Tutorial: Creating a misty scene Elements part 2/4

Fall is here! I adore the fog and mist of this season and I love creating subtle and cold scenes with my copic markers.

Here is a tutorial I made for copicmarker.com on creating some really gentle misty effects! This is great for people who don't necessarily like to draw a lot but are good at colouring and want to add a nice mood to an illustration or project! I hope you enjoy it!

Click to view the tutorial on Copic Markers website

Dappled Light Effect - Tutorial

Here is a new tutorial I did for Copicmarker.com for creating a dappled light effect.

Check it out!

Quick Cloud tutorial

AHHHHH! Its hard to blog lately. We've been really busting our butts over at the Studio, and there are no computers there (intentionally!) so boo! I have been trying to get this tutorial posted for a spell now, and I got a few minutes right now so I'm gunna do it by tunder!

Side note! I did a second Guest Blog post for CopicMarker.com! Its about using coloured Multiliners! Check it out!

Sorry for the shadowy images! I didn't have good light at the time.
I hope its okay anyway!

So I have been getting a lot of compliments on the sky's I've been doing in my Hello, Albertosaurus comic lately, and I thought I'd do a little walk through of how its done.

I start off with a blank sky. Here I've coloured everything else already.

Imagine the paper is white! LOL!

Next I take a light light hard to photograph blue, such as BG0000 and block in where i want some rough clouds to be. Try to compose them better than I did.

Its faint, but I hope you can see the lines!

Now I take that same colour (BG0000) and start doing feathering strokes out from the edges of the cloud shapes I made. Be loose, and be varied. try not to make them look too symmetrical.

Feathering strokes! Lift up your marker at the end of each stroke so it has a softened edge!

Roughly cover in the rest of the sky as well. I never worry about my first layer being too even, since i layer so much I blend it all together at the end. This is also the lightest colour I'm going to use here, so anything else will help cover up streaks. Here it is with the first layer done.

Delicious variety. I might go over the streaky parts to smooth it out a little before going to next step.

Okay, next up, a slightly darker colour. in this case I believe B01, or B00. I don't recall exactly. This is where i pin point some snuggly cloud areas where I want to accent some cloud shapes. I'll go in and add a bit of the darker colour, then blend it out with the lighter colour.

You don't have to be precise, leave some lighter colour around the edge of the clouds to give them shape

After you've blended those with your original colour (also feel free to use any number of colours - if its easier for you to use every single colour in a sequence, DO IT!) go over into the white a but more with your light colour to add some sort of depth to them. make em 3d fluffy.

Here it is while blending, jsut before going into the white parts more.

Needs a bit more smoothing, and going into the white will soften those edges!

 Here is a close up of the finished clouds.

Just keep blending until you're happy with it!
Again, the photos are bad, but I hope you get the gist of the technique!

Here he is! Yeti! Now, you can make it less painterly and smooth it out just by practising the technique a little. I tend to keep a bit of a painterly feel to my illustrations sometimes.

All done!

I used X-Press it blending card, or Aquabee Marker paper for this, I don't remember exactly, OOPS!
I also used probably a couple colours not in there. but in general a mix of the BG0000, B01, B00, B02, B000000. I mix and match and don't really keep real track of it, sorry.

Hope this is useful :)

Darker skin tones - tutorials

So I've often got requests on a darker skin tone tutorial but I've never gotten around to it, especially making them more dynamic.
Frankly, I use the same techniques as my Caucasian skin tones, and so never really saw a reason for it, until I realized that the darkest normal skin tone I really ever draw is a tanned skin at best, and then my really dark girl is actually Green... Reality check, I never really do darker skin tones. So I had to dig back to my old watercolour days and rummaged through my mental file cabinet about techniques for that and applied that to the Copic markers and Viola, I think I got something useful here.

Now, when it comes to the darker skin tones, you can layer a lot more different colours into the skin tone. Unlike light skin where you can only do this in a limited way or you just keep getting darker and darker..

For my examples I've done a medium skin tone, with an olive base and a dark skin tone with a yellow base.
You could essentially choose any colour for your base. warm colours work really well. then for the rest I've used the same brown tones for the over top layer.
Okay, just a little disclaimer here - this is far from the neatest cleaning job here! Ha Ha! I was very sloppy but the principle is the same :p
One thing to take note of with dark skin is that the darker the skin the more the highlights take control of the overall look of the skin tone. in the case of really black people it's difficult to shade at all so it's better to switch your focus from shading to highlighting. The key point to remember is to Blend blend blend!

Example 1

Step 1:
My base colour for this example was YG91 - Putty. It's a greyed yellow green (YG stands for YellowGreen then the 9 indicated the amount of grey, the 1 indicated the fact that it's a lighter colour)

I just do a rough coat of colour, nothing too fancy here.
Not too worried about getting it into her hair because it's going to be black, or nearly black anyway. Thats one of the benefits of working light to dark.
After this I've used the same 3 colours for both examples: E11, E13, E15

Step 2:
I layed in some rough areas of shadow with the E11, leaving some of the initial colour showing.
This wont always show through so prominently but in this stage we leave it showing through because if you layer too much it will all but disappear.

You have to do a little pre planning about your light source in every image anyway.

Step 3: 
In this step I've taken E13 and gone over the darker areas again. Not all the same areas of step 2 but just the darkest stuff really.
Laying in the foundation.

Step 4:
Now I take the E11 again and use it to blend out the E13. This time I go over the entire thing. try not to oversaturate the main green layer or you'll just blend it away. It will be visible in the end, but not as a colour purely, just as a tinting of skin tone.
As a side note, in any medium where you are colouring skin it always works best to use many transparent layers.

Step 5:
I started the darker areas again, this time with E15, again in the darker areas only, not wishing to wash out the area completely, but bring a deeper level of colour the the overall picture.

Step 6: 
Then again, blend it out with E11.

I just finished it off with some lip colour and Dark hair.
the light kinda washed out this photo but you get the idea.
In the original at least, she's got a fair amount of that YG91 showing through in her skin giving her a dark olive skin complexion.

I did her hair in E49 dark bark, just to really clean up my edges, LMAO!

Okay, so there is a medium skin tone. Nothing to exiting.
I wanted to try something a little darker as well.

Example 2

SO for my next one, we're going a little bit darker. I mentioned above about the highlights being very important, but I wanted to also note that I still shade to colour. I don't just highlight, so just keep your mind on the highlights as you shade and they will work with you.

Step 1:

Started this one off with a yellow, Y21.

Just a base coat really.

This is going to be very similar to the last one as you'll see.

step 2:

Layer of E11 just as before. Again, don't cover up the yellow just yet. If you do it now it will be completely drowned out by the end.

Step 3:

A layer of E13 ... familiar?

again, darkest areas, don't cover the base colour just yet....

Step 4:

Okay now blend it out with the E11, and go over the yellow. it will still show through.

Step 5: 

I dove in here with some E27 now, again only the darkest areas. You can be neater than I was here. 

For some reason, the more experimental I am the messier I am, LOL.

Step 6:

Blend it out with the E13 again, note how I've left a nice highlight on her cheeks, forehead, and nose? its showing through the yellow really well.Keep those, they're awesome! I also coloured her lips. she was needing it.

Step 7:

I took it one step further and added some E49 around her eyes, under her nose, chin and lip area. I think the contrast added here really punched up the highlights. I blended it with E13.

Again my final step was colouring her hair, I used 100 (black) for her hair in this one. nothing special done, just slapped it on to finish it off.

Now take special note that I've followed some of the information in my Dynamic Skin Tutorial from before, leaving the lighter tone along the jawline to create the contrast.

The most important things are to keep an eye on your light source.

So this turned out to be rather long, but hopefully not pointless.

I hope you enjoy my free tutorials, because I'd like to keep doing them but also get paid to do them too. I'm hoping for your support in the new year when that happens.

If you have any questions just ask me. Don't be afraid of me!

Here is the image used in this Tutorial Feel free to use it for practice! Just always credit me please :)

Sunset

Just a quick little walk through.

My good friends Donut said she'd wanna have a tutorial about sunset colouring, so this is what I've come up with. I know this isn't magnificent but I thought it would be a nice little mini tutorial in a series of sky tutorials!

 First off I always start off with a base colour of your lightest shade. I generally do a lighter yellow like a Y32, Y21, or in this case YR20. because both my other yellows were dry and they're one of the few colours I have no refills for.

 Next step, I start layering in some pinker tones. In this case I did some quick colouring starting from the top, going about 3/4's of the way down with R12. I blended it out right away with YR20 again.

last 2 steps together: Repeat the last step with R12, only half way down this time, then take a violet shade this time BV31, and only got 1/4 of the way down.

Always blending with the original YR20.

Anyway, I hope that was useful or interesting or something. See you later!

Tutorial - WaterDrops

So, Water Drops! I decided it's a nice simple tutorial to do! Waterdrops are really cool, and can be a really neat 3D effect as well. To start off you need to know what a water drop looks like. I took some photos.

This water drop I just put a drop of water on a post it note and using the Macro feature on my Camera I took a couple angled close ups. You can see that a water drop casts a shadow on the far side, and inside the drop there is a heavy glowing on one side, and darker on the other. these the reflection of my light bulb.

The first picture is the one I used in my samples with a few changes. What you have to decide first is what colour you want. I choose pink because well... I like pink, plus my Mums fighting breast cancer right now so its relevant.

Step 1

lay down a layer of your base colour.

I used RV10, but you can do this with ANY colour, even multiple colours.

Make sure this layer dries fully or you'll have impatient marker syndrome (feathering)

Step 2

Step 2 I actually didn't Photograph. That was to ink the drop with a circle shape but not closing the circle. leave the bottom part open.

Hopefully you can see the inked area in my image.

The area I left un-inked is going to be the brightest area of the drop. Then I added a darker shade of Violet - V95 to be exact. something greyed out from your original colour. I went around the inside, leaving the area of the light area free, and also did the outside area opposite the light area, for the cast shadow.

Step 3

Blend it Quick!

So you can see how I've blended it soft on the inside, but NOT the cast shadow. I think the cast shadow should remain a hard edged. It's up to you. Develop your own style.

Step 4

This one has Pink lines - thought I'd Show as an example if line colour, but I didn't like it fully closed line like that.

Using the blender to lighten the glow area.

Now you want to take some colourless blender and lighten up that glow area inside the drop.

Push IN towards the centre of the glow to make it go away from your cast shadow area. Blend soft!

Step 5

Add White

Add a few drops of Opaque white, and by golly, you have a water drop.

I know my reference has only one light spot but 3's make better design company, so 3 dots is good for me. 

Up close these look less effective, but look at this photo of them on my desk:

Click to embiggen

When you see them in the photo they look pretty 3D eh? Especially the one closest to the left, that's the one inked in pink. 

Heres a couple other drops, just for fun, since I was experimenting. the blue one is just a side view drop, and the grey one is a drip with multiple light spots and reflected colours in it. I poorly defined the shape, but I think it looked kinda cool anyway.

Extra Tidbits:

• Try adding reflections into your drops for a unique way of showing something Like A breast cancer ribbon, a Christmas tree, or Christmas lights. It could be rather fun to experiment!
• Light passes THROUGH a water drop, so sometimes right along the edge of the drop you will have dark on the inside, an EXTERIOR glow within the drop shadow. 
• Study real drops. If you want to do something light Christmas lights, hold lights up to a drop of water, take a photo and use it as a reference.
• Try covering your light source up with coloured transparent sheets and see what effects are achieved.

Okay, I hope that was useful, or at least interesting in some way. I just NEEDED to get my markers out and use them today.

Soon I'll do more tutorials thanks to Happy Crafter's wonderful suggestions and inspiration on my To do List page.

Later, gators.

Blending - fabric

So the videos have finally all uploaded, and I can share them with you now
Colouring Nakias Vest (the most indepth on the blending technique - 2 Parts)





Skirt fabric folds (3 markers)

and here's the image used for the tutorials, so you can see the colours in action.

More videos on blending - hair

Blending Hair


I had another 3 alllll uploaded but it turns out they were the wrong files. BOOO! so I have to re upload them all. :/

Again, here's the scan of the drawing, just so you can see it as its supposed to be seen.

Feather Blending

I got my webcam hooked up so I could record some video. The batteries died on my camera to day after an hour setting it up. How fun. I promised to do these videos today, and I like to deliver.

I'll post the rest as they upload :)

Here's the image I coloured in the tutorial so you can see the result more clearly.
I coloured a bit on her shirt as well, and her skin was coloured from before.