Fixing Mistakes with the Colorless blender

I have been swamped since I got back from Seattle, so I'm sorry if it's taking me longer to answer e-mails than usual. We are also packing for a large show down in LA that will be happening July 3-6, Anime Expo, so I'm going to also be a bit preoccupied getting ready for that show for the next week, then it's packing for CHA and the Certification Classes in Milwaukee and Chicago. Summer is just sooo busy! Hopefully we'll see some of you this summer at one of our events.

Today I wanted to share a quick technique that goes right along with the bricks from Friday. This is a very simple but important trick to keep up your sleeve when you're coloring with Copic markers.

One of the qualities of the Colorless blender is that it pushes color- think of pushing your hand through sand and the sand piles up in front of your hand. That's why the bricks worked- it pushed the darker color out from the middle of each brick and made a thick ring around your shape.

So how can we use this to our benefit? I could push color around to fix mistakes. This poor snail was not colored very carefully. I used YG41, BV31, and YR31 and as you can see, the BV and the YR went out of the lines. No worries, this is where my colorless blender comes in to fix my sloppy work.

To fix coloring mistakes:
1. Color from the outside and "push" your color back into the stamped image. Don't color over the stamped line, color up to the stamped line. The dye is building up in front of your blender and creating a small ridge of color. The trick is to hide this ridge under the stamped line. See how the BV31 fixed right up on the first push? we got lucky with that color. The YR31 still has a ways to go, soooo...

2. Let it dry and repeat. This step might need to be repeated a few times, but you have to let it dry completely before trying it again, or else the marker will move too much and make a mess of the colored area. When you're doing this trick be sure to keep absorbent scratch paper under your work to catch any stray ink you push around.

Also, some colors will be easier to erase than others. After 3 or 4 repeats the YR31 still has a faint trace left, but no where near as bad as before. I can hide this with my ground shadow very easily now, before it would have looked really bad. If you do get a faint ridge inside the stamped line, just color back over the whole area with that same color. This will hide those small mistakes.

Stamp: Slippery Snail by Stampabilities, Paper: Neenah Classic Crest Ink: Memento Ink, London Fog