Watercolor over eco-dyed paper

My good friend Nancy Dawes and I discussed about using eco-dyed papers earlier this year at TangleU, and I've been dying to try my hand over the fantastic papers she had the kindness to send to me.

This is a piece that I created on over one of her eco-dyed papers:

This was a page from a hand bound journal Nancy gave me — and oh, the horror — I had to extract the page from the journal to be able to color in it, I had a hard time working on it while it was still attached. This is the original page with the eco-dyed leaf on it:

You've heard me mention the Bijou Raffle lesson, and this is a great example of how it worked out. These are the cards I pulled out for this project:

I really did not want to cover the beautiful leaf in the center of the page, so I used the Watercolor string prompt to add color around the leaf, using some metallic infused watercolor paint.

Next, I used a brown Micron pen to create the tangles and line-art, you can see a little step-out of the progression here:

Weird!!!! I love the result! I used watercolor markers and watercolor paints to work the colored shading, no black or gray markers whatsoever. I also used white pastel pencil, a white gelly roll pen and a burnt umber colored pencil to deepen the shading. I feel that removing the gray and black from the shading can produce a certain vibrancy to a picture that you can't get otherwise.

Here is the final picture again, including the card. Now that I've tried my hand at this, I'm excited to try the other eco-dyed papers Nancy sent to me, a variety of different brands. So much fun, thank you my dear friend!!!

If you would like to learn how to create watercolor shading over ecodyed papers, then send me an email and vote for a lesson here.

---