Hello bellas!

It’s time for another Scenic Saturday here on the Bellarific blog and with signs of spring popping up all around, I was inspired to ink up these adorable Tiny Townies Under an Umbrella. The care and concern between these two besties tugs at my heart so I paired them with one of the sentiments from the Encouragement Sentiment set to really drive that love home.

Since my last couple cards have been pretty clean and simple as far as coloring goes, I was excited to get back to creating a full background for them. Plus, rainy day scenes are so much fun to color! The reason I say that is because even colorists who are convinced they can’t do a freehand background “because they can’t draw” can create a rainy day. I say this with confidence because as long as you can make long vertical brush strokes and shorter horizontal brushstrokes then you can color a rainy day. The key is in selecting de-saturated colors, those are the duller colors that have a lot of grey tone to them and being willing to do a lot of layering. I usually start with my greens, choose a height for the horizon line and pull up from there in wide brush strokes that taper at the top. These become a tree line, simple as that. I then add horizontal brush strokes in green, grey or both, beneath the ‘trees’ that becomes the ground. Don’t forget to add some of the lighter colors that you used on your character stamp immediately beneath them as well. This will become their reflection and help ground them in the scene. If you want to hint at buildings in the background all you have to do is grab a light grey and add in a few broad vertical strokes until you have the rectangle shape as wide as you want it. Some small vertical hash marks in a mid-tone grey easily become windows on the buildings. Now all you have to do is grab a handful of blue or other cool hued markers to start adding in the rain. You will repeat the horizontal brushstrokes down low on your card to make it look like water pooling on the ground and vertical strokes falling from the top of the card to that ground. Taking these blues right over top the greens and greys and any other colors you throw in the background will automatically blur the scene into an abstract impression of a rainy day. The quicker you lay down colors, the wetter your card stock will be which will help blend the colors easily and give everything that washed out look. Once your background is dry you can take your colorless blender and add in more vertical strokes here and there as well as some vertical lines from a white gel pen for a really nice finishing touch. 

I hope this brief walk through of my process at least shows that not every background has to be full of detailed images and that loosening up and just having fun laying down colors in random patterns can be quite satisfying too. 🙂

Stay crafty my friends!