Natural Blending Families

Sorry about the awkward formatting of the blog. I'm a designer and I'm used to more flexibility in layouts, so in the future I'll keep my layouts simple.

No, I'm not purposely avoiding answering the question "What stamp ink with what paper?", I am going to answer it next week as a form of survey with blog candy, so stay tuned :) (meanwhile I suggest you go over to Splitcoaststampers and search the forums for ideas). Other people besides cardmakers / stampers are following this site as well, and I have so much stuff to cover! By waiting, I also know that more people will find this new blog by then so we'll get more feedback. Just content yourself to know that I am part of a conspiracy theory that will never directly answer your deepest, most important questions, rather, I will string you along forever...or not *wink*.

Natural Blending Families- I created this fancy term for a simple Copic concept that many people have already discovered, but can never be explained enough. You have a color of marker and you want to find a shadow and highlight for that pen. What color should you use? This is where the code on the cap answers that question.

Here's the scoop: I have paper that perfectly matches my B24 marker. I have a picture I want to color, but I want to make it look dimensional with shadows and lighter areas. My two questions are-

1. What colors will make my B24 look shadowed/highlighted?

2. What other colors will go nicely with those blues and not look strange?
These are both easily answered. First, the color number B24 tells me a few things right away:

B- This is a blue marker
2- This is a bright, but not super bright blue (those would have a 0 ir 1 in this spot), and it's not very gray (or else this would be a 7, 8, or 9)
4- This is a middle blue (pale colors are going to end in 0, 1, or 2; Middle colors are 4-6; and dark colors are 7-9)
To answer the first question, shadows & highlights:

Keep the letter and first digit the same. We know instantly that our shadow and

highlight will be in the B20's. There are two colors lighter than B24, which are B23 or B21, but which one should we get? This takes us to the second rule:

Keep a 2 to 3 digit difference between numbers. So our lightest spot will be B21, our main color will be B24 and our shadows will be B26. Not bad, now we know that any part of our picture that we want Blue will be B21 + B24 + B26. This is what I call a Natural Blending Group. These are 3 shades that naturally go together based on color number alone.

As to the second question, what goes with the blue:
Keep the numbers the same, just change the letter (color family). Ok, so we need a green (G), Red (R), yellow (Y), and pink (RV) to go with our blue. We're in luck- there's an exact match for the first two color families. G24, and R24 will look great with B24. Yellow doesn't have a Y24, but Y23 is close enough. Same with RV, we'll go with RV23.

So we end up with B24, G24, R24, Y23, and RV23 for our color range. Where your colors quickly multiply is when you get into shadows and highlights for each of these-
B: B21, B24, B26
G: G21, G24, G28
R: R22, R24, R27
Y: Y21, Y23, Y26
RV: RV21, RV23, RV25



Aaack! what started as a simple picture with one color now has 15 colors I need!

OK, so this formula is just a starting point, you might really only need 2 shades in each color family. You can also shift colors from here- what if you want the pinks to be lighter? Use just the RV21 and the Rv23. What if you want the reds to be darker? Use R24 as the highlight, R27 as the middle red, and R29 as the shadow. You may totally hate these colors together- it's up to you. Personally, I think I'd ditch the pink in this sequence. If I had a purple to match the pink then maybe it would work better.

This is the final image I colored. Since the picture is so small, I mostly used 2 shades in each family, and I chose not to use the pink, instead I used the R21.

Image Credits: Stamp- Flower Shop by AMuse. Ink- Tsukineko Memento Tuxedo Black, Paper- Neenah Classic Crest Solar White 80# Cardstock Marker colors: B21 + B24, R21 + R24, G21+G24, Y21 + Y23 + Y26

Monday, I will showcase my first color. I'll show it's Natural Blending Group, matching colors from across the color spectrum, aaannnd I have a cool color chart that I programmed into my software that lets me generate other color combos you can try based on other color rules, so I'll show combos that the computer says go well together. Have a great weekend!