Well, hello in 2016! I’m wishing you a peaceful, joyful, healthy and creative year.
I took advantage of the overcast morning and started my first day of the year by sketching the sunflower in the garden. Sunflowers are such cheerful, solid, vibrant flowers. I planted two varieties this year (this one is Giant Single or Helianthus annuus), but I think next year I’ll plant few more.
Lamy Safari pen with DeAtramentis Archive Ink and Winsor & Newton Cotman watercolour in Strathmore 400 Series sketchbook (21.6 x 27.9 cm)
Afterwards I retreated into the coolness of the house to finish something that I wanted to get done last year, but frustratingly got sick & had to put on hold for few days. My daughter asked me to create a colouring page for her. She is very specific in what she wants, so I thought I’ll have a practice run first with the existing sketch to figure out the best way to go about creating colouring pages. Ta Da!
As you can see I used the sketch for my Christmas cards. I retraced it with a Staedtler pigment liner pen. (My first attempt at using the pencil sketch didn’t work too great, because the scanning process turned the colour of the thin paper & pencil lines in too many shades of grey and was too hard to clean up.) After scanning the pen drawing I played around in Photoshop with various adjustments to try to get background as close to white as possible and the lines as close to black. My knowledge of Photoshop is very basic, so this step took the longest. I suspect that it would be faster to learn how to use Adobe Illustrator & my Wacom tablet (a birthday present from my sis) and trace the pencil drawing digitally in the Illustrator instead of by pen.
Anyway, if you feel like doing some colouring, you can download the PDF by clicking on the link Goldfields New Year Colouring page. My kids already had a go at colouring it in.
Happy New Year Zoya, beautiful painting and fun coloring page.
Thank you, Sharon. Happy New Year to you as well
Your sunflower is gorgeous Zoya! A great start to the challenge. Good luck with it and a Happy New Year to you!
Thank you, Wendy. I’ll be very relaxed about this 30 paintings in 30 days challenge, as it is summer school holidays here all January and there isn’t mush time to paint.
Wow, what a gorgeous painting! Thanks for sharing and Happy New Year!
Laura, thank you and happy creating in 2016 to you!
beautiful painting Zoya! and what a great coloring page too! 🙂
Jodi, thank you.
Beautiful Zoya!! What a cool mom you are! I’m so thrilled to have met you this year! I hope your 2016 is filled with great things my friend!
Charlie, thank you for you wishes. I wish you fantastic, fun & successful 2016. My kids give me great excuses to try new things and to push myself 😀
Aren’t kids great for that!? Hehe…have a great one!
Oh, my gosh! How fun is that?
I LOVE your card; it’s propped up on the bookcase, along with that beautiful iris. You are so gifted and so kind.
Thanks, Annie. Glad the card arrived safely. Hope you had good Christmas & New Year celebrations.
Gorgeous!
Sheila, thank you
I really like that Sunflower! And, I have that same watercolor tin!
🙂 Thank you. I love this watercolour tin and want to see if I can find something similar in Australia, so I can a spare one to experiment with different colour palettes.
So cool I almost got tempted to do some colouring! But I think I’m too old for this 🙂
Colouring books for adults are all the rage now. 🙂
I don’t even have colour pencils 🙂 not since high school!