I thought I’d share my “easy, scribble method” of coloring with Copic Markers – so named because…. well… its easy… and you just scribble.
For those of you who might not know, Copic Markers are high quality, alcohol based markers that have many advantages over traditional, water based markers. You can color without streaks and lines and colors blend beautifully together right on the paper. Since they are alcohol not water based – you can color in the same spot repeatedly and the paper will not ball up or tear. You can also use lighter colors (or the colorless blender) to remove color and create highlights – or even fix mistakes! (hey – we all color outside the lines sometimes!).
I printed my image on card stock. I like to use X-press blending card (used here) or Neenah Classic Crest. But there are other card stocks that people have great success with.
If you are having a problem with your marker ink spreading or feathering outside you image lines, it might be that you are over saturating the paper with too much ink. But often, the feathering is caused by a card stock that has too soft of a surface. It’s worth trying a different card brand of card stock. A different card stock will often solve the problem of the printed image smearing also.
Remember to put scrap paper beneath your image – the ink will bleed through.
So here is my scribble-y process.
The first thing I do is decide where my light source is because it will help me decide where highlights and shadows should go. Sometimes the image shading shows where shadows should be. This image is shaded, but I’m still mentally placing my light source in front of the image, in the upper left. This means the lower right parts of the image will generally be slightly darker and the upper left parts will be slightly highlighted.
Color your darker, shaded areas with your darkest shade – RV-04 in this case (I chose a bright pink hoping it would show up well in pictures). Just scribble it in there.
Choose you next lighter shade (RV-02) and scribble around the darker, overlapping. The darker color edges will blend together. Add more shading where you want it.
Add your lighter color (RV-00), blending the edges again (just scribble):
Now, with all this blending, you might want a little darker darks – go back and put in more color if you wish. Then, take a look at what might be hit with a lot of light. Take either a very light shade (RV-0000 here) or even your colorless blender and stroke it across those areas. It will remove some of the color and create a highlight. You can stroke or scribble a couple times if you want a stronger highlight.
(If you notice – in all my scribbling, I got pink on the left side of my center. Not too worried. I know I can push that out of the way with either the colorless blender or the color I use for the center.)
Next – color the center. With my light source where it is – I put darker ink (YR-24 and YR-23) on the lower right.
Finish coloring the center – blending with YR-21 and Y-11.
Now the leaves I started with YG-61 but wanted darker so I added YG -67
Then blended with YG-63.
I want a little more brightness, so I just scribbled in some YG-25 and blended with YG-21.
Last (whew) – I wanted to put a shadow line around the outer edge to make the flower stand out more from the paper. I wanted it to be subtle – so I drew around the outer edge with the colorless blender to pre-wet it and then traced over with B-60. This will give you a more subtle, spread out shadow. You need to work fast, before the blender evaporates though!
And here is the finished image on a card:
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