Copic Marker Class

We took a trip to St. Louis and attended a wonderful Copic Marker class on Friday and Saturday taught by Lori Craig. As a kid, I sketched a lot. However, that was before markers were a thing, so I never learned how to use them.  Since Sherri wanted to take the classes, I went ahead and joined her and I really had fun. I also learned a number of things, which will help make doing more with the markers a lot easier. (We can skip past the part of me spending money on a Copic Airbrush system.)

I’ve attached a few of the colorings we did as part of the practice. They are not masterpieces. Many of these were quick and several went unfinished so that we could keep up with the fast pace of the class. It was not overwhelming, but you could not spend an hour on an image to make it perfect. I think a number of the images turned out decent for my first go. Fortunately, we got two copies of each image to go back later and practice with some more.

Blending Colors

For the classes, we were given a number of line art images to color as we practiced certain techniques. One of the big advantages of alcohol markers is their ability to blend, so that was one of the things we were practicing.  I used five or six colors to blend the petals of the flower.

There are several ways to blend (flicking color with quick strokes, going over the paper with different colors, really saturating the paper, tip to tip color transfers, using paint trays like you might with watercolors, …) The markers really are versatile.

Colorless Blender

Another item we were practicing with was using the colorless blender. (Which is not really about blending so much as pushing color away. The blender is just the pure alcohol solution without any pigment). In this image, we colored the jar and then used the blender to push the pigment to the edges, creating a glass effect.

The green of the stems in the water was added after the blue was pushed away.  We also used a less saturated color (with more grey) to give the stems an appearance they were inside a water-filled jar.

Faces

We also worked on faces and hair and I have to say, the scanner might have been at too high of a resolution as it picked up some of the subtle pigment differences from the paper that might be less obvious if it wasn’t on a computer screen.

However, I thought it came out good for something done quickly.

Saturation

Another nice thing about Copic markers being able to get to similar results in different ways. The Copic Marker Sketch line has 358 different colors you can purchase. However, you don’t have to purchase all of them. By using complementary colors, greys, and/or less saturated tones, you can do a quite a bit of shading and add depth to the image. Here, the leaves in the background are a less saturated tone and are less vibrant, than the leaves in the foreground.