I Tried a COLOR CUBE Coloring Challenge… (was this a BAD idea?)

We all know that I love a good challenge on this channel, and usually that comes in the form of someone or something controlling my coloring. I've had my husband control my coloring, my cats, and I even let book covers control my coloring once. Yeah, that was that was a bit of an interesting one. And today we're doing it again, but this time with the new and improved Sarah Renee Clark color cubes, which were so kindly gifted to me from Sarah herself. If you watch my channel, there is a very good chance that you've already seen one of Sarah's videos too. She's an absolutely amazing YouTuber and quite the pioneer when it comes to creating products for adult colorists and artists all around the world. And I definitely say that her color cube is the most well-known creation that she's made. The color cubes are a set of boxes created by Sarah Renee Clark, designed to help creatives choose cohesive color palettes without all the overwhelm and indecision. Each cube comes with 250 palettes and every palette has its own card with the highlight and shadow variations of every color, a matching reference photo, and the hex codes if you want that extra bit of precision. Today I'll be using volumes one through four, which includes the updated versions of volumes one and two, as well as the newest additions to the color cube family volumes three and four. There are two major updates to the color cubes that I'm absolutely loving. The first is the sturdier wooden box design. The cubes now open just below the halfway point, which makes storing and flipping through the palettes so much easier. And I'm also such a massive fan of the new palette categories. You now get dividers with each color cube that group your palettes into different themes and also give you an overview of every palette within said category. So yes, four color cubes, one thousand palettes in total, and along with a random number generator, these are what's going to be controlling my coloring today. What could possibly go wrong? Nothing. Watch those be my last words. First things first, I need the color cubes to decide what book and what page I'll be coloring today, because yes, we're not just stopping at choosing color palettes. The cubes are going to be making a whole lot of other decisions for me as well. So starting off, I'm going to use a random number generator to pick what color cube volume I'll be picking from first. All right, here we go. We've got one to four in there. Let's see what gets chosen. Apologies, my phone is being a little bit silly at the moment. Two, two got chosen. So that is one of the updated versions. So because this is the second volume, this one will have palettes 250 to 500 in it. The spinner wheel looks crazy. Let's just spin it and see what happens. Three hundred and forty five. That is the palette that's going to decide what coloring book I'll be coloring in. OK, so three hundred and forty five is in the category Cityscapes. That is very good to know. All right. So this is what palette three hundred and forty five looks like. And what I'm going to do is choose a coloring book that has these colors on the cover. And then I'm going to choose a page that has some sort of cityscape on it. I'll be back with you in a tick. OK, so I've found two coloring books in my collection that I feel like match this color palette here the closest. So first off, we have Dragon Demond by Diane Dufour. And as you can see, we definitely have some of those tealy colors going on the cover here, as well as the sort of light orangey red and the orange and yellow. I feel like this one is a really close match. And then we also have Fairy Tales and Folklore by Emily Lederhall-Oberg. This one definitely has some of the tealy aqua colors within it, as well as the darker reddy orange, the orange. But when I look at this color palette next to Dragon Demond and Fairy Tales and Folklore, I just think Dragon Demond is that little bit closer to the three hundred and forty five palette here. So I think this is going to be the book we'll be coloring in today. Now, what I need to do is find a coloring page that is somewhat reminiscent to this cityscape reference image. So let's have a flip through. From what I remember, I don't really think there's a cityscape in this book, so I might have to get a bit creative with the prompt. I just thought, though, there's a lot of sky and clouds in this image. So maybe I could actually go off of that inspiration instead, because I know there's a lot of that in this book. Oh, my gosh, that gave me the biggest fright. Oh, Archie just knocked down my light in the background. And oh, my gosh, I thought I don't know, I thought something terrible was happening. All right. So I'm trying to choose between two pages right now. The first one is this one, which you would have seen in my last video. This is one of the top pages I'm most excited to color in this book. I know this one's a little bit of a stretch, but you've got the sky and clouds in the background and then you also have the buildings underneath. I know they're not really city buildings, but they're buildings nonetheless. And then the second option I'm trying to decide between is this one here. This one, you know, just has a lot of clouds and sky in the background. So it's very much going off of that inspiration. Or when I just thought I could add my own sort of cityscape to with inside this circle here like a silhouette. Oh, OK. Yes, I've made the decision. This is the page I'm going to be coloring. I'm feeling inspired. See, that's what's great about these cards. There's so much more than color palettes. They can be used for a myriad of things. Now, this is where things are going to get even more interesting. I'm going to break this page into three different segments, parts, and each segment is going to have a different color palette. This could go my way and I get three color palettes that complement each other very nicely, or I could get three completely opposing color palettes. So what I think I'm first going to pick a color palette for is the cloudy sky background. All right. Hopefully my phone doesn't glitch again whilst I'm spinning. Oh, it is glitching a bit. I really need to get a new phone. Oh, we're going with two again. All right. Two is really getting some love in this video. All right. Let's find out the color palette. Two, five, seven. Two, five, seven. Oh my gosh, that one's so pretty. I love that one. That one's going to be a great sky background. Yes, this one's going to be gorgeous for a sky background. And I've even got like a sky cloudy reference image going on here that I can use for inspiration. All right, let's color the cloudy sky background first, and then we'll come back here and choose another palette. Hello there, Future Keira popping on in to talk you through the coloring portions of this video as per usual. Now, in case you didn't know, Dragon du Monde is a fairly new addition to my coloring book collection. So I was very curious to see how the paper would handle water-soluble mediums. The other Diane Dufour book that I own, Boule de Poix, has handled water-soluble mediums fairly well for me in the past, and this paper seemed to be pretty much the same. So my fingers were doubly crossed that I'd have the same experience in Dragon du Monde. So of course, I dove straight in with my favorite water-soluble medium, my Neocolor 2s right from the get-go, and I'm extremely happy to report that this paper held up really well with water. I wouldn't say it handles water like a dream, but it's pretty gosh darn close. I used my typical technique here with the Neocolors. I scribbled the first layer down pretty roughly, activated the pigment with a water brush on the page, and then tidied everything up with a second layer by pulling the pigment directly from the pastel using the water brush once more. You'll notice that I'm only applying the second layer to the background rather than the clouds, and that's because I wanted to do all the cloud shading with alcohol markers, because I definitely have that option with this being a single-sided book. Hallelujah, we love to see it. Up until this moment right here, I'd never tried using alcohol markers over a Neocolor 2 base before, and it turned out so much better than I anticipated. The alcohol markers kind of reactivated the water-soluble pigments of the Neocolors, and it created this really gorgeous blend for the cloud shading. I feel like it also gave everything a more saturated look on the page and a very, very slight watercolor effect. You'll see me whipping out my alcohol markers quite a bit on this page, and although I don't follow this process strictly every single time, this is generally how I work with them. For each color combo, I choose a highlight shade, a mid-tone, and a shadow shade. I'll lay down a base with the highlight, add a tinsy bit of depth with the mid-tone, deepen it even further with a shadow shade, and then work in reverse. Blend that shadow shade out with the mid-tone, and then blend those two together with the highlight shade. And you do want to try and work in smaller sections and work fairly quickly too in order to get as smooth of a blend as possible if that's the look you're going for. And in terms of choosing colors that matched the Color Cube palette, I honestly just did the best I could with what I had on hand and with what my human eyes could perceive. Throughout this entire coloring process though, I couldn't stop thinking about Sarah's new website, the Color Companion website. It is launching so incredibly soon, and if you don't know what it is, definitely go check out Sarah's recent live stream on her YouTube channel. I'll definitely have to redo this Color Cube challenge when the website is live, because if I'd had a resource telling me what supplies in my collection were the closest match to the color palettes I'd pulled, it would have sped up the whole process significantly. But anyway, mini tangent over, this is what the background was looking like once all the cloud shading was finished. And yes, I was obsessed. The colors in this palette created such a gorgeous gradient on the page, and it's honestly something I don't think I would have been able to come up with on my own. And I don't think I was too far off when it came to translating the colors on the Color Cube card onto the actual page. Now we need to find out what the color palette is going to be for the inner circle part where I'm going to draw my own cityscape. Fingers crossed that turns out okay. Okay, two's been chosen way too many times. I'm removing the choice. We need to show some love to the other Color Cubes. Here we go. My video, my rules. Three, great. I love to see it. Oh, we're going to the dark side, the dark side Color Cubes. So this is volume number three. This should be palettes 500 to 750. Spin, spin, spin, spin, spin. 637. Oh, so this is within the neon glow category. This could be very interesting. 637. Okay, this isn't too bad. This, I can work with this. Especially I'm glad that I have a dark color in there so I can do the cityscape silhouette really nicely. Let's look at this next to the other palette I picked. Yeah, that works. I think that works all right. And so it was time to dust off my drawing skills, bring them out to play. To be fair, it's not like I was drawing anything overly elaborate here. I actually based my little city skyline sketch on another illustration I've And this is something I love doing whenever I'm adding my own elements to a coloring page. I'll take inspiration from something the illustrator has already drawn. So my embellishments match their art style and everything looks nice and cohesive. I mean, obviously I'm not a professional artist, but I do the best I can with the skills I've got. I've also been thinking a lot recently about what coloring goals I might want to set for myself in the new year. And I think drawing in my own details to coloring pages, I think it's going to be a top contender. Most of you will know that I did set myself the goal of learning how to draw this year. And I very quickly fell off that bandwagon. But I feel like learning how to draw by sketching in my own elements to my But anyway, as you can see here, I was loving how the water soluble mediums were working in this book. So I decided to use my Derwent Inktense for all the basing within this circular area. And I can confirm they worked great on this paper too. I didn't want to do anything too over the top here since there was already so much color happening on the page. I didn't want to go too overboard. So I just went with two simple gradients. I used the three darkest colors from the color cube palette as my gradient for the cityscape silhouette and the two lightest colors for the sky behind it. It was a little tricky trying to match the fine matching colors within the Derwent Inktense set that I own. I really had to rely on pencil pressure to create lighter shades where I needed them. And then once all the Derwent Inktense basing was roughly activated, I went in with my Prismacolors to really build that strong saturation and smooth blend on the page. I used a very hard pressure here, basically burnishing from the get go and overlapped colors wherever I needed to create that seamless blend. Over the last six months or so, I've really started to comprehend which pencil sets I need to reach for in my toolkit in order to achieve specific results. I used to have this silly belief in my head that I needed to pick a side. I could only be a Prismacolor stan or a Polychromos aficionado or even just a pencil colorist or an alcohol marker colorist. But now I love exploring and experimenting with every sort of brand, supply, and medium under the sun without pigeonholing myself into one tiny corner of the coloring community. It's not about what supply is better, it's about what supply is going to help me achieve the result that I'm looking for. I wouldn't say I absolutely nailed the color matching from the palette to the page with this one, but I do think it is reminiscent. I did consider adding some of my signature acrylic marker dots to the sky at this point, but I decided to wait until the very end once the entire page was complete. That way I could be a little bit more objective in regards to how many dots I needed. You know how some people have blonde blindness where they never think they're blonde enough? I think I have that with acrylic marker dots. I never think there are enough dots on a page. All right, it's time to pick our final color palette for the video. I think I am just going to put in four and one because I want to show as much love to the color cubes as possible, you know? Looks like it's going to be four. Another dark side color cube. They're not called that, but I just like to call them my dark side color cubes, which means we've got palettes 750 to 1000. My lordy lord, 1000 color palettes is crazy. All right, final spin for the video. Let's do it. 952. That is the wedding bliss category. I love that there's a wedding section within one of the color cubes. Color palettes is a big thing for the wedding season, so I feel like if you have a wedding planner in your life or someone's about to get married in your life and they're planning a wedding, get them a color cube. This might be very helpful for them. Okay, so 952. Let's see what it's going to be. Interesting. This is for the dragon, by the way. I don't think I said that. This is for the dragon color palette. Let's look at all three side by side. Hmm. I mean, it'll definitely be an interesting contrast on the page. I don't think it'll be horrible, but yeah, this is definitely going to test my artistic abilities when it comes to choosing the right maybe like color proportions to complement what colors I currently already have on the page. This is why this video is called a challenge, because this is challenging. I cannot tell you how much I struggled trying to make this color palette work for the dragon here. Not only was my brain whirling with how to make these very muted colors complement the already bright colorful chaos happening on the page, but I was also on absolute struggle street when it came to matching the palette shades with the alcohol marker sets that I own. It was quite tricky. After staring at my swatches for a god awful amount of time, I finally decided that the dragon was just going to have to be tones of brown. I did sneak in a tiny bit of dark green for the claws, but yeah, for the most part, we had a very sepia toned dragon going on on the page. It actually reminded me a lot of what I've been seeing in the alcohol marker coloring world at the moment, where people color a portion of the page in a very monochromatic grayscale or sepia toned style, and then color the main element of the illustration in a bright, bold, vibrant palette. And I guess what I kind of unintentionally ended up doing here was the inverse, and the result was definitely intriguing. I wouldn't say I loved it, but it was a pretty unique outcome. Once I'd finished all the alcohol marker shading, I brought in some acrylic brush markers to add some fun little embellishments to the dragon. This is the same technique that I used in a recent dragon illustration that I colored. You might remember it from the video where I tried all the coloring techniques I've been avoiding. And basically what the technique involves is using brush acrylic markers, preferably ones with a semi-transparent formula, and drawing in some large dots, and then lightening those dots by lifting off some of the pigment on the page with your finger. Just, you know, dabbing it with the pad of your finger. This creates a semi-translucent effect, and you want to do this with about two to three colors, starting with your darkest shade, and then you can overlap the lighter colors on top. I then finished off the dragon by adding in some highlights with a kind of beige-y, light brown Languo gel pen. And of course, I used the hack of sticking a little bit of blue tack on the end of the pen just to get the ink flow nice and juicy. Also, I'm getting such Mushu energy from this dragon illustration. You know the dragon from Mulan? I probably would have colored this dragon red if the color cubes weren't calling the shots on this day. But anyway, another tangent over, this is what the dragon ended up looking like. It was probably my weakest portrayal of a color cube palette in this entire video, but like I said before, this video has the word challenge in the title for a reason, and sometimes we don't always accomplish the challenges we set for ourselves with the highest degree of success. But if my non-perfectionist brain is speaking, I don't think I did too bad. I'll give myself a pat on the back. And now I'm sure you're all wondering, Kira, did you add the acrylic marker dots? Of course I did. I went a little wild with the Languo gel pens, and I also added a bunch of acrylic dots with my white Posca paint pen, and then I finally felt like the page was complete. This page definitely turned out quite different to how I color on a day-to-day basis, but I think I can really appreciate its uniqueness, and that is what is so great about the color cubes. They get you thinking differently, they push you outside your comfort zone, and get you pairing colors together that you wouldn't ordinarily gravitate towards. I'm not gonna lie, I am still very much obsessed with the colors going on in the sky gradient of the background. I will 1000% be using this sort of color combination here again. Oh, it just makes me so happy. But anyway, that brings us to the end of today's video. If you do own the color cubes, I highly recommend giving this challenge a try. Yes, it certainly is a challenge, but a fun challenge nevertheless. And if you don't own the color cubes and you're thinking about picking up one, or a set, or for someone else you love this festive season, I'll have my affiliate link in the description box below if you'd like to support the channel in a small way whilst also treating yourself to some coloring goodies. Until next time, happy coloring friends, have a good day, have a good life, and I'll see you in the next one. Bye!