Welcome to Enchanted Forest, part 1

Support Passion for Pencils!

I've recently started colouring another page in Enchanted Forest, the very first one in the book.
This page welcomes you into colouring the beautiful drawings of Johanna Basford.

I recently travelled to England with the chamber choir I'm singing with. We were heading for Chichester Cathedral where we would sing many many songs during services there.
Since I bought Secret Garden, I always take my colouring books with me on vacation and other trips. This time I decided to take Enchanted Forest with me and my pencils in the Derwent Carry All Bag.

Travelling from The Netherlands to the U.K. takes quite some time, unless you take a plane. We travelled by coach (as they call a bus in England) and ferry.
I coloured for hours and hours in the coach.
At first I was afraid there would be too many bumps in the road to colour properly, but it turned out to be pretty nice colouring!

During the process of colouring I'm sometimes not sure which way I should go, which colours I should choose next, where to shade and where to colour highlights.
In times like that I think about the famous Dutch wildlife painter Rien Poortvliet, who had the same problem from time to time. He took his binoculars or a mirror to and looked at his paintings with binoculars or in the mirror. This would give him a fresh look instantly which fastened the process of deciding what to do a lot!
I use my phone to take a picture of the colouring page and it gives me a lot of information too!

The first page in Enchanted Forest reminded me of a picture like this one:

I started with very gentle layering with brown pencils for the trees and greens and blues in the background.

In this short video you can see how I'm colouring the first layers:

I used darker blues, greys and browns for shading in this stage of colouring.
I'm taking my time with the layering process. There is no hurry and I enjoy every second of it!

While travelling through the U.K. I spent many happy hours of colouring in the coach. I would colour a little and then watch the beautiful English scenery of white cliffs, green hills, forests, cottages, castles, cathedrals, etc.

 

I try to colour as gentle as possible because the paper in Enchanted Forest shows more pencil strokes than the paper in Secret Garden.

The next few weeks I will add more and more layers of colour: yellows in the middle of the drawing, and dark greens, browns and greys in the shaded areas. This is the result so far.

To be continued!

If you want to purchase Johanna Basford's Enchanted Forest, you can use one of the affiliate links below:

         

Buy Enchanted Forest/Het Betoverde Woud at BOL.COM!