so today's a very special three marker challenge because these three colors were
actually chosen by Copic for me to use - I actually had a pretty hard time using
these three colors together and let me tell you exactly why that was
♪
so these are Copic's official colors for the month of November 2018
there is R37 or 'Carmine,' E37 'sepia,' and G99 'olive'
now when I was doing my testing
to see how I wanted or how I wanted to draw and what these colors kind of look
like on paper and I discovered something real quick and that was all three colors
have very similar tone so what that really means is if I were to desaturate
or remove all of the saturation from this video
these three colors would look almost exactly the same now this was kind of
scary as an artist especially for me who kind of avoids dark saturated colors
because I'm just not very comfortable with markers yet and I like to stick to
my pastels and slowly build up the color and you know have more control in that
way this was not going to be like that so
this is going to be a very much a learning experience and diving right
into my biggest fear when it comes to markers - the other thing that made these
colors very different from what I would usually gravitate towards is when I put
these over a line art when I did my smudge test I've quite quickly learned
that the contrast between these colors and whatever I chose to use as line art
whose going to be nil - okay, these colors were almost as dark as the black liner
so basically what I usually do which is use line art to create all of the
details and like the face on the body what's not really going to work in this
situation but I'll get to that later when I start adding in color right now I
want to address what I'm drawing and why I'm drawing what I'm drawing so I did a
lot of thumbnails and research and tried to figure out what exactly wanted
to draw using these three colors before I dove in and like created this final
illustration and no matter how I looked at these colors they just made me think
of the holidays like the red and the green and
that beautiful brown like all together it just uh like it just made me think of
Christmas and like Thanksgiving and I don't know just that whole season and
like wreaths especially so I drew a lot of wreaths and I noticed these colors
worked really well for that and another thing I painted was like a wreath on
like a wooden texture and that looked really cool and it worked and used all
of the colors and it was really happy with that but I knew I wanted to draw a
character because that's kind of what I'm known for
so I dove in and created a character using these colors and my biggest sort
of inspiration was definitely a holiday wreath and I decided to give
this character space buns with holiday wreaths that wrapped around the buns and
I'm very happy with the idea I think it's very funny and cute - I've probably seen
this somewhere and that's where [the idea] came from and also because of the green
wreath then there's the red bow that like hangs off of the wreath and that
was really fun to draw like the flowy ribbon that was coming off of the bow
and then the hair that was looping up on top of that and then to further use the
colors I decided to give her some dark brown skin and then her dress was like a
bright red it's kind of a play on like one of those like Santa dresses that
you've seen around but that's like a velvety red color and then they have
like that fluffy... white.... fur.... stuff? on it it's kind of a play on that but I
decided to make it very slim fitting around like the waist and the body and
then really loose on the sleeves so they're almost like bell sleeves and
then on the end of basically any edge there's bright white because there's
going to be that.... fur. - now this was kind of a choice because it made me think of the
holidays but also this was a conscious choice because of the colors I had and I
knew I wanted to keep as many of these colors separate from one another as
possible so that they'd have more contrast between them because if I put
the colors right next to each other or try to do it too many details with like
multiple colors next to each other the colors just blended together and if you
were to like squint even without squinting and you looked at the drawing
the colors all just look like one color and
that really was not what I was going for so by using this white fur to separate
like the skin tone from the color of the dress I was able to get some contrast
there and I'm very happy with that decision I wish there was something more
I could have done with the face because when it comes to the head that's where
all the colors start you know I start putting a lot of colors next to each
other because there's the hair and like you can't really put a white line
between the hair and the face that's gonna look kinda weird and then
there's the wreaths that are in her hair I did decide to do something special
about that to separate it from the air but the face is definitely where I had
like the least amount of contrast and I had to make a decision which I make much
later on after - when I start getting to coloring the skin tone and the decision
was am I going to put line art on this? - I decided for coloring the body 'no' I
wanted to go for a paper cutout kind of.... thing
I decided to avoid lineart as much
as possible because the liner like I showed you earlier was really not
setting apart from the colors with red it worked the best but with the brown
and the green like you could just really not - you really couldn't see the lines at
all so it was pretty much pointless so the way I decided to do this was just
erase a little bit of pencil at a time and then try to fill in solid blocks of
color using the Copic markers um trying to get a solid tone is a little bit
difficult for me again I'm a beginner with these copic markers [note: this video was filmed in Oct'18] I'm trying to learn so if you have any
tips definitely let me hear them, I am all ears but I did my best to try and
get a solid tone especially for the dress but once I had that solid tone I
went and tried to add maybe some shading where I thought that there would be
shading and I feel like it pulled away a little bit from that like flat paper
'cutout-y' look that I was going for but yeah it's a learning experience
the only other part of this illustration that is like majorly red are the bows
up in her hair that are connected to the wreaths and this is where I started
putting into play my idea to try and keep colors separate so what I did was
see I am coloring each section of the ribbon but leaving a little bit of white
space between them - I carried this idea over to adding the wreaths in her hair
by trying to keep the wreaths that even section of whiteness away
from the bow I did that on both sides - now each element of this illustration
had like a specific color that I had appointed to it like the wreath, the bow,
the dress, and the skin - but there was a hair color that I needed to choose and I
didn't have an extra color so what I decided to do was use two colors, mix
them together - I used two very contrasting colors which are red and
green and by layering those two up I get a very very dark-near-black, a pretty
brown color and I really liked that for the hair color I think it worked really
well and you'll see like I mentioned earlier this is where colors are
starting to get very close together and starting to almost touch and then like
some sections are going to end up touching like the skin and the hair
because like I said "no white line between that" that would just look really weird
um so I had to kind of come up with a way to keep these colors like in their
own little sections and like keep them separate so that they don't all blend
into just one blob and that was by using a Posca pen and what I did was I just
outlined basically all of the shapes and gave them like this nice even white line
I tried to do this as much as possible without the Posca pen - like just using
the color of the paper but there are some parts where I either messed up or
forgot so I needed to use the pen and just create that like even white line
around the wreaths and the bows - after that I started coloring in the hands and that
part was really fun to do those sort of like paper cutout-y section cuz I was
like able to draw in each finger with like a stroke and I just I really
enjoyed that part but you may have noticed like wait a minute it kind of
looks like she's avoiding coloring the face and... confession, yes I was - like I
mentioned earlier I'm very scared of using line art and these markers
together because of like they're similar tones and so I was just very worried
about doing the face but that's where the most details are in
this particular illustration and I thought that was gonna be the easiest
thing to really mess up so I put it off until last cuz I was just so nervous - I did
end up choosing to put line art on the faces because I was very nervous about
like losing that detail that I had in the face already by adding color on
top of it and then I gave that ample time to dry and added more Posca
pen to the bows and added more separation of color there and then once
I was fully sure that that liner was dry and it wasn't going to smudge I started
adding in the color - I'm pretty sure I was holding my breath like the entirety
of coloring in the face cuz I really didn't want to get any weird streaks or
strokes like in weird places on the face because I like the face to be very
smooth when it comes to coloring so I was very careful and tried to avoid
overlapping any parts that were already dry and tried to like fill in the face
as quickly as possible so that was all like still wet and juicy
while I was adding in the marker so that none of it was dry - I'm just like
repeating myself because like that's how nervous I was, I was just like "ahh no strokes
no streaks ahhhhhh" - I think I did a pretty good job overall and then I was able
actually to add shading right under her chin by going over like a couple times
with that same marker and that's just my favorite thing about markers is the fact
that you can do that it's just just looks so cool I love it and then I
learned from experience by testing these markers together that I really did not
like using any of the other markers as like a blush color on this face I think
it just didn't look very good - the colors were just like "meh" there wasn't good enough
blush color so I decided to use this bubblegum Crayola colored pencil that I
had on my desk and just start uh scribbled and blended on like the cheeks
in the nose to add a little bit more like blush to the face - I also used the
e37 color 'sepia' to add some shading to the dress so like underneath the fur on
the top of her dress I wanted there to be a little bit extra dimension there to
make it look a little bit more poofy and like it's sticking out more so that's
what I did there so after that I added in some extra details here and there
like with the Posca pen and a cool thing I learned is: I added like some white
fern shapes to the wreath with the Posca pen
and then went over that with the Copic marker and it looks really cool because
there's like two separate green tones there even though I only had one Copic
marker "whhhaaaaht? yeah!" that was really cool I wish I had realized that earlier I could
have maybe incorporated it in other sections of the drawing but after that
and coloring in the lips, it was time to add in the background color and if you
look at the illustration there's one color I used the least - what's that one?
oh! it's a green! so I decided to make the background color green and I've never
colored in this large of a section with an alcohol-based marker before so that
was a treat *laughs* [note this was before i started my new sketchbook] - I'm trying to get it to not streak was near impossible I've tried a
couple different things I looked up like "try to use swishy motions"I tried that
try to do really quick motions - I tried that - go over the section a couple times
I tried that - all of them sort of worked to an extent but they weren't able to
get rid of like every streak so I - well I had this idea to do it anyway but
I added some like snowflakes to the background so like little X's and dots
here and there to kind of distract from the streaks and to make it look a little
bit more winter-themed with snow so I'm kind of happy with that I really like
the way the drawing looks because it's just like so much color everywhere it's
just like in-your-face and whenever I draw something I tend to just draw a
random character in the middle of the page so I'm very proud of myself for
deciding to attempt a solid background color even if it's not like any detailed
background of any kind like the fact that I'm taking steps to move in the
right direction to start adding backgrounds to my drawing so I'm
happy about that and I hope to get a little bit better with strokes and lines
in my markers so this is only my second ever illustration with a Copic marker so
I'm pretty proud of it I've used alcohol-based markers but this is my
second Copic one and yeah I'm happy with it I had a lot of fun like designing the
character so let me show you some of like the sketches I did when I was
planning out the character so these are some of the ones I did before I drew
this picture I'm really happy with some of these and
you can see where I was testing out the colors and you'll actually notice in my
illo sketchbook the paper is different than what I used to draw the final
illustration - in the illo sketchbook, the colors are actually a lot lighter so I
was a little bit more comfortable using them but when it came to this marker
paper that I used to the full illustration, the colors actually ended up being a little
bit darker so it was even scarier because I was like whoa wait a minute
this isn't what I was planning on? so um this whole thing was uh
definitely like kind of delving into my biggest marker fears and I think it
turned out all right I'm actually really really happy with it
and I think it's given me quite a bit of confidence to use markers
more and use some of those more saturated colors and like that I'm
scared of so yeah I can leave the pastels behind for a little bit and yeah
it turns out okay it's not that scary I hope to get better in the future but
so this is a cool benchmark that I can compare myself to in the future and I
think that'll be really cool anyway - I want to thank Copic for
choosing me to be on of their November artists and to challenge me to use these three
colors in an illustration it was very much a learning experience and I had a
lot of fun so thank you for that and yeah you guys can actually can see this
illustration over on their Instagram page and I'll also be posting it on my
Instagram page so I'll have links to all that in the description - thank you guys
for watching I hope you enjoyed watching my process of using these three very
similarly toned markers in one complete illustration yeah I had a lot of fun
thank you guys for watching I'll see you guys all next week I hope you have a
delicious evening full of ♪ WAFFLES ♪
BYE! ♪
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