As August draws to a close, so does my Guest Designer slot with Rachel Vass Designs; I’ve absolutely loved it and I’m so happy with the variety of cards I’ve created with this month’s release!

Recently, I have been playing around with some different colouring techniques and I really wanted to try some more dot colouring for this Summer Fruits Border. I had a little play around with this technique a few weeks ago in my Marker Techniques AECP post, and I wanted to take it a little further this time.

I wanted to keep this really simple, so I just chose 3-4 colours for each fruit and started by adding the lightest colour where I wanted my highlight to be; making sure that the only marks I put onto the paper were dots.

Once I had my highlight in place, I added mid tones followed by shadows, still just sticking to dots and at this point I didn’t try to blend any of the areas together. I was loosely working in rings, radiating out from the highlight, but still taking into account the shape of the fruit I was colouring and how that would affect the placement of shadows and any additional highlights.

Once I had these areas marked out I just moved back & forth through my shades, allowing the colours to overlap, therefore creating a smooth transition through the shades; but because I worked in layers, the ink had time to dry allowing further dots to maintain their shape. It wasn’t the quickest of methods but I’m really happy with the result!

I also added grey dots around the different fruits, in the same way that I would normally add my grey shadowing. I only used a C1 Copic, but because I worked in layers again and concentrated most of my dots closer to the fruit there is an illusion of differing grey shades which I find really interesting!

I finished my card off with a Neenah Desert Storm mat before adding it to an a2 110lb Neenah card base.

After I had done that I felt like the card was missing a little something, so I added a tiny die cut heart from the same Desert Storm cardstock, making sure to add some dotted shading under that and as a final bit of embellishment I added some Glossy Accents onto it.