How to colour Funky Hand Doodlewords digital stamps

Hi there! Once again it has been too long since I have posted here.  It's for a good reason I promise, I've been working on the Christmas Funky Hand releases which my wonderful Design Team are pretty much finished with so, they will be released very soon.  Look out for some Bloggy fun to celebrate the releases.

On the Get Funky and Craft Blog I posted a technique for matching your Promarker colours to the backing papers you want to use when colouring in the Funky Hand Doodlewords digital stamps.  I thought I would share it here as well incase you had missed it there.

Here are my tips for colouring in Funky Hand Doodlewords digital stamps.  Obviously this is my own idea for matching up the colours. If you have any other tips please add them in the comment section, I'd love to hear more ideas.

Ok, so first off you need to decide which Doodlewords Digital stamp you want to colour, there are quite a few now and very soon there will be Christmas themed ones.  Then, you need to decide on your Funky Hand backing paper collection.  I've chosen the Thank You Doodleword digital stamp and the backing paper is from the Spring Has Sprung download.

When I design all the backing papers for Funky Hand, whether they are on downloadable collections or on the craft CD ROMs, I always use FIVE different colours.  Each backing paper pattern may not have all the colours on but they are all made up of the same five colours.  That's why it is easy to mix and match the backing papers in a collection together.  Anyway, there is pretty much always a striped paper and when colouring your Doodleword digital stamps to match with a collection this is where you will find all the colours in that collection laid out nicely. 

So, print off the striped paper from the collection and the digital stamp. I have printed my digital stamp onto Neenah Classic Crest card which is great for using Promarkers on as they blend well on it. The backing paper I printed onto white card. This is where the fun starts, matching the colours.  I have used Promarkers but the same technique will work for any pens you want to use.

 
The image above is the striped backing paper on the white card underneath some scrap Neenah Classic Crest card, the same as I have printed my digital stamp onto.  It's important to use the same product that you have printed your stamp on to or the colours wont come out the same when you colour the stamp.  Now start testing the Promarkers you have against the backing paper collection colours.  As you can see it took me a few goes with different pens until I found the match I was happy with.  Something I have learned is that you should allow the ink you have matched to dry for a few seconds as the colour changes and many times I have tried a pen colour, thought it was too dark and put it away only to discover it was perfect and I couldn't remember which one it was!

I decided on my five colours for this digital stamp..

They are, Tropical Orchid (Special Edition), Powder Blue, Pink Carnation, Eggnog and Leaf Green.  I've told you what colours I decided on just for interest.  These ones are possibly not what you would choose using the same backing paper download collection.  The reasons for that are, what paper or card you print your backing papers onto which will have an effect on the colours that you will see.  It also depends on the printer you are using if it's an Inkjet or Laser.  How much ink is in your printer? If even one colour is low that can have an effect on the colours that you get when you print out the digital backing paper. So, don't just follow what I have said, test it out for yourself.

So, Promarker colours are chosen, now you need to think about how you want to colour the letters in the Doodlewords digital stamp. The images are quite whimsical so you can mix all the colours together on one letter like this..

 
Or perhaps you would prefer to only use two colours like this..

The colouring is completely up to you.  These stamps are great for newer colourers, like me, as they are pretty easy to colour but you can get a really great effect. Which makes the colouring more fun when you start out as you actually want to use what you have coloured on your card creations.

Here is the Thank You Doodlewords digital stamp completed, layered over the striped backing paper...

I think it has matched the backing paper pretty well, what do you think?

OK, so there you are my tips for colouring Doodlewords digital stamps.  I hope you found them helpful.  As I said at the beginning of this post the new Christmas downloads will be released pretty soon and they include three Christmas themed Doodlewords digital stamps.  I've had fun using this technique matching up the colours from the new backing paper collections.  As it's Christmas maybe I will use those Metallic markers as well.  We shall see.

Thanks for visiting, speak again soon
Anice xx