I got 8 or 9 new markers this past week and have been itching to use them. I wanted to share a few of the images I colored and a few of the things I learned while playing.
This image is from Kraftin' Kimmy - it's the new Witchy Poo image from Annie Rodrigue. Love her stuff. Fun, playful and totally awesome for coloring!
Most of the time when I'm just coloring (which really means practicing and experimenting) I'll try to focus on one technique or concept. I by no means, consider myself an expert with Copics but definitely feel that there's value in critically looking at my work and noting what I like and don't like about it. It's the best way I know to improve. I thought it might be of interest to others so I'm sharing it here.
I wanted to work on putting highlights in the Witchy Poo images as well as practicing more on skin & hair. This is such a perfect image to practice these techniques on. One thing I discovered today is that I'm not good at leaving white space. Just have a hard time doing it. Even though I know that sometimes that's just what's needed to give the look I want. So how to reconcile my need to color everything with the concept of leaving white space to show highlights??After a little messing around I colored with the lightest color of my series in the areas I wanted to show the highlights, then went in with the mid color and then the dark color and blended them all together with the lightest color to smooth them out. I liked some of those results like with my orange Witchy Poo's hat. I goofed when I was coloring her skin though. And was very happily surprised by the results of my attempt to "fix" it. I've found that I really like E000 for overall skin tone and shading with R01. I inadvertently pulled R02 and started shading away before I realized my error. Yikes! Witchy looked like she had a really weird sunburn. I went back with my E000 and started trying to pull the R02 out. While I may not like the overall effect I do like how her cheek looks. A little shading which was needed and a little like blush which gives a little more interest and dimension to her.
Not thrilled with her hair but starting to find a method I like. Witchy Poo 2 had me playing with one of my new colors RV17 - sooooo gorgeous! I really liked her hair. It still shows some highlights but not with a white spot which is just hard for me to do. I was also fairly pleased with the overall color. Red is apparently not only the most difficult color to maintain in real life but it's the hardest hair color to recreate. Leave it to me to always do things the hard way.I found that I also really liked how R39 blended with the RV17. But not so much with how it blended with RV14, R37 or R35. Those images won't be getting uploaded to the blog though. :)
I didn't particularly care for the leaves in my pumpkin & acorn filler image (Papertrey Ink's Friendship Jar Fall Fillers) but I do like the pumpkins overall and really liked the B000 shadow around it. I have to remember to do that more and want to find more colors I like for this technique. I also tried my highlighting technique in reverse - putting the darkest color down, then taking my mid color over it and further out and finally bringing my lightest color over them to finish the smoothing and add the highlight. This gave me a smoother blend and used less ink, both good things.
A few more newly discovered color combos I really liked: B02 & B05, B34, B95 & B99, R39 & R37, B66 & B99, Y26, YR21 & YR12, E51 & E30 and E42 & E31. Would love to hear some of your favorite combos. I want to create a sample book and would like to have a section on color combos to refer to.
AWESOME! These are so great! I'm gaga for those pumpkins!!! :)
ReplyDeleteThese look fab my friend!!! Sounds like you had a great weekend!! Me... not so much... I had to work OT on Saturday! ugh... i am TIRED! :):):):):):):):):):):):):):):):):):):):):):):):)
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