OhuHueVember Week 1 💛
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Featuring Johanna Basford’s 30 Days Of Flowers 💐
In case you thought I forgot about this challenge: Nope! I decided early on it would be best for me to only do the *posts* once a week since that’s the part that really wore me out during October. 😵💫
…I also wanted to post this yesterday, but suffice to say this past week was a wild ride so it just wasn’t possible. 😅
Same as always: Click the "Keep Reading" and we'll talk a bit more about my general thoughts/process. ✨
Like My Art and Want to see more of it? Here's All My Links! ⭐️
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Featured Ohuhu Colors:
Day 1: GY6 Anise
Day 2: Y3 Barium Yellow
Day 3: Y1 Pastel Yellow
Day 4: YR2 Marigold
Day 5: YR4 Salmon Pink
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Did any of you Sparklers question if I just posted the prompt list for OhuHueVember and then forgot all about it? 😆
If you read my epic-length write-up when I posted the list, probably not, but for those who saw that wall of text and understandably said, "no thank you," this post itself should make it pretty obvious: Nope, I didn't forget!
At the tail end of the super long write-up, I disclosed that while I would be doing OhuHueVember daily, I would only be making posts once a week since it was the daily posting that wore me out the most during Inktober.
...And for the record, I wanted to make this post yesterday, the true "end" of OhuHueVember Week 1 (at least the way I laid the days out) but, naturally, this past week was one heck of a wild ride in my offline life (and not for the reasons you'd assume if you're from the US) and so I begrudgingly came to the difficult conclusion that "waiting one more day to post won't hurt."
That's also why this post is considerably later in the evening than I had hoped—I thought doing them once a week would mean I could at least get the weekly posts out around lunch time!—and I was also unable to post at least two other things I was hoping to have finished this week. 🫠
With those things in mind, I hope you Sparklers will understand that I'm going to handle the rest of this description as briefly as I can manage so that I can go ahead and get this posted and go about the rest of my evening—So if I seem to be jumping around a bit more than usual, that's why. Hopefully, next week will be a bit of a different story (in a positive way).
As also stated towards the end of my super-long OhuHueVember write up: "I've been wanting to get back into just coloring in Adult Coloring books (or single pages made for that audience) occasionally, as I've unintentionally moved away from that hobby for a few years when I used to do it all the time. When I first started, the hobby was still pretty new and niche, and sharing finished pages felt "wrong" to try and mix in with my regular art posts, but things have noticeably changed since then.
And in particular, using Ohuhu markers in adult coloring books has actually become pretty common.
So that's part of what I'm going to do to try and scale this challenge back...I've printed out Johanna Basford's 30 Days of Flowers on small, 2.5" x 3.5" cuts of my favorite mixed media paper—Artist Trading Card size!—and those are what I'm going to color for the month." I did try to find some information on what each of these 30 flowers is supposed to be so that I could better match the OhuHueVember colors to the appropriate ones, but I couldn't find anything definitive for every single one and I didn't have the patience (or time, for that matter, considering I was running way behind on prep for the challenge as it was) to try and manually research each one. So I ended up using what finished colorings Johanna had posted as a starting reference, then made adjustments and filled in the blanks based on a combination of feelings and what I thought would work best for the marker colors. (Which as you'll see later in the month proved to be a bit of a challenge for the greens, but I'm getting way ahead of myself.) You'll notice though that I didn't use just the single Color of the Day. I used the light/dark blends that I also listed in the Spreadsheet for the challenge, plus I'm using my old 72 set of Schpirerr Farben pencils for any additional color beyond the three markers for each day. I meant it when I said you could use as many other colors as you want for the challenge, because I knew I myself wouldn't be able to resist the temptation! 🤭
And in case anyone cares, I'm going with the Schpirerr Farben instead of my true favorite Prismacolor partly because I just want to use them more—they are my third favorite behind Prismacolor and the Brutfuner Macarons (which you Sparklers have yet to hear me talk about, but I promise it is on the to-do list!) afterall—but also because the 72 selection is more limited and therefore a tiny bit more challenging than the Prismas would be. And I semi-recently set them up in a zipper case so they're easier to reach for than they used to be.
Believe it or not, the backgrounds were actually the most difficult thing to decide. And I'm still not 100% sure they'll stay exactly as they are. 😅
I thought about either using the Color of the Day itself, or maybe during the Weekly Colors for each flower for that week, but both of those had trivial problems I couldn't think my way around when I did some experiments on a test sheet.
And I did not want to spend a whole lot of time or color on the backgrounds outside of those options either way because I didn't want to take any more attention away from whatever the Color of the Day would be than necessary.
So ultimately, this soft cool gray with a gel pen outline was where I landed. But I'm still debating if I want to go back and add stars/sparkles with the white gel pen to each one too, as I did that a lot in my smaller tests to try and jazz things up a little. I've held off for now because once I got these actual cards done with just the white outline, I liked them more without the stars than I expected...But I'm just not ready to fully close the door on the star idea yet. So at the end of the month, if you see some stars have magically appeared on these, you'll know why!
Oh: And if you couldn't tell, one more way I'm attempting to limit how difficult this challenge is for me is by just photographing each week's 5 flower cards together instead of trying to scan and then color-correct each one. The photos still need some slight tweaks—especially on days like today where it was gloomy overcast and I couldn't photograph in natural light—but it's an order of magnitude less work than trying to scan, crop, and correction each one would be.
I might bother to scan them all at the end of the month for optimal preservation, but I make no promises.
Beyond all that, I'm trying to just handle each day in whatever way I think gives the Color of the Day a chance to shine while still making the final look something I like. Which is a relevant thing to say because YR2/Day 4 and YR4/Day 5 here are not typically colors I would pick for coloring flowers; I was really worried about how both of them would turn out, but YR4 might actually be my favorite of this batch! YR2 is probably still my least favorite just because it's so earthy, but if I pretend the earthiness of the color doesn't bother me, I do still think it turned out nice.
And if you're wondering what happened with the leaves for Y1/Day 3, I was trying to switch things up a bit with a more jewel-tone dark teal and some pink like what I now know are called Caladium plants. It's weird and not really what I had in mind, but I actually still like the results quite a bit.
I think until we hit the actual green colors on the list, that's going to be one of the trickier parts of choosing to handle this challenge with flower illustrations—Figuring out how to keep the stems and leaves from all looking the same. 🤔
But hey, I feel like I managed decently enough here, so maybe I'm anticipating a bigger problem than I should be. Only one way to find out...!
One last thing I will say: As I sort of expected, for as chaotic as everything else in life has been, yeah being able to sit down and just worry about putting colors together in a way that looks nice has tended to be a welcome little reprieve each day. And also expected, not having to worry about posting every day has been kind of a relief, even though I've still had plenty of other stuff on my plate—See what I mentioned before about not having at least two other things done and posted by now that I wanted to. 😅
So now it's that time again for me to leave you Sparklers to chew on what I've laid out here while I move onto cross-posting. I may only be doing it once a week this month, but that doesn't really change how involved the process itself is when the time comes.
Either way, whether you've chosen to join me on this colorful adventure in some way or not, I hope we've all started the month off as strongly as we can and that if nothing else, we can all look forward to some more forthcoming colorful flowers. 💐
I'll see you all again definitely next week, but with any luck, hopefully a little sooner than that! 👋
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See the Prompt List
Coloring/Photo by MysticSparkleWings (me)
Linework from Johanna Basford's 30 Days of Flowers
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⭐️ Like My Art and Want to see more of it? Here's All My Links! ⭐️
