Coloring On Wood

I think my head is finally getting back in the swing of things after the frantic days of CHA. Here is a quick, very simple tutorial. A couple months ago I showed how to color something to make it look like wood, here I am coloring on wood to make it look like wood. Since Copic markers are alcohol based, they work on many surfaces that water-based would not look as clean on.

Wood tag project
Large wood tag by Kaiser crafts: E33 Wide, E55, E44. I started by coloring the background with my wide E33.

I was streaky because I wanted it to look like wood grain. Then I added some streaks of E55 and last, some darker tones with E44. I was careful to keep all my streaks in the same direction, but also uneven (Look at my post on coloring wood for a stepped-out diagram of how to color wooden-looking things).

Note that I used a little less of each darker tone, so that the overall effect is one of wood. You should test your browns since each blending family will feel a little different, but they don't always follow the rule of thumb about adding grays as you jump from one family to the next (like from the 40's to the 50's). In this case, the E44 has more gray than the E55, so it seems darker on the project. By adding E44 last it kept the edges on those thin streaks crisp. If I added the dark first it would soften my crisp lines when I added the lighter colors. I darkened the edge of the whole piece with the E44 so it matched the flower better.

Wood Flower by Kaiser crafts: B34, V06. Since this wasn't made of bits of ground-up wood like the tag it absorbed the color different. The marker dyes flowed more with the grain of the wood, while the other piece stayed fairly crisp and clean.

Chipboard Letter, K & Co: Colored with V06, RV29. This started out a light blue, so all I needed to do was add purple to get it to match the flower, then I had to tone the purple more pink with an RV29. I wiped off dense color with a wadded tissue soaked in blender.

Colors change on different Surfaces
People are always asking me to match Copic colors to specific things, papers, inks etc. I must say that this is very difficult, even under the best of circumstances. Anything you color on will pick up color in a unique way.

On this project, the little chipboard letter picked up color very differently than the Wood flower. I used the same purple on the letter that I did on the flower. Not the same looking though! I had to dab in a bit of RV29 to tone the purple so it was more pink/purple like the wood showed, since the glossy paper of the letter and the absorbent wood flower take in color in different ways.

Real wood versus fibers will also pick up the dyes differently. My purple is stronger on the flower than it would be on the other piece of wood. It really depends on what each item is made from.

When you make a personal color chart, use the paper YOU use most often. If you print it out on a different paper some colors may not look the same, especially on thicker cardstocks. Keep this in mind when matching colors across media as well. You won't get it exact without some trial and error.

My final background paper layer is some tracing vellum that I wrinkled up and colored with the bue and purple markers again to get a spotty, grunged-up look that is more see-through in real-life. The big green glass bead is one that I stole from a vase here in my office. I thought it nicely added to the piece. I haven't glued the whole thing in place yet, since I'm still debating wether to add more bling or not. One part of me says "leave good enough alone" the other half of me says "go for it! add more stuff!" we'll see which wins out. Have a great weekend!

CHA 2009

I'm still here, and I promised to post photos from CHA. In addition to photos, I have a rare treat- a short tutorial video taken in the Copic booth of me coloring a stamp by Our Craft Lounge on Monday by the great folks over at the Pink Donut. Go click on the video on their page and leave a comment or click through to You Tube. Meanwhile, here is a good picture of half the Copic Papercrafting Design team. From left: Sharon Harnist, Debbie Olson, Me, Sherrie Siemens, and Trudee Sauer.

Here is a great photo of Trudee in the booth happily coloring. Sherrie, Sally Lynn, and Trudee all have done a fabulous job coloring and chatting in the booth this year. Life is hard when you have to color all day! You can see in the background the big, colorful signs in our booth. Behind Trudee, on the right is our new glitter display. On the left is our graphic designer, Courtney, coloring and drawing at our doodle table.


Last, here is a quick photo of Cambria Turnbow and the great wall of stamps at Our Craft Lounge. It was a cute booth and totally full of fun, neat stuff. I need to get some sleep, so enjoy the photos and I'll try to take some more before I finish. Have a great week!

Doodling with the Super Brush - Blob Fish

Time for another doodle! Although I'm busy here at CHA, and we had a wonderful first day and two great certification classes, I figured now is a good time to show another quick and easy doodle with the Super brush end of a Ciao or Sketch marker. This doodle is one of my favorites because it is so versatile and easy. If you liked the blob duck, then you'll love the blob fish.

Blob Fish
This is a super-easy doodle that I know anyone can make. Pick a good fishy color, here I'm using BG32, but it really doesn't matter. You'll also need a multiliner or some other outlining device. I'm using black because it has the best contrast, but you can also pick a colored multiliner that is darker than the marker color you use inside the fish. So if your fish is light blue, outline it with a Cobalt multiliner.

Rounded Fin Fish
1. Draw a blob/circle.
2. Touch the side of your super brush to the top and bottom of the fish to make fins.(Turn your paper, not your hands to get the right angle on your fins).
3. Add the tail in the same direction
4. Outline the body and fins.
5. Add final details, like eye, mouth, gills

See how easy that was! Here is another variation:

Pointy Fin Fish
All I changed was the direction I pointed my brush and the shape of the body blob. Now you can doodle up a whole ocean of cute fish.

Again, you will find it much easier to turn your paper than to turn your wrist to match the direction you want the fins.

Variations
The level of detail you add with the multiliner is entirely up to you. If you don't like the gills, then don't add them. You may prefer having a line drawn between the body and tail of the fish. These are your doodles.

Try using multiple colors, have the fins a different color than the body. Try adding lips or stripes or bubbles. Make a whole school of fish for a background, or a single fish for a pool party. The best thing about making the fish yourself is that they will coordinate perfectly with whatever else you color on that page.

These blob critters I have shown you are great projects that you can have a little one help you with. If you don't want kids using your markers, try this same thing with a set of watercolors. It's the outline that really makes the colored area pop off the page, so after they paint their blob go around the outlines with a nice pen (watercolors won't mess up a multiliner).

Here is my final little school of fish, ready to chomp the poor worm. It's super cute and super simple. I hope I've inspired you to doodle a little something for yourself.

Have a wonderful day and I'll try to post photos of CHA later. Some of you have stopped by and figured out what I was getting at in my obscure post about chocolate. Some of you have guessed, and for those of you who haven't wellllll....

We have new atyou Spica Glitter pen colors! There are 11 new colors and Chocolate happens to be one of them. I really will take some photos of the new colors sometime soon, promise! Otherwise, you'll have to stop by the booth to see the other new colors.

CHA 2009

Tomorrow I take off for sunny California and CHA. If you're coming, you can find us at the show in Booth 4147. Come and meet the fabulous Trudee Sauer and Sherrie Siemens demoing in our booth most days, then on Monday Sally Lynn MacDonald will be visiting us and on Wednesday you can meet Michelle White from Paper Tales down in sunny San Diego.

As a bit of a sneak peek I want to share a new release you'll be able to see in our booth. I'll give you some big hints, but let me just say that we are all eagerly awaiting some yummy things to try at CHA. I won't spill the beans entirely, but here is a quick card I made with our new goodies. If you can't guess then you'll just have to wait for me to tell you in a few days what is in store.

Here is my quick final project. I used a wide E33 marker to scribble the background paper then used an E31 to tone the white areas to a nice, soft brown. This took all of about 15 seconds to make! Then, I colored the plain white ribbon with E57. I love how easy it is to get my ribbon to perfectly match whatever I'm working on with just a quick swipe. The added stiffness from the dye makes my bows so crisp and clean as well.

I chose these colors to match my new secret. Then I drew the chocolates and sentiment with a 0.03 multiliner and colored them in with E33, E57 and B21, each color picked to match our new secret, which worked perfectly when added over the top. Last, I popped up the main artwork with dimensional tape. I hope you enjoy!

We'll be looking forward to seeing everyone at CHA, and for those of you who can't come, I'll really try to post some photos of the booth, so stay tuned.

For those of you who are waiting to get into the Certification classes being held in the next few months, please be patient. As we get details hammered out we will e-mail you the applications and class specs. Meanwhile, have a great week and be looking for some great papercrafting previews from Copic!

Oregon Asian Celebration 2009

Oregon Asian Celebration, Feb. 14 & 15 2009
I want to announce an event for those of you who are local. Each February in Eugene is the Oregon Asian Celebration (their website is not up yet, but look for it soon at www.asiancelebration.org/ ).

This year, the Asian Celebration theme is "Heart of Asia" and will be held the weekend of Feb. 14th and 15th at the Lane County Fairgrounds. Look for presentations from Asian Wedding dresses, martial arts, and wonderful food, dancing, and demonstrations of brush painting. There will events with Kumoricon, the Portland Anime festival, and we at Copic host a table in the Youth Room where kids can come in and color Manga illustrations with Copic markers. It is always a blast, so I strongly encourage you to go and experience the celebration if you haven't before. (Illustration I made for the 2006 Asian Celebration Poster, drawn with multiliners and colored with Copics).

For the last 4 years I have had the honor of illustrating their poster. Since you will be able to see the posters around town in the next few days, here is a sneak peak of my illustration for 2009 of two Koi fish.

My Illustration Process
Here is the first draft of the illustration, which, in this case, very closely resembles the final artwork. Usually my drawings go through many revisions, but this time I was able to get what I saw in my mind to match what my final artwork would be. This is what I submitted to the committee when they first presented the theme and asked me if I had any ideas to show the "Heart of Asia".

They liked my first idea, which is pretty rare with clients. So I try not to work too hard on the first draft, just enough to give them a good idea (particularly if they are not artists and can't visualize). Then, after I get approval I move on to cleaner drafts and final artwork.

Notice that my pencil lines are clean and smooth curves. If you find yourself drawing short, jagged lines as you work out a curve then try to break yourself of that habit NOW! Take your rough outline and trace clean smooth lines off it. When I teach comic drawing workshops this is a problem I see over and over again. As soon as students smooth out their lines the picture instantly looks more professional.

Whenever I have a realistic object I need to draw I do extensive research. Running internet image searches makes this part so much easier than it used to be, when I would spend hours in the Library pouring through reference books. I looked at both photos of real Koi fish and traditional illustrations to see how they were depicted. This gives me a good style to base my final illustrations on.

I started with a pencil drawing, outlined it with a multiliner, scanned in my artwork and fixed a few stray lines, printed it out on Color Laser Copier paper, and colored it in using Copic Markers. I scanned in my artwork and color corrected it (like usual, my most subtle colors didn't come through). Then I added the final color background with Photoshop and Illustrator.

This is my typical process when creating illustrations for clients. I have used it for years and it works well for me. Some people draw with their Wacom and print it to color, though I like the hand-eye control of working with my traditional pen, not the digital pen (I use the Wacom tablet or mouse for touch-ups). I hope this give you some ideas about how to professionally approach your own artwork for those of you who are new illustrators.

Just a quick note about upcoming certification classes. Registration is now open for New Orleans and Pensacola. Registration is closed for CHA and Topsfield, MA. Applications will be going out tomorrow for Buffalo, NY Mystic, CT and Toronto Ontario. Be looking for those in the afternoon. I hope to see you soon at one of these events!

Also, for you stampers, be looking for the ultimate paper comparison/giveaway in the next few days. We'll be testing all my favorite inks and papers, just in time for CHA. Then 5 lucky people will get a chance to try the exact same things and get an ultimate goodie package. I'll try to do a fine art paper comparison next month, so look for that as well. Have a great week!

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.

Copic Certification, Winter 2009, Topsfield

Just a quick note: Topsfield, Mass. class on March 1 is now full and closed. If you would like to attend a Certification class in this area please check our list for future events near you.