The halfway coloring point in an intricate coloring picture tends to be the most difficult part of a picture for me. There is often such a mix of colored areas and remaining white spaces that it can be rather visually confusing.
In the picture above, I can feel myself losing my bearings. But it’s this next picture…
…where I find my eyes traveling every which way – trying to make sense of the visual complexity.
This comes up so often when I color that I now expect it and don’t let it make me uncomfortable. I know that strongly intermixed patches of colored and non-colored shapes will always look somewhat chaotic to me, and I know that as I keep coloring, gradually connecting all of the floating islands of color with colored bridges – things will start to hold together better and make more visual sense.
I start looking for spaces to color that make little color islands into bigger color islands. In the picture above, see the white bands between the pairs of really dark blue bands? Coloring those in now will go a long way toward making it much easier for me to see the pattern. I’ll also go after some of those uncolored white dots so that they no longer interrupt the flow of color with their empty whiteness.
At the end of my 3d coloring day (about 4.5 hours of coloring so far) I’m leaving this picture with a lot more big areas of color than you saw in my first picture today. The rest of the picture will come together very easily. (Oopsie! Do you see the one spot I missed? I’ll just fix that now. 🙂 )
(Today’s slow coloring is from Balance (Angie’s Extreme Stress Menders Volume 1.)