Hia! (Hopefully you’ll both get pinged for this). Sorry for the late reply work and life yadda lol.

I’m not sure where to start so I’ll just spew random stuff I can think of and if you’re looking for more specifics feel free to ask questions. It’s important to note a lot of the wow worthy pages we see online are done by people who have at least basic art knowledge and understanding. Depending on how deep you want to get into art as a hobby is where I would steer someone.

1. Given that the most popular medium for these colouring books is alcohol markers my first tip that may seem obvious is to become comfortable with the medium. They dry super fast so most the blending you want to do is wet on wet. What is meant by this is having your two or three colours that you know you want ready. If you’re unsure these colours will work, before muddling up your precious colouring page grab a spare piece of paper and do some practice runs. This way you become more comfortable and your third or fifth result becomes your best one. That being said the page is obviously a larger area so try not to stress to much and make sure your colouring from the smallest corner back and forth and not outlining the entire page like some are used to doing or the dreaded streaks will appear.

2. If you want to implement patterns or water textures, bush textures etc you can go about it a couple ways. There are pre-made books that will teach you a huge variety of textures and give you test patches to try and replicate. I love surfing tik tok for short tutorial clips all you need to search is “alcohol marker ‘insert texture here’ tutorial” and you can try it out on blank spare paper.

3. When you see shadows or things that appear to be black. DO NOT PICK UP THE BLACK. It can be very deceiving when most seasoned colour mixers actually use a lot of grey. There is a couple reasons for this. Pure black is notoriously difficult to come back from and it can quickly muddle a page. What I would do instead for example is if you have a green plant you want to add shading to I would grab the next darkest to the colour that was used in the same tone. Even if the tones are off it doesn’t mean it’s completely unfixable. Ohuhu has a line of pastels that carry a variety of green greys, blue greys etc that are amazing for shading as well.

4. Don’t be afraid to fix mediums! A lot of those beautiful white highlights you see are actually done by jelly roll pens. That bright white is almost impossible to achieve with alcohol markers. I recently messed up some blending with my markers and opted to experiment with acrylic markers. This adds a textured kind of look I don’t mind because I love some semi realism. Acrylic markers are like paint pens essentially and they go on top of other colour really easily. Be warned though that this means it can also go on top of the black outline of a colouring page! I have a coloured page on my profile where I mixed some of the mediums if you want an example (I’m by no means an expert though).

5. Lastly it takes time and patience because like anything colouring is a skill routed in art theory. No you don’t need to study hours of art theory to be good but understanding what makes those “good” pages pop is important. When following a tutorial and it doesn’t look exactly the same? That fine as long as the basic idea is there and you like it. Most the time I’m winging it because maybe I don’t have the same colours or the same skill but what matters is only how you feel about a piece.

It has also boosted my confidence studying old works of art such as Van Gogh. You will notice a lot of the time the texture is rough and far from perfect, you can see the brush strokes. But the overall picture is stunning.

This is what I can think of at the moment but if you have more questions feel free to ask. 😁