CopicArt – Illustrating with Markers

Archive for the ‘Techniques’ Category

   Up to this date, there was really no planning with my illustrations, except for the colors used.  Sure, I always create a test image, but there is one area that it is just weak, and overlooked. Shadows have always been my worst enemy, especially since they were done on the fly, never planned.

   I have to admit that sometimes they were in the wrong place, and since it is markers we are talking about, fixing is out of the question. So after hearing a good advice, here is how I tried to solve my problem. I made an extra copy of the image to illustrate, and with a pencil (easy to erase) added the outline of how I wanted my shadows to appear. Not only I got better looking shadows, but also got a better handle of the light source.

   So here are the first two images of my fairy illustration. 

* Original Illustration *

* Planned Shadows *

   During the certification class, the instructors provided us with sample card stock, and borrowed a rubber stamp, so we could practice the blending techniques. And so I stamped several images that now will serve as samples for today’s topic.

First lets talk a little bit about hair. Hair is not flat, it contains highlights, mid tones, and dark tones, so selecting a solid color to render hair will result on a flat unnatural hair. When rendering hair it is a good practice to use several shades of colors.

Unfortunately I didn’t get the name of the stamp that we used, but at the moment I saw it, I knew it will be a perfect image to test this rendering technique.

Step 1: Using YR21 as base, color the hair in feather strokes from the outside in, leaving a white area in the middle of each side as highlight. make sure to follow the shape of the hair with your strokes, if not, the hair will look unnatural.

Note how I separated her head into two sections (left and right), and colored from the middle of them outwards, again to create a nice flow with my hair.

Step 2: With the base color and highlights in place, it is now time to add a darker color to add tone variations to our hair. Follow the same type and direction of strokes with a YR23. But this time make sure your strokes are a little shorter than your base color. Doing this will create a graduation of colors.

Step 3: Lovely isn’t, it looks like hair now. We will need to repeat the last step with a darker color and even shorter strokes this time, the color used is YR24.

Do not worry if your hair has some hard lines in between colors, we will make them disappear on the following step.

Step 4: Now that we have our layered hair, it is time to blend all the shades and eliminate rough edges that could be created by coloring over dry colors. Using our lightest color (YR21), go over the whole hair, using the same strokes and direction as in the first step. This will re-activate the darker colors and blend everything together nicely.

Final Image: This is a great departure from flat, un-attractive rendered hair, to a more natural looking hair. Here is my final image that I produced with this method, note that the face and dress were illustrated the same way as the hair.

I hope you find this method useful, and easy to use into your own projects.

Up to this point we have our image fully colored, but there is one more steep needed to make it a complete illustration. No matter how careful I color my images, there is times when my color just bleeds out of the outline, and using the colorless blender may not be an option. A few weeks ago, I mentioned my purchase of a Copic Opaque White, and that is the product we will use for our final touches.

            First let me explain a little bit better what the Opaque White is. The Copic Opaque White is a water based pigment ink, used to add details or to correct mistakes on an illustration. One important thing to take in consideration is that you should use it only as a final product, as you may ruin your tip if you try to color over it, remember that it is a water based product, and the Copic ink is alcohol based. It comes in a small container, and is really thick, so much that it looks like a paste instead of ink; don’t worry as that is how it’s supposed to look.

            For some weird reason I haven’t been able to find much information on how to use it, so it was trial and error learning on my part. First thing I found out is that you need a really small brush to properly use it (I bought a round 3/0 and a flat 0), using big brushes will result on wasting, and you will end up with a mess. Second thing, you need to work slowly on small areas at a time, remember this is not a marker, trying to cover a large area may result in a mess. Third, have a container with clean water and a rag next to you, as you will need them to clean your brush.

Here is an image of the opaque white and the brushes I used to do my corrections on my anime girl.

            On this close-up of her head, you can notice how my coloring went outside the lines on her hair, and more noticeable on the eyes. As you can guess, it is too late to use the colorless blender (especially in the eyes), so it is time to use the Opaque White.

            Now, how much do you use at a time, not a lot as you can see in the following image, and remember this is a really fine brush I’m using.

            And here is the result of using the Opaque White to correct my mistakes, and to add a little reflection on her eyes. She does look much better, right?

            Here are more images of the areas that needed correction and how they look once the Opaque white was used.

            Final image, my project was finally completed.

Note: Opaque White may not be one of the must-have products on your list, but it is worth a consideration I you want to add special touches to your images.

 I hope the visual addition I made to my posts is noticeable, and the button adds a little bit more professional look to my blog. We are almost done with this drawing. The two earlier posts handled what I think are the two more important visual elements of my image, now it is time to add some skin and boots.

            Now it’s time to work on the bottom of the image, the boots to be exact. I picked four colors for the boots, “100” for the Sole, E29 for the hard shadows, E57 as my base color, and E39 for my soft shadows. As in the previous posts, the first thing to color was the E57 base color, and while still wet, add the E39 for soft shadows, and finally colored the sole and hard shadows of the boots.

             The hair was colored by using the following colors, E13, and E35. This was made quite simple, as I didn’t want to draw too much attention to the hair. The skin and eyes were colored with the following colors: Skin E00-E02, Eyes 100-YG03-G17. The following images illustrate how I colored the hair, skin, and eyes.

            At this point the image was near completion, I colored the Copic on her hand with an YG17, T0, and W5 colors. And then I decided to add some glitter to the image, by coloring her nails and the shoulder straps with my pink Atyou Spica pen.

            And now we can happily call this image finished, right? Wrong! There is one more step that needs to be done to call this image a complete work.  But that will be told on the next post.

Time to continue with yesterday’s project. One sad thing about using Toner grays is that is so hard to photograph. You can see the result on paper, but as soon as I used the digital camera, most of the details were gone. So you’ll have to thrust me that it looks really nice.

            The next step on my image was to color the shorts of my character, and following the same idea as with her top, I wanted to created a washed-out look. So I decided to make her wear faded blue jeans. Making jeans is quite easy; we just need two colors (B32 and B24) and the colorless blender.

            If you take a close look at any faded jeans, you will notice that it has a distinct pattern, the darkest color is at the edge of the jeans, and it fades to an almost white area at the middle of the fabric. Of course not all jeans fade to white, but to have a consistent look, I will color the faded jeans.

            On this case my first step was to color half of her shorts with the B32, this is my base color (Step 1). Then I followed by coloring the shadows of her shorts with the B24 color, look how I added shadows around the whole previously colored area (Step 2). And finally, using the Colorless blender I added the faded look to her jeans; this was made by coloring with the blender from the middle out, this means I started using the blender at the middle of the fabric, pushing the color out, to the sides (Step 3).

            Note that on the third step on the previous image I went too hard with the blender, so it could be picked up by the camera. I repeated the previous steps on the opposite side of her shorts and used the “100” color to illustrate her belt, and used Y17 for the belt buckle.

            Not bad, we now have a faded black top, and worn out jeans. On my following post we will finish the coloring of the image.

Well I got drawing again, and like the previous time, a test image was made prior to the final coloring.  This time I want to elaborate a little bit more on the coloring part, especially on the clothing part of my Anime Girl. I think this whole project will be divided into two (or more) posts.

                To start let’s speak about the image. The sketch was made on regular copy paper, then used Adobe Illustrator to outline the image, and finally printed it on a sheet of Georgia Pacific Card stock with a laser printer. To me the most important elements of the image are her shorts and her tank-top, and a simple plain coloring, won’t do this time.

Coloring the Tank-Top Dark

                By dark, I didn’t meant dark green, dark blue, or a dark pink. I wanted a black top, with textures and shadows. Bring in the “100” marker and color the image as black as possible, right? Wrong!

                One of the most misunderstood topics of the Copic markers is the fact that they have so many shades of gray. By having so many grays, we can correctly illustrate a great variation of dark elements on our images, and in this case, we will use some grays to color our top.  The colors choose for my dark top are from the Toner Gray family and will be T0, T5, and T7.

                I started by coloring the top with my base color (T5), and then added the shadows (T7). At this point we have a nice shaded black top, and either we can leave it this way, or color on top of the light areas with the T0 to make it look washed out. Here is the result.

                Next post, we will color the Shorts and belt.

There is a couple more basic effects that can be achieved with the colorless blender, both quite simple and fast. Now, I have to mention that the results will vary, depending on the paper used, and the color as well.

Let’s make a Wall

If you think that the chisel tip of your colorless blender is useless, think again. One cool effect that can be achieved with that side is the creation of a brick wall. Just color your area with the base color, then start touching it with the longest part of the chisel tip. Each time you do this, you will create a brick on your wall, so continue doing it until your wall is complete.

Stone-like texture

Another texture can be achieved with the brush tip of your Sketch or Ciao markers. Just tap your colored area randomly with the brush tip of your colorless blender. This will create a kind of stone /ground texture.

As I mention earlier, the results of these two technique will vary depending on your paper. Here are the same technique, with different paper, and colors.

I didn’t forgot to make a post about hand sanitizer, just got a little busy at work.

One big advantage of using Copic markers for our projects is that we can easily go beyond simple blending, and apply textures to our coloring. The Copic pigments react to any alcohol based product, and that is the foundation for our most basic texture.

Ideally I would recommend you to buy a big bottle of color less blender ink, but you can get away without one for this technique. For my early easter project, I stamped, colored, and shaded an easter bunny (Cute). The final image looked flat, and nothing out of the ordinary.

I tough that my Bunny would look better if it had some texture, so I grabbed an old kitchen rag (clean of course), and sprayed it with my color less blender liquid with a perfume atomizer that I had laying around (DO NOT soak the rag, make sure it’s just barely wet), then padded my image with the wet rag. And, presto! My Bunny has a furry texture.

Note: The texture on the left side was created with color less blender, and the one in the right side with Hand sanitizer.

TIP: Hand sanitizer will get you almost the same results. It’s alcohol concentration is less than the color less blender, so it will react a little bit slower, and your project will be 99% germ free. Also, you can use it to clean your markers, or any non-porous area that was stained with Copic ink.

Of course that was my test image, I will post my real project next.

Back from my Certification class, and glad for taking it. I knew the theory of most of the techniques shown, but I didn’t have time to practice them or actually work on them. I wasn’t new to Marianne’s way of teaching, as I attended to three of her Copic presentations before at Anime Expo in Southern California. Nevertheless to say that I enjoyed the Certification Class.

Well, after hanging the Certificate on my studio, and surviving two birthday parties, I finally sat on front of my Netbook to write about yet another blending method that you can do with Copic Markers.

Personally I like the results of the Wet in Wet method, but it has one major disadvantage, it works with colors that belong to the same family range. If you want to blend colors that belong to a different family with the Wet in Wet method, then most likely your will end up with something really close to mud (literally).

For example, lets assume I want to blend a yellow and a brown. With the Wet in Wet method the result would be something like this.

No Blending, the brown is too strong for the yellow to blend, in other cases, like yellows and blues, one of the original colors will change. The following example shows how a blue color will change completely to a green tone once its blended with a yellow.

So, does that mean that I can only blend colors of the same family? No, there is another method of blending that allows us to blend colors of different families. The method is called feathering, and consist on coloring with both colors in opposite direction, lifting the maker’s tip at the place where the colors will met.

To understand better how it works, lets suppose we need to color a square that goes from yellow to blue.

First you will apply the yellow, with long strokes (not round, short strokes), from one corner of the square to the middle of it, but just before you reach the middle you need to lift the brush tip of your marker so it colors the yellow faint.

Then you will repeat the same strokes from the opposite side of the square with the blue marker. Make sure to slightly pass the middle of the square with your strokes, this will be the blending point.

To get a better blending, you may need to repeat the strokes on both sides while the paper is still wet. This technique has a disadvantage too, it works best with lighter colors (last digit below 5).

 Hope this is helpful. Have a nice day.

This is an image I made a few weeks back, but never got a chance to work on it (writing my previous post was to blame). The sketch was made on a regular copy-paper sheet, and then it was computer outlined. As it can be seen, some colors don’t match, and that it’s the purpose of this test page.

My selection of colors for the final image are: Hair – V09 BV08 100, Hair Ribbon – Y15 Y17, Hair – E13 E57, Skin – E51 E31, Dress – V12 RV21, Socks – E07 R24 B45, Shirt – B45 B41, and the Copics – B45 W1.

As a rule there is two things I never do, coloring an original sketch (either pencil or inked), and coloring without making a test image first.

A test image is a photocopy of the work that’s ready to be colored, and will help to select the final colors of your image, as well as the blending techniques that you may want to use. The coloring doesn’t need to be precise, as this image is just a guideline for the finished work.

     These are good practices even for Stampers, it is a real pain to spend hours making a card only to find out the color don’t match, or that your blending needs improvement. With a test image you did that beforehand.