Do you ever get the feeling of panic when you have an adorable critter to color, but you're just not sure which Copics to pick to achieve the look you want? Yeah, me too! But fear not! Playing and practicing with Copic blends is so much fun! We can always stamp more images if a combo doesn't work like you think it will! I thought I would share a fun critter coloring project and show you a few of my favorite Copic combos! When I decide I want to play with color variations of an image, I am always sure to choose a small(ish) image that I'm fairly comfortable with coloring (meaning I know exactly how I like the texture and shadowing to appear). There are two perfectly sized and illustrated images that I like to play around with from Lawn Fawn: the sloth from Hang in There and the dinosaur from RAWR.
Today, I will show you how I used Mr. Sloth! He's so precious and really fun to color! The first time I colored this image, I chose my absolute favorite E-family of Copics - the E40s. I love the desaturated browns, especially when blending between E43 and E44. I reach for this Copic combo for a ton of different types of critters.
As you can see, I also played with the texture of this little guy's fur: stippled or striations....decisions, decisions! With all of my images, I covered the image with my lightest marker to prime the paper (this helps me with the blending) which for all three of the sloths was E41. I worked my way through E43, E44, E47, and finally to E49. When coloring my images, I prefer to color my images lightest to darkest and then back down to the lightest to blend my images, that's what works best for me and the look I like to achieve with my coloring. I'll have a blog post going into more detail about my Copic coloring technique - keep your eyes peeled!
After I finished trying out the image with my favorite E40s, I knew I wanted to play with other shades in the Earth tones, as well as seeing how the sloth would look colored with a couple of different shades of gray.
N2, N4, N5, N7, N9:
E53, E55, E57, E59:
E13, E15, E17, E19:
W0, W1, W3, W5, W7:
Here's my whole collection laid out next to each other - starting from the left are the two colored with Warm Grays, then the E40s, E50s and E10s, and at the bottom is the little cutie colored with Neutral Grays! It's so hard to choose a favorite color combo for this image - I'm glad I don't have to! What other color combinations do you think I ought to try?
