GUEST ARTIST FEATURE: Colored Pencils and Gamsol with Chari Moss

Hello crafty friends, it’s Chari Moss from MossyMade, and I am delighted to be a guest on the WPlus9 blog today. I love Dawn’s work, especially her watercoloring. I myself am not a watercolor wonder; I’m much more comfortable with markers or pencils. So today’s card features an ink blended background and some colored pencil work using the new Friends for all Seasons: Summer stamp set and Companion Die.

I love the soft look you can get from colored pencils, especially when you blend them well. I like to use Gamsol to blend my pencils when I want a smooth look like I did on this card, but you can also just blend them with each other for a more textured look. What I have learned with pencils is it is best to start light and build the layers up to get the look you want.

I've put together a video to walk you through it all step by step below.

Watch above or watch in HD at YouTube

For my background I wanted to keep the soft look so I picked some lighter distress ink colors and blended the sky with shaded lilac toward the bottom, tumbled glass in the middle and a little bit of broken china at the top around the sunshine glow. I used scattered straw to create the glow in the top right corner. To create some movement across my card and keep balance with my sun I placed my grassy hill in the bottom right corner, it is inked with Twisted Citron and just a bit of Mowed Lawn along the edge for definition.

I added a couple little bees from the set and some custom white embellishments dots across the sky with a Tsukineko Pico Embellisher in wedding dress white.

Thanks to Dawn and WPlus9 for having me today and thanks for stopping by!