A little sky & cloud tutorial...

**2nd post for today - please scroll down for my Pink Gem DT card**

I've been asked many times for colouring tutorials and I have always resisted, simply because there are so many out there already doing a fantastic job and I didn't think there was really a need for me to add to that.  However... lots of people ask me how I colour my sky backgrounds, and what I tend to do is refer them to this tutorial that got me started - I adapted it first for promarkers and then for flexmarkers, and my sky now ends up looking quite different to the one in the tutorial... it's still a great one to watch though!

I don't have the facilities to make a video - actually our camera does take video but I'm not sure how successful that would be, might try that another day.  So this is just a very quick, simple picture tutorial to give you an idea of how I colour sky... (please excuse my messy pad underneath - I always work with a sketch pad under my images).  The image I'm using is Denny with Watering Can, which is Janet's current freebie at Pink Gem Designs - go and get him while you can :o)

Firstly, the colours I use are Glacier Blue, Cloud Blue, Blue Grey 2 Flexmarkers and the Promarker Blender pen.  But you can easily adapt it if you're using promarkers, just choose a light and slightly darker blue and one of the lighter greys.

Start with Glacier Blue (or any light blue) and just add some wobbly lines/ shapes - try not to think about it too much, you want it to be fairly random!  It'll be quite different each time you do it.

You can see that towards the bottom I add lots of smaller streaks, rather than big areas of blue.

Then go in with Cloud Blue (or whatever darker blue you're using) and add some random scribble over the top of your lighter blue.

Now add the Blue Grey 2 (or any light grey) to give your clouds a bit of definition.

Go over the whole thing with the wide nib of your blender pen - it takes a few minutes to settle down to the right colour so give it a little while.  If you look at this card I posted on my blog earlier, you can see how it all looks when you've coloured in the rest of the image.

Always colour your sky before the rest of the image - there's nothing worse than blending your sky into areas you've already spent ages colouring!  I would also trim this a little, and then use Antique Linen distress ink around the edges to soften the look.

I hope this helps some of you - oh, also the card I'm using for this one is Elegance Satin from Joanna Sheen, just in case you were wondering (no connection, etc)!