Hello Beautiful Mondo Sakura from Ellen Hutson and Spectrum Noir ColourBlend vs Prismacolor

Hi all!  There's a new release from Ellen Hutson available today and I just HAD to have this new Mondo Sakura set.  Aren't those flowers pretty?

I really wanted the flowers to be the star, so I kept things very simple.

The image was stamped with Versafine and then colored with colored pencils.  My main go-to for colored pencils have been Prismacolor.  I have a 72 count set, but I feel like some color families, particularly the pinks/floral colors are a bit lacking, so I picked up a couple of Spectrum Noir Colourblend pencil sets to round out my collection.  Spectrum Noir also sells a pad of paper specifically for Colored Pencils.

The ColourBlend pencils are not as waxy as the Prismacolor so they tend to go on a little lighter and for the soft coloring I did here, I actually think the blending works a bit better.  I'll need to experiment a bit more with them for heavier coloring to see if they work as well as the Prismacolor when you want heavier coverage.  I was also really pleased with the paper pad, I thought the pencils colored very smoothly on it.  One note though, it is a much thinner weight, more like heavy sketchbook paper.

Anyway, I used three shades of peach to pink in coloring the flowers with a very light touch, I want them to look soft and airy.  Two shades of green were used for the greens and then a yellow for those little floral accents.  I also added a very soft outline line of gray around the entire image, which is hard to see in the photos.  I do this a lot with Copic images too, I think it makes the focal images pop against the white background.

The floral stamp was left in place on my MISTI after the initial stamping so that I could re-stamp after I was done coloring.  I always do this when using colored pencils because the pencils leave a bit of residue on your stamped outlines which can kind of muddy them.  This allows you to just sharpen everything up.

Once that was done, I stamped the sentiments which are also from the Mondo Sakura set.

I just love these pretty flowers!  You'll definitely want to head over to Ellen Hutson to check out the entire release, lots of good stuff in there!  Hope you are having a great weekend!