Marker to Marker Blending with the Colorless Blender

Oh boy do people have a lot of questions! If it takes me some time to get around to answering your personal question please don't feel bad, because I want to answer questions through full posts, so all those questions about paper/ink combos really will be answered, but probably not 'til next week. Meanwhile, here's a blending idea and marker cleaning tip:

There are a few main ways to blend Copic markers. By blending, we mean have one marker color slowly fade into another color on your paper. A great, simple technique for small areas is Marker to Marker Blending. This works with any two Copic markers, though I am using the brush tip of sketch markers. I am choosing a blender pen as one of my colors because I want the colored area to fade to white (If I wanted it to fade to yellow, then I would choose a yellow as my "brush" color). Always use the lighter color to pick up darker colors- that way you can see how much color you're picking up, though on darker color combos it will be hard to see on the tip, but it will show up on paper.

I am using the colorless blender as a paintbrush. All I do is pick up some of the color from the violet marker, V09, directly onto my blender pen. I hear some gasps and screams coming from

the audience. NO, I have NOT just ruined my blender pen, it will come out, even though this is a dark purple.

Start with small dabs of color until you

see how much/how quickly it will fade out when used (try it on scratch paper before you apply it to an image).

Next, choose a pic that you want to color, and touch your marker at the darkest point you want, then color out towards the lighter side. In this case you can see that I colored the dragonfly from the wings base out toward the tip.

Can you see that by the time I got to the end of the wing the color had almost completely left the tip of the

blender?

If you're done blending with that color but your tip still looks dirty, just scribble onto some scratch paper until the color comes completely off (a paper towel is good for this as well). Here is my blender after finishing coloring the dragonfly. Pretty clean, isn't it. I just love how you won't ruin your markers or cross contaminate them when doing this technique. Also, that purple was REALLY dark. If I had tried to blend it out to white with one of our other methods it would have been a lot harder. As it is, the violet on the paper is nice, subtle, and beautifully blended.

Another way to clean markers-I just have to let you know that I kinda lied to you just now. OK, if you read carefully I didn't lie, I just mislead you. Look carefully at the first picture of the purple marker. That's one grungy marker. This is one of my well-used workshop markers. I want you to take a close look at that last picture of the purple marker. It's much cleaner isn't it? I have to confess that for this tutorial I was not actually touching marker tip to tip (though I could have).

I was using this technique to clean my dirty marker. What???

I was using the blender pen and pulling the crusted ink off the marker barrel to color with. Talk about not wasting a drop! Do you want to know how much I was able to color from that one end of a dirty marker? Enough purple to color all these dragonflies!

Image Credits: Stamp- Dragonfly, Lockhart Stamp Co. Ink- Tsukineko Memento London Fog, Paper- Neenah Classic Crest Solar White 80# Cardstock