Blendabilities ....and a partridge in a pear tree!

In this post I thought I would just give some basic tips for colouring with Blendabilities... oops... I almost wrote Belindabilities : ]   I keep doing that!

This stamp set " Partridge & Pears" is quite good to colour with blendabilities, because the sections are small  enough to be coloured easily, but not so small that they're too fiddly, even though there is a lot of leaves. 

Stamps: Partridge & Pears
Card stock: Whisper White, Basic Gray & Smoky Slate.
Blendabilities: Old Olive, Crumb Cake, Daffodil Delight, Smoky Slate, Pumpkin Pie, Ivory, Marina Mist & Colour Lifter.
Ink: Memento Black & Smoky Slate.
Extras: Window Frames Collection Framelits & Whisper White Ribbon.

Pears: Old Olive & Daffodil Delight. I used dots to start with the darker colours first, because pears sometimes look spotty (unless that's just me). My general rule is to use the darker colours around the edges, then build it up with the lighter colours. It's helps if you imagine a light source & shadow area, as if the sun is shining from one direction & casting shadow in the other.

Tree Trunk & Branches: Crumb Cake- You can tell I wasn't being very fussy here, just using strokes, because trees are streaky : ) Again remember to keep the direction of your light source consistent.

Leaves: Old Olive- I guess if I could give any guidelines here it would be starting in the corner  of the leaf closest the stem, then build on that. Basically you just want to add dimension with the dark & light shades, so the leaves don't look flat.

Fruit: Daffodil Delight & Old Olive- I guess this is the baby fruit, it's so small you only need to dot it with the bullet end.

Partridge: Smoky Slate, Ivory, Colour Lifter & Pumpkin Pie.
You may be wondering why I'm colouring the partridge on a scrap of card stock here. Well honestly I didn't like the way the other one turned out, so I decided to colour & cut another one to stick on top. As a crafter I often find myself looking for ways to cover mistakes, this is one of them!

The Wing: Smoky Slate, Marina Mist, Colour Lifter, Ivory & Bronze.
If you've had much experience with alcohol markers you may have used the tip-to-tip technique,this is much the same except with acetate (or any clean plastic surface). Basically the acetate is your paint pallet to pick up extra colours.
Here I scribbled some Marina Mist onto the acetate, then picked up the blue colour with Lightest of the Smoky Slate. Just like blender pens the extra (or added) colour will run out as you colour, but will tint the colour slightly, in this case to a bluish gray. You just need to remember to scribble the excess of the other colour off the marker when you've finished,  you don't want to permanently taint your markers. 

I know all the other photos are probably a bit small to see all the details that I've tried to explain, so hopefully this helps give a better picture.

Dimensionals popping up the partridge & the wing.

I coloured & cut out  a few extra leaves because the card just looked like it needed something else.
Leaves: Old Olive & Daffodil Delight.