I felt a bit frustrated after my attempt at the fish, and I still wasn't prepared to do something complex, so I went for something with a simple design.  I think I might prefer simple designs, I like quick results, I'm not as patient as I need to be to work on something with a lot of detail.

I imposed the circle on the drawing.  I seem to rather like the circle shape, maybe I need to do some mandalas, or even explore drawing my own mandala.  Something to think about for the future.  Some of my gel pens are running out now, I use them a lot.  Xmas and the New Year have been and gone, and the coin shops sold out of all the gel pens and rainbow pens and all the felts.  So I will have to wait now until the shops restock and just keep checking back every now and then.  I have decided I really like colouring-in.  It certainly occupies my mind, and distracts me from the everyday problems all people face.

After doing something so difficult, I decided I wanted a break and wanted to tackle something a lot easier.  I found a fish design and this was the result.

Ironically, it proved to be a troublesome picture.  The paper reacted to the felts.  The felts were eating away the paper as I coloured in the picture.  I changed the original picture by adding a triangular shape to give more contrasting areas.  I tried a lot of different ideas, and I don't think I got the picture to work as well as the others.  Its a flawed picture, but it offered learning opportunities.  I wish I had chosen different colours.  Also the blue in the fish doesn't work.  I was aiming for a fish that could camouflage itself behind seaweed.  It looks more like a mechanical, steampunk fish.  Oh well!

After my initial attempts, I decided it was time to try something challenging.  I went for a complex picture with a lot of fiddly bits in it.

It proved to be frustrating.  It was much more work than I anticipated.  It took me a long time to finish it.  I was able to use some of the ideas I had explored earlier, darker borders around shapes, colour contrasting in similar shapes, such as the leaf cluster just by the bottom of the well.  I had good feedback though.  The blue circle gave it a kind of unity, similar to the mandala.  I think the picture is too busy to be improved on in any way.

At this point, I decided I liked doing the colouring-in.  I found it relaxing.  I decided to tackle something a bit more challenging, and I decided to have a go at a mandala.

It is quite a time consuming process.  You do quite a bit of work before you get the result.  I took a basic shape and turned it into eyes to add interest to the mandala.  Its based on earth, air, fire and water, and the eyes represent the spirit.

After my first attempt, I decided to get serious.  I went out and bought some art supplies.  I bought two different packs of felts, some gel pens, some rainbow pens, I continued to use the special wind up crayons thats a crayon inside in a pencil, and I was given a set of water colour pencils.  I had a few ideas about how to take an outline and make it more interesting at this point.

I was pleased with the job I did on this one.  Having better resources makes a difference.  I decided the crayons made a good background colour.  Its mostly gel pens with a few felts and crayon.

Hi, I'm Kate.  I'm a grandma, two adult children, three grandchildren.  I have a bit more time on my hands these days, so I've decided to do colouring-in, using those new adult colouring-in books.  Here is my first attempt:

It's a bit rough, I experiment with a few ideas, and the colours are a bit odd.  I used whatever I could scrounge from the grandkids supply of felts, pencils and crayons.