Why Supply Lists and Marker Recipes Hurt your Coloring
I have a delicous recipe to share with you.
Amy's Amazing Lemon Meringue Pie:
Baking Powder
Butter
Eggs
Flour
Lemons
Salt
Shortening
Sugar
Vanilla
Print this recipe and make a great pie today!
What's wrong with my recipe?
Some of you don’t like my recipe.
But I gave you all the ingredients!
Okay, okay. I'll admit, my recipe may be missing a few details, but you're very experienced with this kind of thing. You can figure out how many eggs I used and how much flour, right?
Wait, you don’t like guessing?
Then why do you have a Pinterest board full of this?
Let me get this straight:
You have no psychic powers
You spend long hours searching Pinterest for marker recipes
Some of you have so many recipes that you've subdivided the collection into boards for "Hair", "Skin", "Animals", etc
You spend lots of money buying the markers listed in these recipes
You beat yourself up when a recipe doesn't work. Because hey, the recipe is good... so it must be your coloring that stinks
When one recipe doesn't work, you look for similar replacement recipes
Why are you torturing yourself?
Stop.
You’re wasting your time with these recipes. You’re pinning the wrong thing.
You;re riding a merry-go-round in the third circle of hell. You're just going round and round and round and round.
The problem is NOT you. The problem is NOT your coloring skills.
It's the recipe that stinks.
Proportions, application order, stroke quality, and paper saturation are far more important than ink color.
Please go back and read that sentence one more time.
No, really go back and read it again. I'll wait.
Good. Now let me explain.
You and I could have the same 5 markers and the same image stamped on the same paper but we would each produce two completely different looking projects.
Heck, I could run this experiment all by myself and I'd produce a totally different image today than I did last Tuesday.
Clearly then, there is more to great coloring than marker recipes.
Don't believe me?
I just searched Pinterest with the following search terms: "Copic", "Blonde", and "Hair".
The results were 8 pins wide and 45 deep with a "see more" box at the bottom.
That's at least 360 different recipes for blonde hair using alcohol markers.
Maybe only 338 if you eliminate the pictures of Jennifer Aniston that were oddly prevalent amongst the results.
The point is that none of the blonde projects are ugly.
So assuming some recipe overlap, we can honestly say that there are about 300 ways to beautifully color blonde hair (with or without Jennifer Aniston's help).
It’s not about the ink color
Colors are the only information a marker recipe gives you.
"I used YR27, YR23, E55, and BV01."
(Don't use that recipe, I just made it up a second ago. But yeah, I think I could make it work.)
What’s missing?
Did the author color light to dark or dark to light?
Which marker(s) were used to blend?
How many layers of each color were used?
What was the dry time between colors?
How long were the strokes?
How full were the markers (yes, this makes a gigantic difference!)
What paper did they work on?
Does the photo display true color or has it been Photoshopped?
Any one of these factors will alter your final results!
But when your project doesn't turn out like the Pin, you beat yourself up for being a no-good talentless hack?
That's absolutely ridiculous!
Yet people keep trying to color with Pinterest recipes.
And when it fails, they get discouraged.
I met a woman last week at Hobby Lobby…
She had 3 recipes taped into a notebook. She was trying to purchase the colors listed.
She asked me (I was looking at erasers, not markers) if I knew anything about substitute Copic colors.
She was prepared to plunk down good money on about 30 markers based on Pinterest recipes and the advice of a stranger who was there to buy erasers.
I helped her but I know she is beating herself up at home right now...
because she needed more than a recipe list to reproduce the look of those pins.
Product Shrines- You don't usually find these in artist studios.
The difference between artists and crafters
A lot of crafters are obsessed with supplies.
Don't get me wrong, you talk to any artist and they'll tell you about how they have way too many #6 brushes or maybe they have three tubes of every paint Golden ever produced.
But what really excites an artist is using the product-
Physically getting their hands dirty, experimenting with the product.
Artists are all about the process, not specific colors.
I've been in a lot of art studios, I work in my own studio every day.
Artist studios are generally shrine-free. There’s no way anyone’s sharing my mess on Pinterest.
On the other hand, almost every crafter has a favorite product line proudly displayed on pretty shelves (or has dreams of building a shrine someday).
Those marker recipes on Pinterest?
They look a little bit like a Copic shrine to me.
“Look at me, I’m an artist because I use lots of markers!”
Crafters get it backwards
A quick search of "watercolor tree" (shown above) gave me a longer list of pins than my Blonde Hair + Jennifer Aniston search.
Did you notice anything? Not a single pin tells me what color of paint the artist used!
Instead, it's all about the look and the technique.
The same thing happened with "acrylic still lIfe pears".
Nobody is swapping watercolor recipes on Pinterest because anyone who has worked with watercolor for more than a few seconds knows:
It's not WHAT you use but HOW you use it.
Copic collectors haven't quite made that connection yet.
Maybe they will eventually. But for right now, most people are still obsessed with the markers rather than the technique.
You could own all 3,580,000 Copic colors and still not produce good results.
You need to know how to use them.
Good info comes from classes, not Pinterest
If you want to color better, you need a class, not a recipe.
I don't care if it's a live class or online. It could be free on YouTube or a pay-to-download PDF packet.
What good classes have in common is that you are shown what to do with your marker and the instructor also explains why.
The golden egg lies in the technique, not the ink.
I'm not saying you should never pin a recipe. Pins can inspire you to use different markers than you might normally choose.
But they're no substitute for a good lesson.
You’re cheating yourself if you think you can get an education by spending 20 minutes a day on Pinterest.
Find a class, find a talented instructor, find a video channel, haunt the blogs and websites of good artists who talk about their process.
That's a far better use of your time than pinning hundreds of blonde hair recipes and beating yourself upside the head when you inevitably fail.
