CopicArt – Illustrating with Markers

   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.

2 Responses to “Anime Style Hair Rendering”