New Spica Colors & Coloring Vampire Skin

Yeah! It's been a long process, but finally we have our new atyou Spica glitter pens in stock. If you love the bold, bright original colors then you'll love the new set of pastels and secondary colors. (Later this week you may even get a chance to win them...hint, hint..)

The colors and their Copic equivalents are:
Pitch Black - 100
Blossom - (RV22)
Garnet - R39
Lipstick - R29
Baby Blue- B21
Mint Green - G82
Buttermilk - Y21
Chocolate - (E58)
Sand - E33
Peach - E01
Lilac - BV00

These are available NOW at a store near you.

The atyou Spica pens are prefect for adding a subtle shimmer to any of your papercrafting projects. These pens are acid free, archival, and pigment based. They last twice as long as any other glittery pen and are not a gel pen. They're really hard to see in a picture, so you have to see them in person to understand how they work the best.

Coloring Vampire Skin
With the popularity of Vampires these days I realized that in my original Skin Color Posts I forgot Vampires.

The perfect pale, sallow, skin color with sparkle combination I found is

E000 + E70 + E01 + Clear Spica

(Other colors I used: B91, B93, B95, BV11, R35, R39, R89, C2, E31, E34, E37, E59, Y000)

Scribble over your main skin surface lightly with the Clear Spica. You don't need too much. Color the whole area in with your pale E000, this will evenly spread around the glitter, and they you can add your unhealthy shadows with the E70 and touch up the darkest skin areas with E01.

Skin colors are hard to scan or photograph, but on my monitor these colors look pretty accurate, though the E70 is more purple in real life (adding to the sleepless look). On paper they are a dead ringer for a vampire out in the sun where you can see their skin sparkle :) If you enlarge this picture and look really closely you might be able to see the flecks of light where the glass flakes from the spica pen is catching the light. I added a few hints of the new Peach Spica pen to the shadows just to deepen them up a bit.

Artwork is some I drew a while ago for another project, photocopied onto color laser copier paper.

Big Copic Prize Week
The winners for the Winnepeg Certification giveaway from Sherrie's blog will be announced tomorrow. Thank you to all who participated! That will be a fun class and the two lucky winners will have a neat opportunity to learn from Sherrie.

Look back tomorrow on Sharon's blog for another cool prize opportunity, and you can still enter to win a prize on Sally Lynn's blog, so keep looking for your chances to win all week.

Blog Candy Fun

I promised Cami over at Our Craft Lounge that I would play her stamping game, and you get to be the winner. Today Our Craft Lounge is releasing 28 new stamp sets. Want to see them all? Click here. My friends thought it would be fun to give away all 28 sets to celebrate our second release, one of EACH new set!

Today, leave me a comment, and I'll draw a winner on Sunday (approx. Noon Pacific Time) for this fabulous Irish Blessing Set that I drew for OCL. Want to see who else is playing the Our Craft Lounge game? Go bug Cami for a complete list.

Meanwhile, here is the card I made using the new Irish Blessing set. I'm not usually one for patterned paper (or papercrafting in general, but when you have peer pressure things change...), but I had this great piece of striped Pool Fun paper by Reminisce. Too bad it was mostly blue. So I took my G14 and G17 Copics and toned it down with some stripes of green. Perfect! Now it's St. Patrick's Day paper in colors that match the artwork. The ribbon is from Offray, and the white paper is Neenah Classic Crest with Memento ink.

My drawing style for this set
I drew this stamp set all in angles and loose chunks. Why? Because when I draw I get tired of drawing in the same style all the time. I encourage those of you who tend to draw all your stuff in one way, switch to a totally different style every now and then.

Add straight angles where you would usually have curves. Make some lines extra thick and some thin if you always draw with one line width. I love looking through old reference books and changing my style (like when I drew the Mad Hatter from Alice in Wonderland). If you look through my sketchbooks you'll see a variety of styles. I see it as a challenge- have I drawn anything like this before? How can I push myself to be a better illustrator?

One nice thing about the sharp corners on this image- I can color in sharp edges and it looks good. My usual perfectly blended smooth objects would totally look out of place on this artwork. This totally works, and it is much easier to get it to look correct than if I had used perfect blends. Again, it forces me to change my mode of thinking and gets me to make different illustrations than usual.

When you get this stamp set it comes on a card just like you see here. I colored the examples on the set to help you get an idea of where to start your coloring process. I don't expect people to copy the artwork exactly, but know that I color all my examples with Copic markers.

Something special to me about St. Patrick's Day is that I have a hidden talent. I can spot a 4 or 5 leaf clover without even trying. I'll be going for a walk, look down, and pick one out without thinking. I have found thousands over my lifetime. I usually dry them and give them away (think of this set as my personal 4 leaf clover that I'm giving away today). Just a bit of something many of you don't know about me :)

atyou Spica Glitter Pens
The green and gold areas are atyou Spica pens. I haven't talked much about these pens, but now is a great time. Spica pens are micro glass-flake filled pigment pens. They're not gel pens and they're not multiliners. Their tip is actually firm plastic. You can never see the glitter on a computer, but they're really elegant and they're transparent. Right now they're available in 12 colors and a clear, but in April our 11 new colors should be coming in- they're gorgeous!

Unlike the markers, Spica need to be kept horizontal t0 even out the flakes. If they are dropped or shaken then the glitter inside gets unbalanced. Just store them point down for a while to encourage the glitter to flow correctly, then return them to the horizontal state. You don't want them to stay point down, or the glitter might overwhelm the tip.

I was informed by the Japanese manufacturer that the word "Atyou" is kind of like "Wow!" or "Oh!" it's a happy exclaimation. "Spica" is the name of one of the stars in the constellation Virgo. When you say "atyou Spica" don't think of it as the sound you make when you sneeze (even though it sounds that way) think of "Wow! Stars!". If you get a chance to see one in real life you'll agree that "Wow! Stars!" pretty much says it all.

On that note, I'd better get back to bed. Play along, leave a note, go visit the other designers for Our Craft Lounge and win a set of stamps. It's that easy. Happy Valentine's Day!

eta: Of the 28 new sets at OCL, I drew 24 of them. Can you guess which ones I did NOT draw?

Doodle background- doodling without a purpose

Once a week I'm going to try and remember to post a Draw-it-yourself technique. Today's technique is very simple, but makes a cool background when you're done. First, let's talk a bit about the purpose of doodles.

Admit it, you doodle. You are talking on the phone with a pen in your hand and you draw a dot. Then you do something around the dot. Before you know it, you have a squiggle, some lines, and a dot. Ta Da! You can doodle.

Doodling without a purpose
There are two kinds of doodling. What I just mentioned was Doodling Without a Purpose. It's Zen, it's Serendipity, it's Therapeutic, it's Subconscious. Whatever you want to say about it, it's random and you'll probably never do anything with it, it's just a way to keep your hand occupied while your mid is otherwise busy.

Here is an example from when I was in college. This is classic Marianne doodling. Very random patterns and small critters. This is the first time I've looked at it in 8 years. Note how I turned plain lines into shapes or added flowers to everything (I'm glad the professor didn't look over my shoulder or else he might have thought I wasn't paying attention).

A lot of people start with dots or swirls. I know my Mom would always draw a dot then elaborate from there. Sometimes it became a border, sometimes it just got to be a bigger dot, but if she was on the phone for any extended time there was bound to be a doodle. Sometimes it was one important word that she was talking about, and the word became a doodle.

Whenever you doodle like this, you tend to have one shape or object you always seem to come back to. Some people draw a shaded ball, some people always start with a square, some people always draw a little squggly S shape. Some people just draw a line and add things to it. You get the idea. Look back at YOUR notes from meetings, phone message pads, old homework. What are some of the shapes you always catch yourself doing?

Next time you doodle With A Purpose, start with one of your favorite doodle shapes and work from there. Doodling is supposed to be relaxing, not a time to stress over perfection. Though, I know that the more you go out of your way to doodle the "better" you'll get at it, and it will become a habit that is hard to break.

For today's doodle that I'm actually going to use, I started with basic dots in 3 light colors- YR02, V12, and YG03. Then I took an orange Spica pen and drew a circle around each dot. Then I took a melon-green Spica pen and drew circles around those circles. Where the two would touch I just combined them in larger and larger circles, each layer in a different color. Note that it's not perfect.

Finally, I have my own, custom sparkly background paper in pastel colors that looks cool but started as simple dots. Try different variations, but don't try too hard. If you make a mistake, so what? it's your doodle. You don't have to use it for a background, you could just be doing this for fun and relaxation. On that note, have a relaxed week - I'll try to post a few more things before I leave for CHA.

Coloring Black Things with Grays

Have you ever tried to color something you wanted to look black, so you color it with black and it just looks bland and bad? You're not alone. Lots of people have this problem and hopefully I can help your black things look better after this post.

Why does it look so bad?
Your black lines disappear and your area looks totally flat if you color with black. Black is a monster that sucks in all color, especially color around it. If you have large areas of black it can be very overpowering.

So how can we make something look black without coloring it black?
This is why Copic makes so many grays. There are 44 shades of gray, which seems like a lot when you only use a few of the lightest grays every now and then for light shadows. The darker grays are what you would use to get black.

Note: In this post I am about 1 or 2 shades lighter than you will want to work, mostly because I needed to make sure my scanner would pick up the subtle differences between blacks. You may like these blacks as they are, or you may want to go a couple shades darker. That's a matter of personal preference.

Look at this shirt. The black shirt is just a black shape. It has no life. Next, we have a t-shirt colored with two shades of toner gray, T6 and T8. The shirt still looks black but now we can see the black lines around the shape.

Now look at the last shirt. This shirt has been through the wash too many times and looks faded. This was an easy effect by going over the shirt with the lightest gray of the same family T0. I could have used the blender but it would have been too much and too harsh.

Usually you can get a good "black" by using the 6 or 7 in each gray family as the base color and shadowing with the 8 or 9 from the same family. Sometimes you may need to use the 10 in that color family, but rarely do I reach for a black.

So why are there so many grays?
Each gray has a slightly different feel. If you look at this sequence you can see that the W's are warm, almost brown, the T's are a little less brown, the N's are truly neutral, and the C's are sort of blue.

I'd use the Warm grays for warm feeling natural things, trees, dirt, etc. I'd use the Toner grays if I didn't want the grays to be quite so brown but not cool or neutral. The Neutral grays are really that- neutral. If you look the Neutral circle looks more black than the others when you see them in this sequence. The Cool grays are more for metal and cold things.

The shirt above is a fabric that I wanted to be sort of neutral, so I used the Toner Grays, since the warm grays were too brown. I could have used Neutral gray, but I didn't feel like it at the time. I drew the circles with lines through the light area so you can get an idea of how the black lines compare to the blacks of the shape. (Note: the T4 you see in this picture is one of the first two markers I was given over 8 years ago- it still has the original brush tip).

What about the black markers?
First, never use the black 100 or 110 for drawing a shape you're going to color in with other colors of Copic markers. These markers are meant to blend, so the lines will just get blurry and look bad. Use these if you need deepest shadows in your artwork. If you want black lines draw them with a multiliner. The lines will be crisper and they won't bleed with other marker colors.

What's the difference between 100 and 110?
Have you ever worn a black shirt with black pants and it's not the same shade of black, yet each piece of clothing by itself looks black? That's the difference. You can't really see it unless you're on certain papers and the two are next to each other.

100 is equal to a C11, or a cool, deep blue black. This is what most people consider true black.
110 is equal to a T11, or a slightly warm black.

Coloring black shiny things
Black metal you can color in exactly the same way as other black things, but where a t-shirt is fabric and has a matte finish metal is shiny and will reflect light back. This is another case where you need to use opaque white. No way can I leave the white areas white when I'm working on such a small shape and with such dark colors.

However, a little dab of thick opaque white covers up the black nicely and makes our little ball look like dark, shiny metal (it's cool gray so it's supposed to look like metal or hematite, my favorite stone).

The final picture is from Flourishes. The young man in the tux was so dark compared to the simple white wedding dress that I added a black Spica glitter pen to break up the black areas. My scanner picked those up as rainbow flecks, so that's the speckles you see on his outfit. Image: Wedding Party by Flourishes Paper: Neenah Classic Crest Ink: Memento Tuxedo Black Other: Atyou Spica Black pen