Coloring a dark background with Distress Crayons and Distress Inks

[Music] hello my friends it's me karen valentine and we are going to do the background today on this beautiful image by an artist it goes by 0073.uv on instagram and on patreon patreon is the only places you can get this page and all of her other pages and and they're fabulous so you should go there and check it out so i have been playing around with backgrounds i've tried several and um i finally came upon this one that i really really like and um i so and so we are going to do our background with the distress crayons um by ranger and tim holtz and um i was really surprised that i could use water on this paper because it's you know it's not a super heavy paper but um i'm going to give you a little i'm going to give you a little sneak peek and show you how i've been playing so as i said i um i practice by printing out the image on a on a scrap piece of this paper and then i can play around and cut and paste and cut out so this is what we're going to try and achieve again and um so that's why i've already kind of gotten my um palette dirty because i've already started so this one um is a pretty pretty quick um and easy background so i'm just going to start so the first color that i'm going to lay down is dusty concord and i find that these do a lot better when they are freshly put onto the palette because if they get a chance to dry on the palette then they don't spread as fast now the nice thing about this because we're going to be using water is that you don't have to be precise i just want to get some of this color down on the paper um i tried coloring directly onto the paper with these and what winds up happening is that you get a lot of swirly marks from where the crayon went onto the paper and it takes too much water to work those swirly i'm going to go ahead and turn this it takes too much water to work those brush uh not brush the crayon marks out of the paper so it really is better to apply it first i know it maybe seems like an extra step that's kind of a pain but honestly it goes really quick so it's really not too bad um yeah so i really i tried doing it lots of different ways and this way seemed to be the best you can use your um you can use these brushes if you prefer if you like those brushes better um i personally [Music] i mean they're both they're both good brushes it just kind of depends on what you're trying to do but i feel like i can i don't know push harder with these and and really get that so as you can see we didn't bother going along we didn't bother getting up close to the edge of the image because we don't have to and we didn't cover the whole entire thing because we're going to use a few different colors here so but i don't know if you can i don't know if you can tell but really the the um this crayon dries really fast faster than the gelatos do i think so putting down a small amount at a time and just continuing to do that seems like the best way to go because otherwise it almost feels like it gets wasted okay where's my other brush okay so this is um aged mahogany turn it again something i do really like about these crayons as opposed to the gelatos is that they're definitely more opaque so they're probably closer to neocolors but they're they they don't seem as milky to me as neo colors nail colors always seem kind of milky to me these seem more [Music] true in color more more i don't know how to describe it but i like them okay all right let's do one more color i'm going to do gathered twigs it's a nice warm brown i won't do too much of this okay let's start let's start there the other thing that i really liked about these is that it does not take a lot of water at all to activate these so actually the less water used the better at least in my in this case so i am using a water brush if your water brush is really wet and leaky i would i would just switch to a regular um paint paintbrush because you don't want you definitely don't want a ton of water so we're going to add the black right up against the image and then you can use your brush anywhere you want to kind of smooth and blend the rest of the colors but i kind of wanted to achieve that painted look so i i kind of like to use a i don't know like a s like a an effect that makes it look like brush strokes i guess would be what i would but i want to try and keep the majority of the black close to her close to the image and we can always come in after this dries and re-activate or add more black so we'll see what we need to do after we i kind of want that color to go all the way to the edge now this does seem to cover the pencil so you want to be careful not to go over the top of your coloring or else it will cover it up okay let's see i'm trying to figure out the best way to do this so i don't something tells me i just did a 180 on that paper that was kind of silly okay let's see how debating on if i want to put any of this black on the bottom part in other words i think i want to not get this hair out of here i think i just want to use the water to um blend right down here okay and the other i mean it really surprised me because this paper is not a super heavy cardstock but it is hardly buckling at all which is really surprising to me um i should probably i want to add some more black but i'm thinking i should probably let it dry because i don't want to i don't want to tempt fate and push it too much so um i'm going to just turn off the camera dry it real quick and then come back okay so i feel like i want before i do the black i want to do a little more this brown probably need some more i'm not getting too fast with my water or with getting too fast and not being careful about how much water i'm putting down here okay let's do some more black this is turning out to be kind of a wintry picture not really a summery spring picture that's okay you you okay let me um just clean out my brush a little bit okay i've got some work to do down here because it just looks like i didn't get my color down there properly so this is the um mahogany aged mahogany that might be that might be too red sorry i know it's a pain that i have to keep turning this around but it's the only way i could think of to not stick my hand in let's do some of this purple color too there we go there we go that's better and we'll do the same thing down here a little bit more all right i think i like it i'm thinking i'm thinking and i'm also experimenting which i probably shouldn't be doing on a page like this on film but okay so the question for me would be i want to make some black in here the question for me would be do i add something over the top of this or do i let this be what it is like i could add some pencil over the top like a light colored pencil which i've done before i think i like it but part of me is thinking that i even want to kind of keep i was thinking that i wanted to go lighter as i went out but i kind of feel like i need to add some more dark so i'm kind of mixing the black with the brown maybe a little bit black out here so you're just gonna if you're if you're doing this um just work it till you like it you know maybe you want it like lighter than this and that is okay okay i'm gonna dry this let's see what we got here i might have put too much black at the base not the base you know right next to the image okay drying time and one little tip when you dry dry from the top and then when it's dry mostly on the surface you're going to start seeing the paper curling up towards you flip it over and dry on the back side and that will flatten that image back down and help keep it from curling too much in the wrong direction okay i will be right back okay so it's all dry and i think i have decided um to add some more another layer to this because i had in my head a vision of a rich chocolaty background and it's not quite there yet the colors that i tried previously on it were not giving me the look that i wanted and so that's why i went with the um the burgundies and the purples which i still really like but i think it still needs something so i'm gonna combine the um the distressed crayons with the um distress inks and i think i'm gonna take this walnut stain i tried just a teeny little bit of it to make sure that that is what i wanted to do and i think i'm going to put a piece of scrap paper okay so um it just it didn't have the um the warmth that i wanted yet so let's just do that and see what we get let's do some down here what i like about these on top is that they seem to well i think they do because they're sheer um it's still allowing some of the texture and even some of the color to show through but it's just making the color richer and darker which is which is where i wanted to be so i might even do another layer i'm not sure i feel like i've struggled with this page to get it to where i want and i i think it's because i pre-planned what i wanted to do and um i do a lot better when i just let the page speak to me and tell me what it wants i know that sounds stupid but as if i have expectations and i don't always meet them the way i want to okay well that's getting better already so i'm curious if i were to add some black soot i always want to go in a really small area before i start laying it down in a big area so i'll take one of these little brushes and see it's pretty dark i want to be careful because i don't really want i wonder if i were to add i wonder if i were to use that with this um like just tap that black a little bit just to get it a little bit darker but not but not go black because i feel like i want the um the black that i put on here with the distress distress crayons to blend a little bit better i think i had it a little too heavy it's getting better you all right let's see what that does that feels a lot better to me there's this area right here that needs something i can't seem to get up close enough to her let's use this i really like these brushes okay so this feels much closer to where i want to be um now i'm just fine tuning because i'm kind of inexperienced with some of these products i don't know exactly how they behave i could come in with pencil um and get into these tight bits typically that would be what i would do but maybe we just try it with one do i want to use black or espresso how about black and it's really i mean this is just me being super extra picky but i definitely am glad that i added that layer of distress inks over the top i really just really really wanted it to be really rich part of me wonders if i should be doing this with espresso and not black but i'm not pressing down real hard and this is my spirit farm black which polychromos black is also a brown a brown black as opposed to a neutral gray black really has a nice rich warmth that it added so all right i'm gonna no wait never i'm never really done okay this is my espresso just curious some of this area right here by her skin just did not do what i wanted it to do it didn't get quite as that's better i'm very detail-oriented when i do my pages to the point where sometimes it's annoying to me but i will lay in bed at night stressing about paige and how if i'm not happy with it when i um when i go to bed at night which is really stupid but there it is okay so i keep finding all these places that i feel like need a little bit of extra help all right i can honestly say i am finished and happy um so yay i was not i was not quite feeling it until we added that last layer so there it is she's all finished finally um if you watched all of the videos and the whole series thanks for hanging in there with me once again i think we got there in the end and um yeah i'm really happy so i hope i hope you had fun i will see you guys back again for the next video i've got a um i've got a another flister to do i've got um a little pencil review um thing and um and we're gonna work on a new a new page so there's lots lots coming for the month so until i see you guys again take care of yourselves take care of each other and happy coloring love you guys bye [Music] you

Channel: Art by Karen Valentine

Views: 555

Rating: 5 out of 5

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Id: ODzptvW09uM

Length: 35min 59sec (2159 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 01 2021