Interview with Jen Part 2:Coloring Demo

As part of yesterday’s interview Tonya asked me to do a coloring demo using Prismas on a stamped image. I will have to honestly admit I’m a little nervous. Coloring on stamped images puts me a little out of my comfort zone… lol. Ask me to demo how to shade an eye and I’m there for you . So go easy on me.

Tonya scanned a stamp of this Stampin Up! cupcake for me to use as an image. I printed it out on white cardstock from The Paper Studio.

Adding a base color

To start off I lightly shaded the base of the cupcake with an overall tone of light peach. If I know I’m going to be shading something that has a base color I always like to put down a very thin layer of that first and then begin to build the values on top.

If you aren’t comfortable with shading lightly I do have a couple of tricks that will help. First… don’t try to shade lightly with a sharp pencil. Instead scribble a little on some scrap paper until you have a nice smooth flat spot on your pencil and shade with that area. You’ll cover a bigger surface area and it’s easier to stay light when the pencil isn’t pointy. Second be sure to make sure you pencil lines over lap. This is also a lot easier with the wider line you get from the duller pencil.

Building shadows

After putting the base layer down I went back with the same pencil and added the beginnings of shadow along the ridges in the cupcake base. As I did this I tried to make sure that there were no stiff edges as I shaded… everything needed to blend out into the background.

Next I took a light brown colored pencil and went back into the shadow areas to deepen the shadows. At this point I also needed to decide where the light was going to come from. For this image I chose the left side so you’ll notice that the right side is just slightly darker than the left.

Creating texture

These shots shows the nearly finished cupcake bottom and the start of the icing. I chose a sky blue color for the icing. Since the light source on this image is coming from the left I started with some darker shading on the right of the icing. As the fluffs of the icing curve to the left they become lighter. If two fluffs intersect the side that faces right is dark and the side that faces left is light. You can see in the fully colored picture on the left that I added the hint of curves of icing inside the image. To do this I gently shaded randomly curved lines that blend into the color around them.

Adding dimension

To add a little more dimension and depth to the icing I wanted to deepen the shadows just a tad and I also wanted to add a little pop to the sprinkles.  To do this I pulled out a dark blue colored pencil and very lightly went back into the icing and added just a touch of darker blue along the fluffs and around the the right side of the sprinkles.

To blend things out a little at this point I grabbed my white or you could use a Prismacolor colorless blender and I went through and smoothed out a few of the lighter areas to give the icing a little creamier texture.

Finishing up

To finish up the cupcake I chose some bright colors for the sprinkles and randomly placed them around the sprinkles. Next I shaded the candle with orange, dark on the right to lighter on the left. The flame was the last little bit to finish and to do that I colored the entire flame yellow then added orange and red to the base to create a glow. The very last thing I did was take just a bit of my orange and darken the right side of the cupcake base. The reason I did this is because it’s a good idea to try to echo colors whenever you can in any drawing. This help tie the whole thing together. Depending on how I’m going to use this I may go back and add a ground shadow to anchor the cupcake to the ground. And it’s done!

I haven’t decided what I’m going to do with this guy yet but I suspect he’s going to end up on one of the many birthday cards I need to get started on next week and I have the perfect paper to go with it!

Here are all the images side by side… I hope there was at least something here that you found to be useful!! If you have any questions please don’t hesitate to ask!

Jen blogs at DeconstructingJen.com and is Twilight Tuesday Inspiration Challenge Design Team Member.