'Mouse with Flowers' ©2012 Kirsten Talmage

Mom had some scraps of mat board she was getting rid of, so I thought I’d try my hand at a technique I’ve seen Jessica Douglas [link] do some time ago. (Go see her very fabulous art, even though there’s nothing quite like this in her gallery right now.)

So. Colored pencil on mat board.

Very fun! Because of the darkness of the mat, and because of the thickness/strength of the board, I had to push my nervousness with applying color with a heavier hand. Very good for me!

I don’t have a mat cutter, so the other experiment was trimming away some of the red with an X-acto knife. Feh. I like it OK in the original (better than a smooth edge), but not in the digital versions, go figure.

Also, there’s clearly some dust on my scanner. Whoops. Nor am I at all sure that you are seeing the colors I am, and on my laptop’s LCD screen, the colors are darker and slightly more muted than in the original.

The original is about 6cm by 6 cm. Yeah, tiny! ANd that’s why this image is so small—sure, I scanned it at 600dpi (the scanner whined about 1200, silly thing, though that was before I rebooted it), so I could print it bigger, but … I probably shouldn’t! (Might anyway…)