Do you want to play a game? “Okay class, pick up your R35 and we will color the tail of this ribbon.” That’s how Copic and even some colored pencil classes work, right? If you do exactly what the teacher does, you’ll end up with something amazing. And it works… Kinda. You walk away with a very pretty project. Your Christmas scene looks just as cute as the instructor’s. Your ribbon is smooth, your ornaments look shiny and the box looks perfectly dimensional… maybe even realistic.
What did you think when you first saw the Indian Maize project here?
All those Copic Markers on each little kernel? And then she added colored pencil over the top of each one? I’ll bet it took weeks to color!
Weeks? Really?
I’ve noticed over the years, some very experienced Copic Marker fans add lots of extra steps to the coloring process that don’t really pay off in the end.
A lot of people make dimensional coloring harder than it has to be.
Do you?
Copic Marker coloring classes can be misleading! Many students walk away from classes and tutorials thinking that mystical magical color selection is the key to coloring with depth, dimension, and ultimately realism.
But it’s not a magical marker recipe that makes your coloring look real and dimensional…
Stereotypes?
Yes. In your mind, you assume a baseball is white.
In your head, you think that grass is a whole bunch of stringy strands.
And if you fall for the stereotype, leaving the baseball pure white and coloring the grass like it’s some kind of crazy fur…
Well, you’ll get a flat baseball and a field full of fur.
Join me over at the Power Poppy Blog today as I break down the steps to my latest project, Vintage Home Run.
Each step is an exercise in coloring what’s real, not the stereotype in my head.
Vintage Home Run is a Marker Painting Workshop and is designed to teach you the art beyond coloring. Vintage Home Run is a lesson on using values rather than color to develop realism in all your artistic coloring projects.
Follow Amy’s Work in Progress posts for all her class projects at Instagram. It’s a great way to watch projects as they develop. You’ll also get handy tips and thought-provoking insight into the artistic process.
