Find Out If You’re a $100 Winner + Create in Color with Sandy Allnock

Before we get to today's post, we have our randomly selected New Product Launch winners. Both of these lucky winners will receive a $100 Shopping Spree in the MFT boutique.

from Amy’s blog: Casandra Bennett

from Inge’s blog: Kathy Dippner

Congratulations to you both! Please send an email to erica@mftstamps.com to claim your prize. Thank you to everyone that commented on our Design Team blogs — we appreciate every comment!

Soft pencil strokes on a lightly textured card stock is a winning combination for achieving a gorgeous range of skin tones. The new Adorable Adventures stamp set from Birdie Brown, with its quartet of explorers, is an ideal choice for practicing your technique and expanding your coloring skills. And who better to walk you through the process than Sandy?

TGIF, coloring friends! I’ve been coloring different skin tones for years now — not as much in colored pencils as other mediums, but the Adorable Adventures stamp set totally inspired me to get out my Luminance pencils and give it a go.

I stamped the images with Kraft Premium Dye Ink onto Primitive White Card Stock — it has little flecks in it that go really well with pencil texture, and the softness of the paper works nicely with pencils!

While you may have a different brand of pencils, play with the colors you have — get out all your browns and tans, even lighter yellows and pinks, and stamp a whole bunch of faces in a row. Try out which colors work best, and *how much* of each color is needed to create a different skin tone. These are the Luminance colors I used, so you might be able to compare your set of pencils to this one and see if you can make the same kinds of skin colors.

I find that when I try to put shadows all around the edges of faces and blend inward, the tones get dark fast. Why? Because that center point has colors blending in from all over! If I choose a light source, like left or right, I only have one side to blend into the light areas from darks. You might try that if you have similar troubles.

As for scenes, sometimes a simple hillside and a hint of a sky are enough to give it a “setting.” My crazy backgrounds aren’t necessary to make an adorable card!

One other benefit of putting lots of awesome time into coloring images on my card is I'm able to keep the design parts of the card much simpler than many! I don’t add lots of embellishments, I just trim it down so some of the card base shows, and it’s usually pretty much done and ready to hit the mail!

One of the other stamps in the new release that I want to play with is the Old Friends set — I want to try skin tones in watercolor on that one. Keep your eyes peeled, that could appear on my social feed in the near future when I find some time under the couch cushions!

Enjoy the last bits of summer!

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