Tuesday, August 23, 2011

Copic Practice

I joined a site, Make It Crafy,  that someone recommended and have been practicing my coloring with copics.  One of the free images I received was Pipi.  The challenge was to color the image without black lines.  I was pretty happy with how it was going until my copics started to misbehave.  Have any of you had problems with the ink getting sticky, streaky, and shiny on top of the paper while coloring, making it impossible to blend, and basically ruining your image?  I usually only noticed this happening with the darker colors, but am now noticing it will happen with light colors as well.  Here is what someone recommended for cleaning copic nibs.  I gave it a try with one of my nibs last night.  I was surprised how clean it got.  Seems to have made a difference.  I am going to try it with some of my other nibs that aren't working so well.  I would love to hear from you if you have had any of these problems with your copics.

So this is the image I received.  I think it is such a cute image and it was fun to color.  I was going to make her hair darker, and started to do so, but then the ink gave me grief.  I messed up the 3 swirls on the left.  Then I took my colorless blender and tried to clean up the sticky ink.  That made a bigger mess so I tried to lift all the color from that spot.  It didn't all lift but I made due with what I had and recolored those 3 swirls as best I could.  The no black lines is a very unique challenge, in and of itself.

My next image is called sitting Jane and I purchased her here.  I lightened the image in GIMP and printed it onto SU Whisper White cardstock.  I started having difficulty with the sticky ink, so I used my Prismacolor colored pencils to the image to help with some of the shading.  I drew the brick wall and sidewalk to ground the image and am entering it into the Ground Your Subject Challenge at Make It Colourful.com.

Thanks for stopping by!

Hugs and smiles,
Janice

8 comments:

  1. All I can say is WOW! and BEAUTIFUL!!!

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  2. How adorable! You don't know what I would give to be able to color like this! I hope someday I can at least take a class in Copics, but for now it's just trial and error (lots of that) for me.
    Thanks for sharing about the 'shiny spot' problem. That happens a lot with me whenever I use greens so I guess I need to clean my green markers.

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  3. Hi Janice,Oh my those images are ADORABLE!FANTASTIC job with the coloring,I TOTALLY LOVE it!Just AMAZING my friend!!:)

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  4. Hi Janice. Thanks for visiting my blog. I especially appreciate the welcome back. Your cards are adorable. I feel your pain with the streaking issue. I have a dark brown that did this. I went so far as to buy another one thinking it was the marker. Eventually it did the same thing. So, I finally replaced the nib and refilled my marker at the same time. This helped. I'm not an expert on Copics, but I think that my problem was laying down too much of the darker color in the beginning and trying to blend to another color family that did not blend well together. Keeping the color numbers close together and in the same family helped. Also, flicking the colors to blend instead of making small circles made a big difference when working with the brown. Keep us posted.

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  5. I've never had this problem Janice! I must just be lucky! Now..how about these two gorgeous little girls!! You just can't tell you had a problem with the hair at all! She's totally beautiful and coloured to perfection! I also love the little girl sitting on the wall. Your pencil shading is just as fabulous!! xxx

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  6. Oh Janice You make me laugh... "Practicing!!!" Seriously - you call that "practicing". Ummmm... "PERFECTING" or "Refining" is more like it. The scritchy-scratchy- scrawly colouring I do is what's called "practicing" Lol. That colouring of yours is amazing and perfecto!!!! I think Prismacolor pencils may be my thing. Ink and Chloe just don't mix.

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  7. Those are amazing Janice! I've seen this new technique of coloring without the black lines recently but I have not tried it. Not so sure I can color without lines! Your coloring is fantastic! Both are very cute cards.

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