Waterfall Tutorial with Ivy Swing

I have a background tutorial that I wanted to share on coloring a distant waterfall on a tropical world, far, far away!  The planet of Avatar to be exact, however, you can use this same technique for a waterfall on any of your projects.  First of all, my project uses the Ivy Swing rubber stamp from Make it Crafty plus a Sugarplums Cherry Emma from CC Designs.  The character was stamped first and masked with a sticky-note then the Ivy Swing was stamped on top of that.  The positioning was tricky but I was lucky this time.

I started with the Ivy Swing and colored the leaves, flowers and birds.  The colors are actually listed down on my paper if you’re able to see them but you’re going to need better eye sight than me at the moment.  LOL  Unfortunately, I don’t have the originals either.   But the tutorial is more about the technique than the colors so you can substitute for the colors that you like.

The next plan of action was to sketch in where the water would be falling.  I looked at waterfall pictures and thought it would be something like this.  Next time I would watch the direction of the splashed a little more but this works for now.  I used a lighter color for this step and will bring in the darker colors later.

Here’s the darker colors I was talking about!  I went all the way to the darkest color in the spectrum and then I’m going to work back to the lightest color.  I wasn’t sure what I was doing at this point and was starting to get second guesses – I thought for sure I messed it up.

For the next couple of steps, the basic idea is to work from the darker colors into the lighter colors.  I’m not going to worry about blending at this point and I just want to layer in the colors.  I used colors from dark blue, gray to light blue and light turquoise.

The final step was to use the blender pen and the lightest colors to blend in all the layers.  The lower part fades off but when I get that cut off it actually looks better.  That’s the end of the tutorial – the next steps are the finish coloring the character and make a card… to be continued!  But you can find the end of that story on another day!  😀