Some Pictures from Hannah Lynn's New Book: Whimsy Girls at Work

Hannah Lynn, one of my favorite coloring book artists, has done it again.  This time, she created a fun and whimsical book portraying women in a variety of jobs.  This may be the first of two books, as she said she had so many ideas for this book, it was hard to chose which ones to include.  All I can say is, I hope she has a second book, especially if it's as wonderful and fun as the first one.  So far, I've only colored two pictures from this book, but I've printed out plenty more that I can't wait to color (I opted for the digital edition of this book instead of the physical book).

Before jumping into my picture, a few important details.  First, Hannah Lynn drew two versions of each picture: one that is more detailed and one that is more simplified.  She does the same thing with the monthly exclusive pictures you can get by supporting her on Patreon.  This is the first time she's done this for a book though (at least that I've seen).  Also, I couldn't find my bag of colored pencils.  Luckily, a few months ago Amazon had a 120 count of Crayola colored pencils on sale, so I bought those for when my pencils were on their last leg.  I wanted to wait to open them, but I was also so excited to finally get to use them.  It might only be an extra 20 colors, but it really does make a huge difference.  With all that out of the way, on to my pictures.

The first picture I colored is titled "Veronica's Patients".  As soon as I saw this picture, I knew I wanted to go with my usual softer, pastel-type colors.  I have no idea why, but I just love using pastel color palettes when I color, even though I don't really wear pastel colors or use them in my day to day life on a regular basis.  I did step outside my comfort zone with this picture, however, when I colored her skin and hair.  I tend to color people with lighter skin and dark hair (so they look very similar to me).  This hair, however, reminded me of a former student of mine, who always wore her hair natural in a giant bun on top of her head, very similar to the girl in this picture.  That student had significantly darker skin, but this is my homage to her.

I did struggle a little bit with the animals, as I wanted them to all have different coloring, and I didn't want them to blend in with any of the neutral tones I used, especially with the cabinets behind them.  I'm not entirely thrilled how the darker of the two dogs came out.  I tried to blend two brown tones together, which I know never works out, but I was optimistic that it would work out this time.  It didn't turn out terribly, but it definitely could have come out a little better.

Something I like to do when I color is put all the pencils I use to one side so they're all in one place.  Then, when I'm done coloring, I like to count how many I used.  It's weird, I know, but that doesn't mean I'll stop doing it.  It might not look like it, but I used a whopping 54 colors in this picture, which is more than I usually use.  For some, it's typical to use well over 54 colors because they do so much shading.  I am not nearly that skilled at coloring, so I don't use three or four colors for a simple pair of pants (not including things such as buttons or other details).

The other picture I colored is titled "Seaside Signing".  Once again, I stepped outside my comfort zone in a few ways for this picture.  You'll notice right away that the colors are extremely different.  I went for much bolder colors, with the exception of the seaside scene in the window.  It's not that I don't use these darker, bolder colors, it's just not as often.  To me, however, this book store reminded me of something warmer, with wood paneling on the walls and something more aligned with jewel tones.  I did manage to sneak some softer colors in, such as the seaside scene and in her scarf, but that's about it.

Another way I stepped outside my comfort zone was by making the author have red hair.  Like I said before, I usually color brunettes.  I have no idea why, I just do.  While I love the red hair next to the burgundy for her pantsuit, I'm not entirely thrilled with how the hair came out.  I used three different shades of orange for the hair, I think it's just a little too much.  I should have stuck with the two darker shades and not the lightest of the three.  Oh well, it doesn't look awful, but I just feel like it could look a little bit better.

I'm also not entirely thrilled with the colors I made the awning in the window.  It was pretty much the last thing I colored, I had no idea what colors to use, so I just went with two colors I knew looked fairly good together.  While these colors do look pretty good together, they don't look good here.  I feel like a lot of my attention is drawn to that window, not to the author signing books, which should be your main focus.

Overall, Hannah Lynn knocked it out of the park with this book.  The pictures are incredibly detailed and show a wide range of jobs.  I hope she does a second volume for this book, as it's so much fun to see different careers represented.  You can find the book on Etsy and Amazon.

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Is It Too Early For Some Deborah Muller Christmas Coloring?

The answer is no, no it is not.  Or at least that's what I'm telling myself.  First, a little bit about Deborah Muller.  Like Hannah Lynn, Deborah Muller is an artist I stumbled upon on Amazon when I first started my coloring book obsession about two years ago.  Right now, I have about four main companies/artists I buy my books from: Jade Summer, Coloring Book Cafe, Hannah Lynn and Deborah Muller.  Jade Summer and Coloring Book Cafe are companies; they employ multiple artists who do the artwork for them.  Hannah Lynn and Deborah Muller, on the other hand, are individual artists.  While Jade Summer will always have a special place in my heart (they were the first adult coloring books I started actively buying on a regular basis), I tend to prefer the individual artists just a little bit more.  I find they're more personable on social media, they interact with you more, encourage your art more and tend to be a little friendlier.  That's not to say they aren't friendly on Jade Summer and Coloring Book Cafe's social media, but they're a company, they lack a certain personalization.  You become invested in what the individual artists share about their personal lives, you see them on Facebook all the time looking at the artwork, and you feel a real connection to them.  For that reason, I prefer those Facebook groups and social media just a little bit more.

I started by Deborah Muller Christmas coloring extravaganza with this little cutie from one of her new holiday books: Gnome for the Holidays.  At first, I wasn't entirely sure if I would like this book, but the flip through online convinced me enough to check it out.  It's so adorable, I know I made the right decision.  One thing I enjoy about Deborah's books is the little designs all over the place.  Instead of adding regular details n the mountains, she adds circles, little lines, etc.  At first, it was a little intimidating for me, because I didn't know how to color them, but I just went with the flow.  I knew I wanted cool, arctic colors to go with the picture, so I went along with that to make the mountains pop a little bit in the background.  The color I used for the background (Outerspace) is one of my favorites to use for night skies because it's a SUPER dark blue that looks almost black, but isn't.  The problem is that streaks show in the coloring very easily.  The good new is that also blends really easily, so I'm able to fix that problem.

My blending technique is really simple.  Sometimes I use a white colored pencil, but that's extremely rare.  Most of the time, I take little scraps of toilet paper and rub it across the colors I want blended.  It makes such a huge difference.  As I've worked with Crayola colored pencils over the yeas, I've found that the blues blend the best, while the browns blend the worst.  I have no idea why, but it's always extremely difficult for me to blend brown colors (especially when I layer colors, which I haven't been doing a lot of lately).

When I finished this picture, I liked it, but I wasn't in love with it.  I had already flipped through the book and picked a second picture to color for the day.

When I saw this picture, I immediately thought of Santa Clause (even though it's a goat in the background, not a reindeer).  After relying so much on blues and coloring such a dark picture, I knew I wanted something lighter.  I'll be honest, I'm not entirely thrilled with how his outfit turned out, but I struggled a little with how to color it.  I didn't want all red, which is why I added the random light green stripes to break things up a little bit.  Despite that, I really do love this picture.  First of all, I love how bright it is, it's such a huge difference from the first picture I created.  I also like how the face came out on the gnome, I finally got the skin tones down to something that looks good.  Finally, the trees are so adorable.  I wasn't sure how the red circles would look, along with all the different shades of green in the trees.  I've noticed that while I'm coloring, sometimes I think what I'm doing looks terrible.  I just power through it though, as I trust my instincts.  The overwhelming majority of the time, once the picture is done, I'm so thrilled with the outcome because I went with my instincts and trusted my gut.  That's the case with this picture.  Is it perfect?  No.  But I'm pleased with how it came out, and I just think it's adorable.

This picture is from the other Deborah Muller holiday release (she has a third one planned, but it hasn't been released yet), called A Merry Mermaid Christmas.  As the title implies, it's all mermaids celebrating the holidays.  Mermaids are Deborah's specialty, she even calls her company "Chubby Mermaid Art".  Just like the gnome book, I wasn't entirely sure how I'd feel about it when I heard it was being released, but once I saw the flip through, I thought it was adorable.  Most artists show mermaids in warm, tropical environments, but that isn't the case here.  Deborah's are hanging out with polar bears and penguins, bundled up in gorgeous winter outfits and with Christmas trees.  It's definitely a fun take on traditional mermaids.

This wasn't the first picture I picked to do from this book, but it's the one I ultimately decided to color, and the other one would have to wait for another time.  It's a little hard to tell in this picture, but I really messed up the hair.  I attempted to layer some light blue over some timberwolf grey.  I should have known better, I've attempted to do this color layering combination before, and it didn't end well that time either.  To make matters worse, I completely forgot that there's this stunning grey/light blue color already in the Crayola 100 pack called wild blue yonder, and I use it when I want a sky color that's not as bright as sky blue.  I feel so foolish that I forgot about that color, especially because it's one of my go-to colors.

Despite that little setback, I'm pretty pleased with how this picture turned out.  I think it's adorable, and I love the little penguin and seal.  I feel like the splash of color with the starfish and circles in the top left corner is a little bright, but I didn't want it to blend in too much with the rest of the background.

I have two more Deborah Muller Christmas pictures I want to color from her books from last year, but that will have to wait for another post.  In the mean time, her new books are adorable, whimsical and definitely worth adding to your coloring book collection.

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A Little Hannah Lynn Coloring to Start My Week

The other day the coloring bug set in for me.  As I scrolled through Facebook, I saw some gorgeous pictures from one of the groups I'm in and decided I wanted to color a little bit too.  That's how it works for me when it comes to my many hobbies: I won't do one for ages (weeks or months even), then, one day, out of the blue I'll want to do it.  I've been working really hard on finding a balance when it comes to bouncing between hobbies, and I've gotten a little better, but there are just so many, I can't do it all at once.

I pick pictures to color like I pick books to read: a poke around my collection until something catches my attention.  I usually tend to know what artist or company I want to color, so I pull those books and go from there.  Over the summer and the other day, I was on a Hannah Lynn kick, which is perfectly fine with me.  I get new pages from her once or twice a month, and I have many of her digital and hard copy books.  She does beautiful artwork for a wide range of topics.

The first picture I colored was Jacqueline from Steampunk Darlings.  I'm going to be honest, I bought this book on a whim.  Sometimes I'm drawn to a book because I love every single page, and before I even get the book in my hands I have ideas for many of the pages (more on that later).  Unfortunately, that wasn't the case for this book.  Don't get me wrong, the artwork is absolutely stunning (as always), and I definitely appreciate and like steampunk style, but I've struggled so much with how to color these pictures.  I can't pick out color schemes.  In my mind, steampunk is very metallic looking, but I don't know how to properly convey that on paper, especially since my coloring skills are mediocre at best.  I'm part of two different Facebook groups for Hannah Lynn, and I love looking at all the beautiful work there.

I'm going to be honest, that's where I got the idea for the color scheme for this piece.  Part of me feels gross for admitting that, like I stole someone else's idea.  I really hope that artist doesn't mind.  Trust me, mine looks nothing like the original (I can't even remember who colored it, I saw it ages ago and couldn't get it out of my head).  The style and colors for this picture are based on Black Widow from the Avengers, although Natasha Romanov has brighter red hair, while I went for mahogany with red and maroon mixed in to add some texture.  Another thing that really worried me about this picture was the lack of color.  The overwhelming majority of the picture is done in shades of grey or black, with a little bit of red and gold thrown in for accents (not to mention her skin tone).  As I colored, it was hard to get a firm understanding of how the final product would look, but by the time I got concerned, I was already committed to this color scheme, so there wasn't a lot I could do about it.  Well, my worries were for nought, as I absolutely love how it looks now.  I do wish I had done more silver on the goggles instead of gold, but if that's my only complaint, then I think I did a pretty good job.

Another picture I colored this week is called "Leprechaun's Treasure".  Also by Hannah Lynn, this can be found in her Mythical Maidens and Curious Creatures book.  Not only is this her newest book, it happens to be one of my favorites.  I'm fortunate enough to have seen pictures for this book over the few weeks leading up to its release, and I was so excited to get my hands on it.  Seriously, the pictures are absolutely gorgeous, and there's such a wide range of different mythical creatures.  If you're looking for a fantasy coloring book, this is definitely one you should get!  Usually I opt for hard copies of books, but I got a digital copy of this one.  The main reason was that there were a few pictures I wanted to color a few times with different color schemes.  I usually only color a picture once, and if there are double printed (which is common in many of Hannah Lynn's books, along with Jade Summer's), I don't color the picture the second time around until I've colored all the pictures at least once.

This picture was one I had printed a while ago, but it never really called out to me until just then ( I guess I was on a "redheads with one eye covered" kick or something).  Once again, there was a lot of the same color in this picture (I used about five different shades of green), although it wasn't nearly as bad as the Steampunk Darlings picture I colored earlier.  While this picture definitely has some more color than the other picture, I don't like it as much as the previous picture.  That's not to say I hate how it turned out, because that's definitely not the case, I just like the one from Steampunk Darlings just a little bit more.  I think it's because the colors went on the paper smoother on the other one because of the paper quality (the leprechaun one I used my own cheap computer paper).  Part of me is tempted to invest in higher quality printer paper, but I'm just a casual colorer, so I'd rather spend my money on more books.  I don't even use fancy colored pencils, just Crayolas.  It works for me, and that's all that matters.

The last picture I want to talk about is Lanai Time from Maui Mermaids, because who doesn't need a little bit of tropical during the season's first cold snap?  I won a digital copy of this book through a drawing on Hannah Lynn's Facebook page, and while the pictures are gorgeous (as always), they haven't spoken to me until now.  I printed out a few pages, and I originally planned on coloring another one first, but when I saw this one, I knew it was the one I had to color.  This reminded me a lot of Queen Liliuokalani, Hawaii's last queen before America took over (I just glossed over everything, my knowledge on that is extremely limited at best, I haven't learned about it since 9th grade).  Many of the pictures of Queen Liliuokalani show her as being much older, but there are a few from when she was a young girl too (albeit, in black and white). 

I worried about the multiple shades of brown taking up the center of this picture with her skin, hair and chair, but I think it all came out fine since I used very distinct shades, although I did use one of the colors I used as highlights in her hair also for the coconut.  I had a lot of fun coloring the dress, the ferns and the mountains in the background because I used colors I don't use that often.  Pink isn't one of my favorite colors, not by a longshot, but I still use it fairly often.  When I do, I tend to use softer shades like regular pink or tickle me pink.  In this case, however, I went for a brighter pink (I'll admit, I don't remember the exact name if it, it might be blush).  For the ferns I went literal and used fern green, and the mountains are tropical green.  Both are colors I don't use very often, although I'm not entirely sure why.  I guess I don't do too many tropical pictures, so neither of them are particularly useful.  Although, I do use fern green every once in a while when I need another shade of green for something.  I also enjoyed using cerulean blue for the ocean.  Once again, it's a color I enjoy and appreciate, but not one I use very often.  I tend to like my oceans and skies more subdued, to blend into the background (no pun intended), but it seemed wrong to not have vivid blue seas in a tropical paradise.  Plus, I think the cerulean looks absolutely stunning alongside the fern.  That's definitely a color combination I'm going to have to remember for future reference.

When I started writing out this post, I didn't think I'd have a lot to say.  I'd simply show off my mediocre coloring, then say a few sentences about each piece and move out.  Overall, I'm shocked that I had so much to say about something as simple as some pieces I've colored.  I think what shocks me even more though, is the fact that you've kept on reading until the very end.  If you've made it this far, I appreciate it!  Make sure to come back, I'll have more coloring pieces in another post.

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