Digis on the 5s release: Pansies

Hey hey hey do I have something really fun to color today! I can speak from personal experience on this one, as I spent a bit of time in the predawn hours painting in my studio before the pitter patter (or electric guitar amp) of four children and a snoozing man broke the sweet silence. I enjoyed my coffee accompanied by a trio of Pansies and a palette of watercolors and gouache. Can’t really think of a better way to start the day!

Here’s what I came up with, after Googling images of peach and purple pansies, and then on the last one, “let’s throw in some blue!” What do you think?

I really can’t underscore enough the value of Googling the flowers you’re coloring to help you along in your color choices. It frees you up from feeling like you have to come up with everything by staring blankly in to your art supply stash and thinking, “where the heck do I start?” You can start directly from nature! And that handy Google!

Here’s what Pansies, our newest digital stamp set download, looks like without my extra leafy fluffery:

In my painting above, you can see that I added extra leaves and green background shading, as I don't cut out my paintings and make cards like many of you all do. (I hope to do this someday!) But for now I tend to make little artworks from my stamps, and often I will enlarge the image a bit to be sure I can get my paintbrush in those tiny areas (another reason I love digis!)

For the artwork above, I changed the opacity of the image to 60% so that it was a light grey, and then printed it at 130% of the original size.

Now, Pansies come in such a gigantic range of cultivars that your coloring options are endless. And what is really great about this new digi is that the “faces” of the pansies are large enough that you have quite a nice canvas on which to get super artsy. There aren’t too many teeny tiny petals the way I have in many of my sets. These are broad, with lots of shading and veining to help you determine where to put in your highlight and shadow. You can really get into artful experiments with these beauties, I know you can!

Would you like to see what some of our Bloom Brigade designers came up with using Pansies? Each creation is so unique and so FUN, I do think you’ll be inspired to try this one for yourself!

Cindy Lawrence

Stacy Morgan

Tosha Leyendekker

Thank you for popping over to the blog today to check out our new Pansies download, and be SURE to come back on Monday to get some wonderful coloring tips from a very special guest!