Coloring book craze

In addition to drawing and coloring my own art I also like to color adult coloring books. However I never really cared for the mandala - style of coloring books you see in department stores. I order a lot of stuff from Adlibris which is an online book store for Scandinavia. I took a spin through their coloring book selection and I stumbled upon a coloring book by Lena Furberg called 'Måla Hästar' (ENG. Paint Horses).


Lena is a long time illustrator for the Swedish horse magazine Min Häst and we also have 'a sister magazine' here in Finland called Hevoshullu. Lena's comics and drawings were one of my biggest inspirations  when I was a teenager. When she released her own drawing school, I drew horses like crazy. The influence of Lena's work can still be seen in my artwork to this day.

So when I saw her coloring book I knew I must have it! I've had it for a while now and I've colored several images which I want to share with you:

The first image I colored. I was very surprised how well the paper took layers of colored pencil even if it was so smooth.

I really loved coloring this one as it had so many little details.

This one was a real challenge as I wanted to create this dusky atmosphere. I don't even remember how long I spent with the blue in the background to make it dark enough.

This one was very fun. I don't know how I got the gold & silver idea but it just popped into my head. I could've worked a bit more on the red flowers though.

This one I colored very recently. For some reason this picture was screaming palomino.

I always use colored pencils for coloring the images. I mainly use Faber Castell Polychromos but I also use Caran D'Ache Luminance for tonal control and blending. The white Luminance pencil is amazing for blending. But it does lighten the colors. It's also worth noting that Luminance pencils are wax based so one must be vary of wax bloom. I haven't tested colorless blenders on these pages. I might try a Caran D'Ache Full Blender Bright on my next piece.

I also searched around DeviantArt to see if there are any coloring groups around. And well enough I stumbled upon a group called Color-Me-Club. I found this amazing mermaid lineart drawn by AshDayArt and I decided to print it out, trace it onto Hahnemühle Nostalgie paper and then color it.

I tried to keep the colors toned down in order to create an underwater feeling.

I used my usual combo of Polychromos and Luminance. As I finished coloring the different sections I re-drew the pencil lines with a mechanical pencil loaded with 3B lead. I never use fine-liners for my artwork. I have rather unsteady hands sometimes and fine-liners make me even more nervous as I can't erase the ink. I also feel that inked lines are a bit too harsh for my way of coloring.

I had recently purchased some Brush and Pencil Textured Fixative and I wanted to try it on this paper. Sadly the spray was a bit too wet for this particular paper and it warped pretty badly. I tried fixing it once I was done with the coloring by wetting the back of the paper and then putting it under weights over night but it just made things worse by causing waves on the paper surface. It was hard to get a good scan after this as my scanner picks up even the tiniest of details.

So if you need to color traced images like this then I'd recommend using mixed-media paper at least. Preferably hot press watercolor paper to prevent disasters like this.

New coloring books

 

I recently took another look at Adlibris' coloring book selection and I stumbled upon Mass Effect and Dragon Age coloring books! Seeing as I've played both game series' this was an awesome find. I can't wait to paint my favorite characters and creatures. When I got the books and skimmed through them I was perhaps a little disappointed about a few drawings since they're kind of stylized and certain characters were somewhat unrecognizable (Alistair and Kaidan being among them which is a shame since I romanced both).

Here they are. Plenty of new pages to color.

Also in case you've missed the news: The Witcher is getting it's own coloring book! It will be released on September. I hope I will be among the first to order it so it doesn't go out of stock.

That's it for now. In the future I might write a little tips-and-tricks guide and give you a review of my coloring process.

Witcher 3 and NVidia Ansel

Since I don't really have any art stuff to share right now, let's start with gaming.

Throughout the years I've liked to take screenshots of games like The Elder Scrolls: Morrowind and Oblivion and some others as well. I've used programs like FRAPS and recently I also tried MSI Afterburner. However the quality of the screenshots were always a bit lacking.

I searched around for a more higher resolution solution and stumbled upon NVidia Ansel. The first thing to note about this program is that it only works with selected NVidia video cards and only with a handful of newer games. I have an NVidia GeForce GTX 1060 3GB so I decided to take the program for a spin and try it on Witcher 3.

You enable the screenshot overlay by pressing Alt + F2 ingame. The overlay freezes the game and from there you can change all kinds of stuff like the camera angle and the type of screenshot. This is really important as the type you want is 'super resolution'. But obviously it's worth noting that the files taken with super resolution will be BIG. I always use the lowest setting for the resolution as I simply don't have the need for incredibly large images.

Also, if you are using the console and free camera mod for the game then the console might open as you press F2. This is kind of annoying but it doesn't have to be too big of an issue. Just re-try it a few times and you will get a console-free screenshot. The reason why I also keep the free camera mod is that Ansel does not work during cutscenes.

Now onward to some examples:

Because Ansel freezes the image when you enable it, it's great for capturing action shots in great detail.

Thanks to super resolution, the screenshots display a whopping amount of details.

When you freeze the image and enable Ansel, you are able to move around in the world freely and set up your camera for a perfect composition.

Ansel keeps rendering the game world as you move around so you don't have to shoot only the targets that are right next to Geralt. You also won't experience glitchy stuff that you get with the free camera mod.

Ansel is also great for shooting landscapes as the details are not lost and blurred out.

I find that some other screenshot programs don't really capture lighting accurately enough. Since Ansel works a bit differently, the lighting always shows as it should.

All levels of depth in a landscape are shown because Ansel keeps on rendering the environment as you move the camera. It does have it's limits though so feel free to experiment.

That's it for now. I hope you enjoyed the pretty screenshots. I have loads of screens in my folder and I will be uploading them as I journey on in the world of Witcher 3. I'm about to finish the main campaign on my current play-through and will be heading to the expansion areas soon. I can't wait to test out Ansel in Toussaint!

The blog is now in English

Hello to all readers, both new and old. I've been writing a blog for a while now but it's been only in Finnish. I tried to write both in English and Finnish and always translated all my texts but it was very draining in the end.

I thought that choosing Finnish would be the right choice in the end but after a few months I found myself stranded with barely any readers or Finnish blogs that I would want to read myself. There's so much more information available in English and I've always felt more comfortable searching for that said information. Since the first days I started using the internet back in the 90's I've been a part of a vast international community and I felt the need to get back to that community.

So long story short, welcome to my blog about traditional art, coloring books and gaming. Sometimes I might also share some deeper thoughts about life or some particular events and also stuff about my cats but mostly I will try to focus on the three main themes so the blog would stay more compact and consistent.

So again, welcome everyone and I hope you will enjoy seeing some of the stuff that I do 😊