So I just uploaded 5 new seashell coloring designs to my Etsy shop. I colored one and put it on my Facebook fan page at Jenny's arty coloring pages. My friend Barb A. told me she liked the colored version and suggested it might be a good idea to do more of those, that they really are more inspiring than just the blank black-and-white line drawings. I think she's right.

It also occurred to me that each design would look a little different when printed on different types of paper. So I scrounged up some of the old fancy papers we've had lying around for years and printed out 3 different designs, one on Fargo Primera clay-coated paper, one on 24# (I think) regular bond, and one on the back side of a piece of paper with a preprinted border. The last one is fairly grainy and somewhat gray in color.
So here's the one I colored on regular 20# paper. Looks okay as a digital graphic but the original has sides all curled up because the Posca pens are too liquid for such flimsy substrate.

I tried coloring on the clay-coated paper with colored pencils; not a howling success. All the colors are very pale. I added some darker color with Prismacolor fine line markers and they were not an improvement. The texture they made was very scratchy and unattractive, and when I tried blending them with a Q-tip, they mostly just rubbed off. I'm going to take the paint pens (Posca pens) to it next.

All this is fine, even though I don't much like the results of the clay-coated paper much. This is all meant to be a learning experience so I can see which media - pencil, pen, marker, paint - works best with which substrate. Maybe I'll try a fresco on a wall next. No, not really.