Chinese lanterns

Series: The Daily Marker Art Card #24

As with all Power Poppy digis, all you have to do to make them look good is to follow the shading hints on the images. Adding extra highlighting along the edges with coloured pencil really helped emphasise the shaping. The trickiest part of this art card was trying to decide what to do with the background once I’d coloured the Chinese lanterns.

I fairly quickly decided that I wanted a dark background so that the lanterns would stand out, but what colour? I’d done a brown background on the luminous bouquet art card and dark blue on the nighttime fairy art card. Green? But the dark greens aren’t that dark and I didn’t want to have to do two layers, glazing green over grey — the background has some fiddly bits to colour around and doing it twice would just double the risk of messing it up.

It took a ridiculously long time to come up with the idea of doing it in black. I am so used to avoiding using black for anything other than, occasionally, the darkest marker when colouring black hair, that it just didn’t occur to me.

Copic markers:

lanterns – YR27, YR09, YR68
stems – YG25, YG17
berries – E09, YR18, YR09 / Y21, YR23
background – 100

Polychromos pencils:

lanterns – 103 ivory, 107 cadmium yellow

Supplies:

• digital stamps:
  Power Poppy – Chinese lanterns
• dies:
  Marianne Design – ATC
• pens:
  Atyou Spica – gold
  Posca PC-1MR – gold
• embellishments:
  Tim Holtz Idea-ology – metallic stickers – quotations
• paper and card:
  Neenah Solar White 216gsm
  black card

This image was coloured for day 24 of The Daily Marker 30 Day Colouring Challenge on 8 July 2019