Coloring Book Fun - Raspberry Fairy

Sarah Darkmagic - Posted on 29 August 2015

Lately a lot of my energy has been spent on stress and anxiety relief. One thing I've found that really helps with that is coloring. I spent a few hours a few weeks ago coloring in a coloring book page and enough people liked it that I thought I'd share how I did it here. I'm not an artist (although I had a good art program in school growing up) and there are many ways to color. If it's something that interests you, just remember do what is fun for you!

Work setup and materials

I used a folding tray table in front of the couch as my workspace. My main materials were:

Crayola Colored Pencils Set of 50 Affiliate Non-affiliate
Fairies Coloring Book: Charming Pictures of the Sprites from Folklore Affiliate Non-affiliate
Glass jar
Sanford Peel-Off Magic Rub eraser Affiliate Non-affiliate
Prismacolor Premier Colourless pencil Affiliate Non-affiliate
Staedtler pencil sharpener Affiliate Non-affiliate

Berries

The first portion of the page that I tackled were the raspberries.

First I started building the color of the raspberries. On the left, I have the raspberry pencil as the first layer and maroon as the shading. On the right, I've gone over the berries on the bottom half of the page with magenta.

Finally, I went over the berries with the red.

Stems

Next I did the stem. The base was done in the color sand, then harvest gold, and next yellow green.

Finally, I went over the right half of the stems with jade green and then the right edge with dark brown.

Leaves

Then onto the leaves. Base of leaves is harvest gold, followed by yellow green, then jade green.

Next the leaf vein. Base is bronze yellow followed by brown and then gone over with a hint of raspberry.

To polish up the leaf, I used my colorless blending pencil to go over the colors and blend them a bit better together.

Flowers

After finishing up the leaves, I colored in the flowers. The base is white and I used sand and cool gray for shading.

I didn't keep good track of the colors from this point, but I think it gives you a good idea of how I layered colors to get what I want and used different colors for shading.

Body

First a base of sand and then I believe the color is tan.

For the trim (and the leaves right next to the berries), I started with a layer of yellow green, followed by jade green, and then regular green.

Wings

For the wings, I used white as the base. The little sections are done in yellow and I used cool gray for shading.

Hair

For the hair we started off with sand and tan then I used long strokes of light brown, brown, and dark brown.

Finished

After that it was just a few more finishing touches. In particular, I went over the thorny areas on the stems with the raspberry color.

Looking for more?

First, Stan! has a great coloring and adventure book called Dungeoneering 101. The pdf is just $2. Since it's suitable for ages 6 and up, the drawings won't necessarily be as intricate as many adult coloring books, but I had a bunch of fun coloring one of the pages during a recent business trip.

There's also a KickStarter for "All the Colors of Magic" volumes 2-4.

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