LiSSA - colouring a cup and saucer

Hello lovely people,

It's only a couple of weeks now until the launch of LiSSA...what do you mean you haven't heard about this?!

Ok, so LiSSA is an interactive tool that Dr. Hubby and I have developed to help crafters and artists with light source when colouring images.  You can find some more info here so I won't repeat it all in this post!

I wanted to show you today how LiSSA can work in practice using one of the objects, a cup and saucer.  It's a pretty basic object but I don't think it's that easy to decide where the shadows would fall.

Please bear in mind that I am not an expert colourist so any flaws in my colouring are my own and not the fault of LiSSA - lol!

Here's the screenshot from LiSSA;

I didn't adjust any of the lighting settings from the default because I like my light source from the top right and was happy with how the cup looked.  I used the zoom function to be able to see more detail and then spent a little time studying the image.

I took the stamped image I wanted to colour and used a green marker to map out where I could see the deepest shadows.  Ignore the yellow for now...that's for later!

 I then coloured my image using Copic markers G21, G24 and YG63.  These 3 colours are fairly close together so give a nice smooth blend but you could choose a combo with a little more contrast if you wished.

I was pretty happy with this but wanted to see if I could improve on it at all by accentuating the highlights I could see on the image so that's when I went back and added the yellow marker to my shadow map image, then I had another go.

Now, what I maybe should have done was colour the cup BEFORE using LiSSA but I'm 100% sure that I would never have been as happy with it as I was with this LiSSA-aided version.

See that shadow cast by the cup on the left of the saucer?  No way would I have done that and I think it adds a lot of depth to the image.

So, I hope this has given you a little taster of how you could use LiSSA to help you colour, and I'll be sharing plenty more examples and helpful hints before and after release :)

Thanks so much for popping in and I hope you have a lovely day!