Quick Plaid with a Wide Marker

Since Father's Day is coming up, now is a good time to show you how to make a "Manly" plaid with a Wide marker (you can do this with any Copic marker, it's just more fun with a Wide). Don't forget to post a comment on Tuesday's blog to be entered in our drawing.

Pick a good, manly colored wide marker. Pick a couple manly colors in another style of marker that will match your wide marker. For this first example I'm using R27 and a 100 Black. Carefully touch the black marker to the tip of your wide marker, holding them there for a while until the color seeps onto the wide marker.


With your dual-tone marker try drawing a stripe. It takes a bit of practice to hold the wide marker at the right angle for a smooth stroke, but once you get the hang of it, it gets to be addictive making fun squiggles. You'll also find that the color you add wants to quickly come off the tip, so test how much you need to saturate the second color to get even stripes without it fading too soon.



Next, I added Y15 and I drew plaid. It's that easy. I had to add more ink as I went along, as you can see, the yellow wanted to fade out quickly. Try to do a blended stroke sometime, where one side of the marker is darker. Try different color combos, squiggles, or zig-zags. These markers are loads of fun, and are great for doing some other special effects I'll be showing you in the future.

When you're all done, if there is still any residue of your extra colors on the wide marker carefully scribble onto some scratch paper until it comes out.

Wide markers are great for backgrounds and for filling in large areas. They only come in 36 colors, but each one is about 3/4" wide! Wide markers use a lot of ink, so be sure to get a refill at the same time you get the marker.

I won't usually show finished projects on this blog, but since I had to make a father's day card for my hubby with this technique I figured you'd like to see the completed example. I drew the image myself, since he loves the Lumberjack Song by Monty Python.

Color theory note: I chose to do my ground shadow yellow to tie the card colors in to each other. Since the plaid was a strong yellow I made the ground a grayer, dull yellow. So the shadows are mix of Y23 and C3/C5. Usually I would use a W3/W5 for the yellow ground, but I wanted to tie in the gray of the hat and keep my color choices simple. The cool gray looks a little odd IRL, but not bad (the photo looks stranger)

Image Credits: Paper- Neenah Classic Crest Solar White 80# Cardstock Marker colors: R27, R59, E31, E33, E29, C3, C5, Y15, Y23, Colorless Blender Image- Photocopied line art Adhesive: 3M Double sided foam tape