I'm Sarah Renae Clark, and I'm back again with another children's
coloring book challenge, where I take a kids coloring page and color
it like I would usually color an adult
coloring page with my professional pencils, markers, and the adult coloring
techniques that I teach you on this channel.
Last time I tried this, I printed a Disney coloring page
from the internet, and I enjoyed it a lot more than I thought I would.
You can check out that video here.
So we're doing it again.
But this time I raided my own kids coloring book collection,
and I'm going to be coloring straight from the book,
big black lines and all.
Right now my family and I are in quarantine so I can't leave the house.
And I'm working with a six-year-old
downstairs and a two-year-old in the next room.
So instead of the video that I did have
planned, I decided to embrace my inner child today and found the perfect coloring
book to sum up life in Australia with two little kids; Bluey.
Bluey has quickly become an Australian
icon in the household of every family in the country.
And it's a show you that we love, and by we I mean, us parents,
possibly even more than the kids that it's made for.
The characters and scenes are beautifully illustrated.
The story lines are so relatable for kids and parents,
and it sums up growing in Australia better than any kids show I've seen.
I'm doing this for my kids.
No, Bluey is not sponsoring this video.
We're just big fans.
So we bought our kids this Bluey coloring book and they've made a start,
but it needs an artistic touch.
My first challenge is going to be finding
a page that doesn't have two-year-old scribbles all over it.
So before I start, I've snapped a quick photo of my page on my iPad so I can draft up
some ideas digitally in the Procreate app before I start coloring on my actual page.
I like to do this because it gives me more confidence that the final page will look
good with the colors I've chosen and the positioning of my lighting.
And because I'm coloring in the book,
I can't just reprint this page if I don't like how it's turning out.
So the digital version acts as a draft.
When I colored Tiana in my last video,
I really try to stay true to the colors of the scene I was working with,
but I want to try to bring my own style to this scene.
So other than the main characters,
I want to use some other color inspiration and new colors for our background
instead of looking to the show itself, I'm looking at some different forests
on Pixabay that I can use as a reference photo, mainly focus on the colors they are
using, and this one really stands out to me.
I love the mix of reds, oranges,
browns and greens and the warm sun coming from the back.
So I'm going to use this as my inspiration.
Here's a nifty little trick;
you can actually drag a photo
into Procreate, and it will automatically pull a selection of colors for you.
Very cool.
I didn't even realize when I chose this
image that my coloring page has branches across the ground just like this photo.
How perfect is that?
Now that I've got my digital draft,
I've chosen some markers from my collection that seem to match the colors
I'm expecting to use.
I've been watching some of ADC Art Attacks videos recently where he recommends
Pro markers, and I remembered that I bought a bunch of Pro markers on sale for $1 each
at a local shop a few months ago, and I have never used them.
These markers are basically vintage. They are;
I think the original pro markers before
Winsor & Newton bought the brand and check out the colors that these just
happened to be from the small range that I ended up buying.
These are a perfect match for today's project, so let's add them to a watch
alongside the Ohuhu and Copic markers I'm planning to use.
I've also got a little story book here from my son that works as another handy
reference image so that we can get our characters colors right.
And because I'm using alcohol markers that will most definitely bleed through
this coloring book paper, I'm adding a page of bleed proof paper
underneath so it doesn't run the rest of the book.
Okay, let's begin.
Seriously, the first one I started drawing and I've used the wrong color.
Okay, so pro tip; a colorless blender.
If you do stupid things like I've just
done, you can use the colorless blender to dilute your marker and reduce the color.
It won't completely erase what you've
done, but it does a pretty good job on most colors.
My plan for this page is to do a base
layer with markers and then do my details with colored pencils.
This method has become my favorite way
to color all of my coloring pages in the last few months.
It means you get the benefits of the vibrant markers with no white gaps
underneath, but the detail and blending of the colored pencils.
I'm really not off to a good start here.
How is this that I can't seem to stay within these giant black lines?
I'm totally off my game today.
I'm sorry, Bluey.
Luckily, this is just the undercoat.
The first time I used an alcohol marker
on a double sided page like this, I panicked when I started seeing
the artwork from the back of the page, but don't worry,
it only shows while the marker is wet and will disappear once it dries.
For the forest,
we're using the greens and browns I've
chosen instead of the forest colors from Bluey.
Those are more of a green and blue.
I like the red ground in our reference photo I found, so I'm going to do similar
and use my burnt, umber Pro marker for the ground.
This is actually a really nice color,
I like this.
Because the markers are just a base layer here,
perfect blending isn't as important
because I'll be going over this with pencils later.
However, I still like things to look good at this stage.
The better this looks, the less work I have to do later
and the more confident I can feel about my progress.
Okay, I'm not really sure how to approach
this tree, so I'll give this some more thought as we bring in the pencils.
With the base colors done,
this isn't looking too bad so far.
In fact, I could probably stop here
and this would look okay, but that is not my plan today.
instead of our wonderful 2D design like
the original Bluey cartoon, I'm planning to bring in some realistic 3D
shading and interesting lighting with my Prismacolor pencils.
Let's start somewhere easy;
the dark background areas.
My main goal with pencils is to build up
my shadows, add highlights and create texture.
I've chosen my Prismacolors here because
they seem to work well on any paper I use, whether it's good quality paper or just
basic paper from a coloring book, and they blend really well, which I love.
When choosing my colors,
I try to find a base color similar to my markers, and then I can choose
my highlights or my shading colors around that. The base color means I can blend
those shadows into my markers much more smoothly.
And because of our marker layer,
we don't have to use as much pencil, and I don't need to burnish anything
because there's no white page to hide underneath.
Now for the tree, you'd think I'd know how
a color a tree after creating my own coloring books for the past six years.
But yet, as I'm thinking about how
to approach this, I'm realizing I have never colored a tree in, ever.
So even as a professional, every coloring page comes with surprises
and challenges, and today this is my new challenge.
My dilemma here is that this cartoon tree
is essentially one giant, smoothed out shape,
but a real tree is made up of hundreds of leaves being hundreds of smaller
shapes, each bouncing light and shadows of their own.
So how can I portray depth here
and texture while also showing the light source coming from the back of the tree?
When I find myself approaching something totally new like this,
where I feel a little lost, I start by finding a reference image.
In this case, I would look for some
photos of trees, to see how the light works.
Or I could look at how other people have
colored or even painted trees to learn from their methods.
The rest of this background so far is reminding me a little bit of a coloring
book I've just bought, which is the Thomas Kinkade Disney coloring book for adults.
So I decided to see how he approaches painting trees because they might give me
a better idea of how to recreate something with light and shade.
By the way, I was thinking of coloring
something from this book in a future video.
So let me know in the comments if that's
something that you would like to watch and looking closely at some of his trees,
I can see that they appear to be made up of a lot of small shade,
almost like circles or dots of light and shade almost at random.
So I'm going to try take this idea
of circles of light and shade and see if this works to create depth in our tree.
So far it looks a bit strange,
but I'll use some mid-greens to blend these new shadows and lighting so they
aren't so distinct and let's see how that goes.
Meanwhile, I also want to try to bring more light on my left and more shadows on
my right to keep that overall illusion of the lighting coming from the left.
It's not perfect, but hey, I'm actually surprised at how well
that worked, and with that, I think we can move on to the road.
Our road color with inspiration from our reference photo.
So let's look again at the texture that was a part of that image too.
I think the best way to recreate this is
going to be to add lots of little dots of light and then shade around these.
I think I'm going to regret adding so many of these
With our light source from behind,
our characters will also be casting a shadow, and there'll be heavier shadows
behind a lot of the fallen leaves and tree roots along the path.
I'm really happy with how this is all turning out so far.
I'm tempted to leave this like this
with our realistic background and 2D cartoon characters,
but I really want to see how Bluey, Bingo and Bandit look if we bring them
some shading too. I want to start with our light source.
Coloring light always makes me a bit nervous, but it is also the part of a coloring page
that I find the most exciting because it brings a new level of interest to a page.
In this case, I'm using the warm light
of the sun coming from behind our characters, so we've got the warm light
from the back, which means any shadows will fall towards the front.
I don't want to shade them too heavily because I really love the colors of these
characters already, so I've just chosen a slightly darker
shade of each color to do the shadows in each section.
By the way, I've got a whole video about
the different types of shadows that I add to pictures like this,
if you want to check it out. You can learn what each shadow is,
how they work and use them as a bit of a checklist to create realistic
lighting on any picture and it's not as hard as it looks.
I'll pop a link in the description below.
What a difference from the original line art,
to our final picture with just some markers and pencils.
I actually enjoyed coloring this more than
some of the adult coloring books I've done.
Just because a book is labeled as a kids coloring book doesn't mean it's just
for kids, and coloring is definitely not just a children's activity.
What a fun way to build your drawing skills, extend your creativity and get
through a crazy season like what most of us are in right now.
If you'd like to see me,
do more coloring challenges like this, please subscribe and tell me
in the comments what you'd like to see me color next.
I think I'll cut this out of this book
now, though, before it ends up with more decorations from our two-year-old son.
Okay.