ADVANCED COPIC COLOURING: I hope you have been practising and have mastered basic colouring? Because now it’s time to take the next step – apply what we have learnt to a more advanced style!! The basics remain the same – we still choose a colour family, start with the lightest, apply a base colour and add darker colours as shading. But this time we are going to combine the first three steps of ‘basic colouring’ into one single stage – advanced colouring stage one AND we are going to complicate it a little by changing the light source!  Make sure your mojo is in the house for this one!!!

Follow the same steps as in basic colouring stages one to four but this time, create an alternative light source. Instead of pretending a flash of light directly in front of your subject, try to imagine a light source (such as the sun, or a stage spotlight) from top right (or any direction you like!)

This stage does require a bit of imagination – and a lot of trial and error! But you will be surprised just how much more realistic your colouring can look when your light source is naturally positioned. Have a look at ‘Lime Green Rosalie’ below – she shows you where I saw my light source and how I think that light would affect her. It’s still fairly basic – if this was an art class we would examine the effects of lighting more accurately, but how far you take the concept of light reflection is up to you – I want to focus on copic colouring so the art theory is minimal and therefore simplified. Basically, if the light was coming from the right side, then the left side would be in shadow (darker) and the side where the light is coming from would be brighter, with the most obvious light at the moment the light ‘hits’ Rosalie – on the top right of her head.

       

Remember, start with your lightest shade then build up your colour in layers of decreasing area before finishing with a final layer of the lightest shade to blend all the colours together.

Apply your colours very lightly and sparingly – leave your highlights (where the light hits the subject) white in the first instance. This will allow us to complete the area with just a single layer of our lightest colour – leaving it nice and light to represent the light hitting it.

Again, we will start with a light base colour and we add our shading in 2 stages, blending with our first, lightest colour. For darker colours, such as that which is used on the hair, you may need to blend with your middle colour a bit too, to ensure you get a smooth blend.

Don’t forget your light source! I often place a spare marker on my page, pointing in the direction of the light source to remind me where I need my highlights and lowlights.

The basic rule is that if the light is coming from top right then the shadows are placed opposite – bottom left.

Below you can see the steps I took to achieve Rosalie’s face and hair. 

Continue colouring in this way. Her dress, flowers and shoes. Don’t worry about shadows just yet – we’ll be adding those later!

 

You can see that I used E51 on MOST of the face – leaving the lightest area white. Add your next colours (E21 and E11) and then blend the whole lot with E51 to fill it in. It leaves a nice pale section that represents the light flashing on the face.

If you’re game, you can retain some of the white section for a really intense light – below you can see a smoothly blended hair, whereas above, on the full Rosalie, you can see how I left a white section for a real sense of ‘shine’

I’ll be sharing blender pen techniques next week – wow what an adaptable marker that is! You’ll love this post!!