An Intensely Colourful Background: Big Brush Markers + Oil Pastels

I needed a quick project for my blog post today and wanted to share how I can build up an intensely colourful background quickly using a mixture of Faber-Castell Big Brush Markers and Van Gogh Oil Pastels (by Royal Talens).  I worked on a #8 manilla tag.

I often mention starting with a paper towel mop up sheet, so today I am showing you the original sheet, before I split off the top layer and added a section of it to my tag.  As you can see, this one was used first of all to mop up some Distress Oxides from my glass mat, then a few days later, for cleaning some Archival ink off various stamps by stamping them onto the paper towel until the ink was gone.

Having split off the top layer, I glued it to the tag using matte medium and gave the surface a good coat of medium too.  Once dry, the excess paper towel was trimmed away.  I have sufficient left to cover a second tag if I wish to do so.

I chose one of the Tim Holtz Paper Dolls, glued it to the tag and sealed once more with matte medium.

Once the surface was well sealed and no longer porous and the tag completely dry, I could start using my Big Brush Markers to add colour and shading around the image.  This is a technique that I picked up from Vicky Papaioannou on her Clips-n-Cuts blog.  I started by adding a little Light Green all round the image, blending the colour out with my finger before it dried.

Next came a layer of Cobalt Green around the figure and along the bottom to provide something for the little girl to be standing on.  This was blended out in the same way.

Finally, Dark Phthalo Green  introduced a third colour for shading and blending - including a little up the side of the tag to the left of the figure.  The colours were chosen to link in with those on the paper towel background.

At this point, I brought in my Van Gogh Oil Pastels for further colour intensity around the edges of the tag.  A small amount scribbled along the edge and blended inwards can be layered up for deeper colour.  I started with Phthalo Green and some Fir Green along the top and down the right hand side.

For balance, I then introduced Turquoise Blue in the top left and bottom right hand corners.

To finish, one of the Small Talk stickers (Tim Holtz idea-ology) was added at the top.  
I love creating these sort of backgrounds;  they look as if they have taken hours of work and by cutting down on my use of baby wipes it is good for the environment too.