Today I’m continuing coloring my sky colors inspired picture from Balance. The shades of blue look much more sky-like when I take the photos using natural daytime lighting, don’t they?

Everything was going so smoothly and then SPLAT. That’s the sound of an ink drop splotching my page.

I use refillable markers, and I just couldn’t resist adding one or two more drops of ink when I thought it was about full. I could see that the marker tip was getting quite juicy and really should have stopped adding ink at the first signs of the marker tip looking overly shiny and wet. And I could have dabbed off the excess onto a paper towel – but I didn’t have one handy and took a chance.

While we are on the subject of refillable markers and ink refills, I thought you might enjoy a look at my marker and ink stash. Yes, it is extreme – but I really do use every single one of those marker shades. And I think I’ve got enough ink to last me about ten years, lol.

Each of these ink bottles is supposed to fill a dried out marker about 10 – 12 times. I keep all of my ink in this handy box right next to where I’m coloring so I never have dried out markers. At the first tiny signs that they aren’t fully full, I dab on about a dozen drops of ink and always have markers that color like they are brand new.

They are easy to refill, and it’s pretty rare that I ever overfill one. But sometimes I zone out and add a few drops too many and then get “the dreaded drip”.

Nothing that a little cover up won’t mostly hide. I didn’t fuss about this too much because the drip was such a light color. My repair on the gray area isn’t great – but it’s not going to be overly noticeable in the finished pattern. I can always go over all of the dark gray areas with a second layer of gray coloring and make the repair blend in a bit more if it starts to annoy me.

Of course I absolutely do have that initial shock of “Oh no! I just splotched ink all over my coloring!!!!” I think that’s a perfectly natural response to the surprise. But in the grand scheme of things this is all pretty small stuff. This particular oops doesn’t seem to have the same power as my black blobby shape regrettable coloring choice from a few days ago. It’s probably a good moment to do a quick wellbeing scan and notice if I perhaps feel more resilient today.

It seems that no ink drip is going to diminish my blue sky mood today.

And I keep finding places to add even more blue.

But of course I do need to add a gray ribbon to help balance the colors throughout the page. 🙂

At the end of day two, I’m about halfway through coloring this picture. There’s no need to try and rush when coloring an intricate design. I know that sometimes people might not be used to coloring pictures that take day after day to complete, but there are lots of us in “The Slow Colorists Club”. Whether that’s because you color very slowly or because your coloring time is limited, that’s OK.

You might not know this, but I have tried to make all of my pattern series (black cover) books and my extreme series books (the pink Angie’s Extreme Coloring Books and the indigo blue Angie’s Extreme Stress Menders) intricate enough so that even avid colorists with a good deal of coloring time will have at least a full month of coloring from each book. It usually takes me about 6 hours or so to color a picture like the one you see here today. Please don’t ever feel like it’s taking you too long to finish coloring one of my drawings. That’s not you coloring too slow – that’s me trying to make sure that you get your money’s worth out of every page. 🙂

(Today’s coloring is from Balance – Angie’s Extreme Stress Menders Volume 1, colored with Copic markers.)