adding color to line work

right at the edge of Fall we signed up for Creativebug and started stiching and drawing like mad.  i’ve enjoyed the  Basic Line Drawing class taught by Lisa Congdon.  using her ideas as spring boards, my journal is filling up with drawings that i really like.  in one of the class chats, Lisa mentioned that she scans some of her drawings into the computer to add color with Photoshop.  ah! so that’s how she does it.  she joked that that was another class entirely, but gave the advice to scan in black + white.

i had been wanting to try it myself.  those wide, flat fields of color are just so attractive and restful to my eye.  i also needed to make a blog button for the upcoming 31 Days challenge.  so i scanned a drawing of a poppy–how very Lisa Congdon of me! and AP helped me to add color using the free program called GIMP.  he knows how to use Photoshop and GIMP, so it was very straightforward for him to add color to what i had drawn with the paint bucket tool.  the results are pretty enough that i want to learn how to use the basic features myself.  i have some concentric circles that are begging for some color! then i asked Mr. Google how to make a blog button.  following advice from this tutorial, i pasted the image into Picmonkey and from there saved it to the cloud. ta-da! button made.

it’s probably a bit on the small, hard-to-read side, but hopefully the clean white space and pop of color makes you want to click on over to investigate.  i am really pleased with how it turned out…now i just have to write the series to go along with such a pretty poppy!