Monochrome just means colouring in one colour. Many people think it means black and white but it can be any colour and white, or any colour without white! It makes colouring a lot simpler as you do not have to keep choosing colours!
I have tried this for different pictures in Johanna Basford’s books. I thought that I would share some of the pictures I have done so that you can see whether it is something you would like to try out.
This on fromt the top of the page is from Secret Garden and I used shades of blue with pastel for the background. I coloured the leaves in blue and outlined the flowers with a white gel pen. It is not truly monochrome as there is a lot of black printed on the page, but it was near enough for me!
This is from Worlds of Wonder. I used two shades of dark blue pencil from my Arteza Premium set. I liked the blue and white together but I did cheat and add grey for the metallic parts of the bike!
Another blue and white picture, this time from Johanna’s Christmas. The blue felt like the right colour for this snowflake design and the different shades help to make different parts stand out.
This is from Ivy and the Inky Butterfly. It was a competition entry and so I wanted it to stand out, so felt a monochrome version of the picture could be a good idea. I did not win but it was great fun to do!
This picture is from Lost Ocean. I experimented with colouring this in graphite pencils with different hardnesses of leads. It was a fun experiment but they were rather smudgy! I think next time I would use grey coloured pencils as it is a lot less messy!
Another blue picture agian! This one is from Worlds of Wonder. I used Arteza pencils again with the same dark blue tones from the bike above but with a lighter colour in the background.
I wanted to give a sepia effect to this postcard from Secret Garden. I, therefore, used one tone of pencil and used a sepia shade of pastel for the background.