Poppies at The Stampman & Red #Promarkers tutorial

Its a Poppies Challenge this fortnight over at The Stampman hosted by Janet.  If you haven't heard Janet is collecting poppy themed cards and items to sell at the Royal British Legion  at their fundraising concert later on in the year.

I thought I'd do a little tutorial along with it on using reds.  I've used the gorgeous Poppy stamp from Aspects of Design 01 Floral.  I also used coredinations black magic card stock.

Reds are one of the scariest colours to use in promarkers it seems but actually they're really easy.  As there is such a high level of colour in them, the blender pen really works magic when using reds, moreso than any of the other colour ranges.

For this you will need red plus one of the darker shades of red like poppy, your blender pen and one of the greys 4 (I used cool grey 4)

 You can see in the pic above that I've added a darker shade of red leaving some of the original red and white showing.

 Now pick up your blender and colour in the whole of the petal, this will push some of the original red over the white and merge the red and the darker red together.

 Repeat ths by adding your red, then your darker red and blend.  To get a higher depth let it dry off a few minutes and repeat.

 Once you're happy with your colouring then use a dark grey such as cool grey 4 to add shadows.  On this image the shadows would go where the stamp is black.  Colour over it lightly with a blender pen (only once) just to break up any harsh lines from the grey.

 This one is a mauvy pink version using baby pink and fuchsia.

Hope this is useful to you, the reds work very well with the blender, nothing to fear :)

Would also like to enter this into...

Top Tip Tuesday - Anything goes (Entry 2)
Bloggers challenge - Nature
Phindy's place - Embossing