Coloring Tip: How to Color a Smooth Background (why Copic Markers leave stripes and streaks)

Coloring Tip: How to Color a Smooth Background (why Copic Markers leave stripes and streaks)

Do your Copic Marker backgrounds look streaky or striped?

You’re not alone. It’s hard to create a smooth colorful background with Copic Markers.

I see the streaky-background question posted on beginner marker groups at Facebook a lot. The sad thing is, the answers from the community are almost never correct. Today let’s look at how to color beautifully smooth backgrounds.

Coloring Tip: Time of Day Changes the Color of Everyday Objects (Copic Marker, Colored Pencil)

Coloring Tip: Time of Day Changes the Color of Everyday Objects (Copic Marker, Colored Pencil)

Which Copic Markers should you use to color fire?

Close your eyes and think of a fire. Are you picturing a campfire with burning logs and maybe some kids toasting marshmallows? Which colors do you see in the flames?

Red? Orange? Yellow? Maybe a little bit of blue?

Great! You’ve figured out which colors we will absolutely, positively NOT be using today!

This Isn't Paint-by-iNumber - Change your Marker Blending Philosophy

This Isn't Paint-by-iNumber - Change your Marker Blending Philosophy

Back in the 1970’s, if you did crafts, you made them from a boxed kit. We didn’t have the internet for inspiration and instruction. We crafted by the box.

I loved one kind of box more than any other- the paint by number kit. I lived for the moment when all my weird globs of paint on the canvas finally coalesced into a prancing horse or a spray of roses.

The rule in paint by number was to stick to the numbering system. Bad things happened if you went outside the lines, put the wrong color in a spot, tried to blend two sections together, or if you ran out of paint and had to start substituting.

Up close, paint by number paintings are eye-scalding but from 20 feet away? You might be mistaken for Van Gogh… or so the box claimed.