Coloring fun

Finally I am playing with this set called Count Your Blessings and having some fun with coloring.  I have always admired others who spent hours on coloring one image and that image is just a WOW.  It looks realistic, dimensional and the image definitely draws everyone's focus.  As a novice I stick to color pencils, watercolor pencils and some markers. 

I think it is acceptable for my first attempt with markers:

This is quite difficult as a big proportion of the image belongs to the orange family but alas I don't have that many shades of orange!  I blended with some brown, red and yellow to make do.  I think I have tried to stretch beyond my comfort zone to color things with some "unnatural" colors. 

One thing I am happy with, however, is the halo effect.  I heard that it is really popular for any colored image so I added that blue shadow to pretend that I'm quite a maestro in coloring.  The light blue does add some depth to it.  Even though I am not a master in coloring, I am a master in pretending to be one.  LOL.

The sketch of my card is based on the one provided by Tuesday Morning Sketches: 

My card is entering the following challenges:
Our Daily Bred Design - Fall colors
Crafty Sentiments Designs - Fall colors
Polly Craft Challenge - Harvest colors
Perfect Sentiments - Fall
Tammy Scrapin Corner - Anything Goes

Thanks for stopping by!