[** Update: downloads are archived after two months—or more—so patrons have plenty of time to access them. Sometimes it’s much longer! I removed these over a year after posting…  I’m making the post public when I archive the downloads, so more of you can see the idea and the process. Feedback welcome! —Kir, February 2021 **]

“Hope (dragon bouquet)” is another from the Tiny Tin Series. Here’s the post showing the almost finished original:  https://www.patreon.com/posts/wips-in-30s-19079556 

As you know, I like to post colored or partly colored images for the previews for the coloring pages. For the last several I’ve been messing these up with digital coloring in Photoshop (excuse to learn stuff!) but since recently  I was using watercolors more, I thought I’d remind myself how to print these and then paint.

So this preview, I printed the line art on half a sheet of watercolor paper. You can usually fiddle around with scaling to make this work for you if your printer will allow you to use anything other than letter or A4 paper. This particular paper is “student grade” and I picked up a bunch of it at AC Moore (before they went out of business). It’s moderately crappy paper, actually, but helpful for practicing. heavy for the printer (HP 8600 AiO), but the ink dries nicely and then I can paint over or around it.   And I don’t mind screwing up because it’s cheap and I always need the practice. 

I painted in some water in the areas I wanted although I think I could have put the paper down on a board and wetted the whole thing. It might still buckle this much though. But it didn’t matter, I was (am) having fun. The paint on my tray was a bit dry in spots which is why there’s some streaky texture over in the right side of it. 

And then it occurred to me to wonder: what if I …or you …. printed in gray instead of black? Well, I don’t know, but if you would like to a lighter version of these let me know. I can likely work out something along those lines.

Have fun coloring!