CopicArt – Illustrating with Markers

Archive for April, 2009

On my previous post I talked about what I found to be the strong and weak points of the Digital Stamps. As my first complete project I decided to use this image from Dustin Pike (http://dustinpike.blogspot.com/), he’s offering this and other images free of charge, so if you like it please visit his site, and leave him a comment or two.

While taking a look at my local Michael’s, I saw that they had a 40% discount on some Prismacolor sets, and although I have a few color pencils, none of them are prisma. So, despite been a marker (Copic) guy I bought a 48 colors set, it was now or never for me as the special ended today.

So what to do with this two items, one choice was to color the stamp completely in markers, and forget the prisma for today, other choice was to go full force with the pencils. Going full marker will just make another image (no challenge), coloring entirely with prismas wasn’t a true option, I have almost zero experience with pencils, so using them for such a big image wouldn’t look good.

So after weighting options A and B, I decided for option C , coloring the image with markers, and use the pencils for the shadows. Combining media like pencils and markers can save you some money as pencils are less expensive, and the results are quite good.

Here are the pictures I took from this project.

Now, I did a mistake on the kite, I forgot about the pencils and shaded it with markers, not a big deal, but I have to mention it

The rest of the image was colored as planned, basic color with Copics, the shades were colored with the Prismas.

Time to put the new Laptop to good use and write something useful here. Today’s main topic will be Digital Stamps, the benefits and problems that I have found so far. Nothing is perfect on this world and these kind of stamps are not for everyone, and at the same time there may be people that find them perfect for their way of work (I’m one of them).

First things first. How did I found out about Digital Stamps, and why did I use them. I knew about those kind of stamps from advertisements on web pages I visit, but I really decided to take a closer look when Joni (http://astickysituation.blogspot.com/) pointed out to me one site that has a few of those stamps for free, and since they were free, then I wouldn’t loose anything from testing them. The site she mentioned to me is: http://dustinpike.blogspot.com/ check it out and don’t forget to leave comments for Dustin, we all love our Blog comments. After my initial tests, I went ahead and purchased some from a site advertised at SCS (forgot to save the link, sorry), and gave it a more serious test run to the Digital Stamps.

Like anything we can find inside this beautiful blue planet we call earth, not all things are perfect, and in the case of Digital Stamps, there are good and bad points to consider before trashing your rubber stamps and gone digital.

Good Points: Portability, no big storage spaces are needed, because they don’t take any physical space, they are inside your computer, and if you own a laptop, they can travel with you to anywhere. Consistency, unless you are running out of ink, every time you print one of them they will look the same (My biggest problem with rubber stamps, I cannot get them to print right most of the time), Scalable, most of the creators of these stamps make them big (page size big), and since they are digital you can scale them down to any size you want, and again they will be consistent.

Bad Points: Selection, Digital Stamping is a new medium, so the selection is quite limited compared with more the more traditional rubber stamps. Ink selection, not all inks work with Copic markers, so before investing in DS make sure your printer will work with Copics. Quality, even if the image looks pretty on your screen, if the file is either damaged, or saved in a poor resolution/quality setting, then your printouts will look terrible. Digital can be scary, there is a certain degree of knowledge needed to work with them, you need to know how to unzip files, paste images into documents, and specially how to scale down your images. Digital can be deleted easily, and I mean easy, just one wrong key, or mouse click, and your stamps will be gone, so extra precautions will be needed, like backing up your files often.

Using Digital Stamps can help people like me do things that couldn’t be done with rubber, but at the same time, the one using them must be aware that it will be imperative to have the right knowledge and the right tools to make them work as they should be.

Next post I will show you my work on one of those Digital Stamps I got.

Finally I got my new laptop, and I’m currently setting it up so I can finally get back to work on the site, and my real-life job. Due to the laptop issue I did get a little behind on some work projects, and now its time to catch up so I can finally dedicate some needed time to my illustrations, and more educative posts.

I may even do something tonight, with a few digital stamps I just purchased. As soon as the coloring is done and the text written I will post it here for all of you to see, and I haven’t forgotten about the shading, that will come after.