the sentiment. I originally had the “happy birthday” running around the base of the glass, uncoloured, but it didn’t look right. So I outlined it with a Copic multiliner, but that didn’t work either. Then I tried colouring it in with Inktense pencils, but no, still not happy. I looked around to see what I had that would cover Inktense and found my Posca paint pens. Guess what? Hated that too. At this point I admitted that I was never going to find anything I liked and resorted to plan B and heat embossed it in gold on a black strip instead. Much nicer.

I’d been trying to figure out why I don’t completely love this — it’s far from perfect, but as a first attempt at liquid in glass, I really can’t complain — and then it struck me: something about it reminds me of the “draw something from real life” exercises that we had to do in art class at school, the ones that I never got much in the way of positive feedback for… (Seriously, the leaf I drew really did look like that, serves me right for picking an “interesting” leaf.)

Supplies:

• stamps:
  Altenew – birthday greetings
• dies:
  Lawn Fawn – stitched square stackables
• inks:
  Versamark
• pens:
  Copic multiliner cool gray 0.1
  Copic multiliner black 0.05
• Copic markers:
  whisky – YR20, YR14, YR16, Y17
  glass and shadows – N0, N2, N4, N5, N8
• Derwent studio pencils:
  67 ivory black, 72 chinese white, 10 orange chrome
• embossing powder:
  Judikins gold detail
• paper and card:
  Neenah solar white 216gsm
  Hunkydory Adorable Scorable pearly shimmer
  Avery Elle – paper pad – brights collection