Penguins in northern lights

Hi everybody.

Helen here to give you my last blog post for this year.
As I just made one Christmas card to show you I thought I should make a New Year card this time. 
I LOVE this stamp, Christmas penguins from Stamping Bella.
And I wanted to make a scene with fireworks, and in a way as natural as possable, so I thought "what about northern lights"?
And as I post this I see thas Cicci made one in her last post, so now you have some different ways to colour!

I stamped my image on Perfect Coloring Paper and used Memento Ink.

I sketched in my scene with C0.

Started with the sky, used B91 which will be my brightest blue in the sky. And I placed the color along the horizon line as I want some glow from a twilight.

Then I got in with the northern lights colours, YG21 - V04, and I used BV00 in the top of the paper but it didn´t get the effect I wanted.

Went in with B93 on top of BV00 and used flick marks to have thin lines and started to blend the blues together in the sky. As I went over both V04 and YG21 they turned out to just the lilac and green I wanted.

Darkend the sky even ´more used B95 in the top and B93 in the horizon line.

Went back to the northern lights colors and filled them in once more and added some YG23 for a vigorous green shade.

For the darkest sky I used B97 and that really made the northern lights to pop.
And as you can see my blending between the dark B97 and a lighter blue, B93 gave me those dots, as it does when you go over a dark color with a lighter and bleach the darker one.
Here you might think that I ruined my colouring.
But I see it as it works with me.
If you look at photos of northern lights you will see thousands and thousands of stars and I see these dots as stars in a layer that makes them to be far, far away.

Started to colour the snow used BG70 - BG11 - BG10.
The ice in the distanse got some C0 - C1 - C3.

In front of the image I put down some B21 - B41 - B45

The penguins are coloured with C3 - C5 - C7 - C9 - B24.

I didn´t know that the penguins are white/grey on the inside of their wings, now I do!

And the beak and the flippers are black and not orange that we often goes to.

 The bellies on the penguins got BG70 - C0 - C3, and the larger penguin got some Y11 - Y17 on his chest and YR09 on the beak.
The bells got Y32 - YR21 - YR24.

And...
To be able to see northern lights you need a cloudless sky. Snow falls from clouds, and as there are no clouds there will not fall any snow!
But there will be stars! A lot of them. And you´ll see the stars in the northern lights as well.

I extended the path so the penguins came down the hill in the background jingled the bells.

So, here is my penguins in the new years evening with some natural fireworks.

I wish you all the Happiest New Year 
and will see you next year I hope.

Love
Helen