The Complete Coloring with Copic Markers Course

1. Introduction to the Copic Marker Course: Hello and welcome to the ultimate Copic Mker course. My name is Scott Harris. I'm an illustrator, a painter, and a concept artist. In this course, I've tried to give you a core fundamental knowledge of what you need to know, as well as advanced techniques. I want to equip you to being able to use PC markers well to their maximum potential, that you fully understand the nature of the medium, and that you are not just learning little how to use or tips and tricks, that you really truly understand CPC markers, how they work, the COP color system, and everything involved with using Pc markers to a professional level. This course is taught as if you are in a class with me, and so we're going to have a really great time learning together how to use these markers and how to get the most out of your Copic. It shouldn't take you long to work through most of the modules. But if at any time, you want to see full length or time lapse commentated demos, go ahead to Module five, and you'll be able to watch full pieces being colored from start to finish. Again, my goal has been to equip you quickly and efficiently so that you can get to using your Copic markers well very quickly. Alright. I'm excited to see you in the course. I hope you enjoy the course. I've trimmed the fat and cut the fluff so that we can give you the core hard skills you need to get started as soon as possible. Let's jump right in. 2. Module 1.1 Types of Copics: Welcome to the first lesson of this module. In this lesson, we're going to be taking a look at the types of Copic markers available. We're going to start off with the Copic classic marker. The Copic classic marker has 214 colors in its range. It's a square barreled marker. It holds the most ink of the markers, and it has a chisel tip on one end, which is great for flat falls, as well as a precision tip on the other end. And if you pay attention to the design of the lids, because of the gray outer plastic of the precision tip area, you can actually tell which tip is very easily based on the shadow of the groove on the cap, so you know where the precision tip is. Now, the precision tip would really be more for writing. We have the color information as well as the color name on top, and we'll of course go into understanding this color system later in the course. And that is, in effect, the CPIC classic marker. Now, typically, the COPA classic marker has kind of become second best to the COPIC sketch, which is the next one you'll look at, which are really the main copix for your crafting for your mango artwork, for your stamping and things like that. So the Copic classic, though, was the original marker, and also you can exchange the chisel tip out for a brush tip, which we're going to look at in the sketch marker next. Now, the brush tip is a little bit smaller than the classic, so keep that in mind. The Copic Sketch marker, which is really the epitome of Copic markers these days, there are 358 colors in this series, and it really is by far the most popular marker. It has an ovular barrel. Of course, we have the color information there, the color name as well. And the difference between the sketch and the class in the tips is primarily that on the one side, marked by this gray line here, we have the brush tip, which looks like that. And the brush tip is great. It has a bit of flicks to it. It's awesome for doing color fulls, for blending, for kind of painting with the Pik markers. So really, this is the marker that most people go for. It's definitely the most popular and they're great. They're really, really, really nice to use. That super brush tip is what Kopk calls it. And then on the other end, we have a chisel tip, and this is great for flat fills as well. And that is your Copic sketch mark. Now, the barrel is a little less in CCs than the Copic classic, so it holds a little bit less ink, but it's a great marker, and its ovular shape also stops it from rolling on the table. Next, we have the Copic chow markers. Now, the chow are really the entry point into Copic markers. They're cheaper. Their barrel holds less ink, but they're very similar to sketch markers in that they have the super brush tip on the one end, which is really the tip we're looking for for most of our craft work, as well as a chisel tip on the other end, right, the medium chisel, right, or the medium broad, as they call it. Now, unfortunately, the chows do not have the color information on their caps. This can make it a little bit difficult to find the color that you're looking for, but they have it printed on the barrel, as well. So you can look at the barrel and know what it is. Now, some people do make their own little stickers with the color information, particularly the code here, B 24, which they put on to help them find their Copic chars when they have them stacked vertically or horizontally into a shelf. Then we have the Copic wide marker. Now, the Copic wide marker has 36 colors. This is an empty marker, so there's no ink in this one. You can buy empty markers of all of these marker types, so you can mix your own colors. And effectively, you can see that the Copic wide marker has a very, very extra broad, extra wide tipia for doing massive areas of color fuls, great for doing backgrounds and things like that, although not entirely necessary, you know, for your general use, but it is great if you want to get broad strokes in the background. So that is your Copic wide marker. The last but not least, we have CPIC various ink. The Copic various inks basically are refills, right? You can refill your markers to a certain quantity based on the marker type. On average ten to 15 times you could refill a single marker off one of these ink bottles. So they really are good value, and you don't want to keep rebuying markers because Copic markers are expensive. So once your marker runs a little dry, simply get the various ink. It has the code and the color name on the lid, and you can get this various ink refill and do an ink refill. Now at the end of the course, talk about how to refill your inks. So we definitely look at CPAC maintenance and ink refilling at the end of the course, but just know that these are available, and you pretty much won't need these in the beginning because you'll find that the markers have a pretty good lifespan to them. And the various inks, of course, come in 358 colors, which are the full color range of the CPIC markers themselves. Now, let's just go through those color ranges once again. Your Copic classic markers have 214 colors in their range. Sketch has the full 358 colors. Copic how has 180 colors, and then we have wide that has 36 colors, and then of course, the inks that also cover the entire 358 color range. So these are the types of Copic markers that you're looking at buying when you want to get into Copic and start using Copic. My recommendation would be to start with Copic Sketch or Copic how. If you're intending to build out a full collection one day, I would definitely recommend sketch for the long term. That is the COPC Mark range. I hope you've enjoyed this lesson and I'll see you in the next lesson. 3. Module 1.2 Additional Products : Let's now take a look at other products from the company that produces Copic that complement your usage of the markers. Let's start at the top left with the Pik mult liner SP. Now, these are mult liner pens, inking pens that come in a variety of colors, and they are really non smudging, non smearing mult liners. So when you want to do nice inked lines, these are the pens to use, they won't smear or mix with your pix when you're blending or coloring over them. These particular ones have exchangeable ink cartridge. So when you run out of your ink, you can simply take it out, pop another one back in, and you don't have to buy a brand new pin. And they have an aluminum body, so they're really nice quality, and they're really nice to use. They come in multiple sizes, including a brush pin, as well, and these are the Copic mult liner SPs. As it says on the barrel, water and Copic proof, and it uses a pigment ink. Right. Next, we have the let's call them disposable multi liners. They're nonrefillable they pretty much do the same job. You have your different tip sizes and nib sizes there. Again, they're inking, and they come in many different sizes. So these are a little bit cheaper because, of course, they're made entirely of plastic. They do the same job, though, and they work just as great. They won't smear and they use the same ink. Then we have the Copic gassinfa brush pin. So let's take a look at this. It's a plastic body brush pin, and it has a very nice brush tip to it. And this is good for getting very nice thick, painterly looking strokes in your inks. This is very much an inking type of tool. It's very nice. This is just another great product to compliment your usage of Copic when you want that kind of look. Alright. And then we have nib replacements for your markers themselves. This is just one example. There are a bunch of different nibs you can buy. Mentioned this just again, the markers have empty versions that you can then take the various inks and you can, of course, mix up your own colors and produce your own unique marker colors as well. So even though the range only has 358 colors, there are empty pens that you can buy, empty markers that you can buy, that you can mix up your own colors and create your own unique blends. Then we have Copic opaque white, and we've got two versions of it here. Essentially, it's the same product. It's a zinc based water based paint, basically, that doesn't yellow over time. And this is used to add very white highlights on top of your Copic markers, usually at the end of a workflow. This particular opaque white bottle comes with a built in fine brush, so it has a very thin brush, little kind of brush tip, almost like a nail brush, but even thinner. That lets you do fine detailing. And then, of course, this is a little tub of it. A lot of people like to use the pencil method where they dip the pencil into the tub and use the tip of a sharp pencil to then paint those white spots on for example, when you want to highlight eyes or add particular highlights to the scheme or other objects, COPIC opaque white is really, really a great product for doing those kind of highlights. And then we have the spare nibs for your multi liners, as well as just an example of that exchangeable ink cartridge. And then COPIC also makes their own range of paper selections. We're going to go into papers soon in terms of the various brands and the various types of paper that are optimal for COPIC. But nevertheless, COPC paper selections, they have sketchbooks, they have papers. Here we have a custom paper here which is a 420 sheets, 150 GSM, very nice for blending. It has good coloring properties. So COPIC does make a range of different paper products, which I would say are pretty much the best that you can use when you want to color with your copix because we don't use just ordinary paper. You can, but we'll talk about soon why you wouldn't want to use ordinary paper when blending your Copic. But nevertheless, know that they have sketchbooks and paper varieties available. So definitely take a look at your stationery shop or your arts and craft retailer to see what there is available. These are some of the extra products that are useful to you when you're using COPIx to make sure that you can get nice clean lines that don't smear, replace nibs in certain pin brands and things when you need to do nib replacement or maybe you've messed up a nib, can mix your own markers and colors with the empty markers, CPIC whites for highlights, and a few of the extra products in the range. That's it for this lesson, and I'll see you in the next lesson. 4. Module 1.3 What Markers to Start with: In this lesson, we're going to take a look at the recommended starting colors when you're first getting into your CPC markers. Now, something that's pretty important is you don't want to go into your stationery shop or your art craft store and go crazy. And, trust me, I've been there you're going to end up getting duplicate markers. You're going to buy stuff in weird orders that don't really work for blending. You need to hold back and hear me out. Okay. Don't buy copix randomly. Don't go crazy in your art store. Alright. The first important thing to know is the Copic color system, and we're going to cover that in this module. By the end of this module, you'll understand how the Copic color system works. And when you understand that system, you're way better informed in terms of what markers you want to buy and get so that you understand how they blend and work together. Now, you'll also want to choose the type of mark you want to collect in the beginning and the type of mark that you want to use long term. I'm going to make some recommendations depending on whether you go with how or whether you go with sketch as to which is the better root long term to go for. Now, on the left hand side, we have 12 colors and the same 12 colors are replicated on the right hand side with the Copic Sketch marcus. Copic chow markers are great if you're on a tight budget, but you have to remember that the chow line only has 180 of the 358 colors in it. So long term, you're going to be limited to your color choice in these types of markers. Conversely, Copic Sketch markers have the full 358 color range. Another disadvantage to how is that the numbers aren't on the caps. All right. And you might think that that is kind of negligible. But the truth is when you're using Copic markers, you tend to pick and choose colors a lot, especially when you're wanting to blend. And typically, your markers are stored kind of horizontally or vertically, and being able to quickly see the code and the number of the color that you becomes very, very important to such an extent that hobbyists, crafters, stampers, mango artists out there have created their own little labels for their char sets that they stick onto the ends of the caps so that they can easily see that. If you want to save yourself the trouble of doing that, I would definitely say get sketch. My key recommendation is to start with sketch, they are a little bit more expensive, but you have the full color range, you have a bigger barrel, you have the same nibs between the two, but you have the very important printing of the number on the caps. This is quite critical. So keep these recommendations in mind. Now, these colors here, we have 12 colors. And you might think to yourself, Well, these kind of random and a little bit desaturated. You would be absolutely shocked if you understood and knew how far you could take just these 12 colors. Now, you'll see a lot of them are lighter colors. We also have a cool gray C two and the setia and we also have the colorless blender. So technically, you know, we only have ten actual colors. Remember, Copic markers can be applied in layers on top of each other to darken and saturate the color. In addition, you can mix the colors. So when you consider that, like I said, you would be surprised what you can achieve with just these 12 markers. In fact, you can achieve most reasonable color schemes with just these 12. You might then say, Well, then why are there 358 colors? Well, more colors is more convenience, more choice, more nuance, and more opportunity for mixing. But as a starting point and also so that you don't, you know, blow all the money you have on buying hundreds of CPEC markers, these 12 are a great place to start. And I recommend these specific colors. Now, once again, you will know how the COPID color system works and understand what these numbers and letters mean by the end of this module, which is, you know, really soon, the next three, four lessons. When you do, you'll be able to buy better. So there is also a buying guide for you that is attached to the resources at the end of this module. Use that buying guide to help you choose what colors to buy, what order to buy your colors in, and also to give you advice and extra insights on the different marker systems. Now, you may notice that I have not included the CPEC classic markers here. And the reason for that because of the tip differences where you do not have the super brush nib on a classic, like you do on the Skechta, you have the precision nib, and that's not super useful for stamping coloring, manga coloring, coloring your art, and doing great shading and things like that. That tip is more for writing and more precision kinds of marking, right? So you really don't want to spend extra money doing mass nib replacement on your COPIC classic collection. The main advantage there being that the barrel does hold more ink overall, but they kind of square and they're a little bit chunkier to hold. I would definitely recommend sketch. All right. So those are my recommendations for the starting colors, you can see the codes over here. Do refer to the COPAC buying guide which will list these markers, but will also help you further expand and grow your collection in a logical way using the COPAC coloring system. I hope that this lesson has been useful to you, and I'll see you in the next lesson. 5. Module 1.4 Choosing the Right Paper: In this lesson, we're going to take a look at appropriate paper types to use when utilizing your Copic markers. Now, not all papers are suitable for Copic markers, and we're going to explore a few different paper types to see what is and isn't going to work well for you. I'm going to be using these three colors blue, double zero, blue, oh two, and blue oh four. And these have some nice stops along the way, so we can test blending on the different types of papers. To start off with, let's take a look at some standard copy paper. I have a few sheets of copy paper here. And whenever you're using CPC markers, I would advise to always put a sheet of paper underneath, maybe even two underneath that particular sheet, just to stop ink when you're over flooding the page or when you're really getting deep into your coloring there that it doesn't go through and mess up your table or mess up your book or anything that's underneath the paper. So always use an extra sheet. All right. Let's take a look at normal copy paper. Now, I wouldn't recommend normal copy paper, right, because it's very thin and it doesn't allow you to really layer too much because the fibers in the paper absorb only so much of the marker, right? The absorb only so much of the marker. I'm going to try and do a kind of a blend here straight into from 00 into four. And what I'll do is just bring in 00 again. And I'm just softening up that edge. And you can see it starts to get a very nice soft edge and a nice blend there. Let's see what this effect has on this particular page. All right. Immediately, you can see we're going almost pretty much straight through the page. It looks almost exactly like the opposite of it, and we've bled through here. Now, copy paper is actually really nice. It's really white. It's a great smooth surface. But again, its key issue is, it can't absorb too much. What happens with copy paper after a while is when you want to kind of soften edges more or go in more what you'll end up doing is you'll end up just pushing the ink around because it has only so much grams per square meter, which is the GSM rating of paper. Copy paper is about 80 GSM on average, so it's only got 80 grams/square meter of material for the ink to go into. And so, eventually, you just end up moving the same ink around, and it leaves kind of weird streaks and it'll also cause the paper to kind of wrinkle a little bit. Right, so let's just kind of get in close there and see what's happening on the copy paper. Alright, so a lot of bleed through on copy paper. Look, if it's all you have, use copy paper. But anyway, let's move on to our next paper tap. This one I definitely don't recommend for financial reasons is kind of your artistic style paper. This is 200 GSM. It has quite a thick texture to it. Definitely nice for watercolors, right? But when you're dealing with Copic, if you have a 200 GSM that is this rough, basically, this thing is going to suck up every last drop of your marker as you're using it. So they tend to use a lot of inks. So let me kind of get a blend going here. So it's B zero, zero. We'll move this into b02. You can see it has quite a nice smooth application when you first go on with the marker, and I'm just doing some really quick blenziaT is B zero of four. Then a technique that we'll cover later, but I'll mention it now is, as I do the labs, I go back with a previously used marker to get the blend nice and smooth. Alright. And I'm going to go now to b00 and use this b00 here, blue zero, zero, going into the blue 02, and really getting the ink in there to get it to take the edge away. And you can even use the lighter color over all of the colors just to kind of enhance the blend a little bit more. So the texture is great, right? It looks really nice. And the blend is pretty good. You really do see that texture coming through there. Alright. But the problem is that this paper is excellent at sucking marker ink, and really, I think on average, they say that you can get about 2.5 a four pages per sketch marker on average, something like that, 2.5 a four pages on average of full color. I would say you would probably get at most one page with this type of paper, 200 GSM paper, it's very thick and the roughness means that it's really going to suck all your marker ink right out of the marker. So not that great. The blends okay. It's a bit textured, but definitely I don't think we want to use this kind of paper. So try to avoid this paper unless you really want a textured look, but now you know the advantages and disadvantages of this kind of paper. Next up, we have what is actually labeled as marker paper. Now, this is 70 GSM. The marker won't bleed through this. I'll certainly bleed through and show on the other side, but it won't bleed through the other pages. But it's very thin and it's not really that great to work on in general, right? So let's take a look at, let's say, a double blend here. We'll go 02-04. And just see how this paper reacts. As you can see, immediately, such a nice smooth effect with the ink coming out, right. And as you can see here, I'm being quite liberal with my usage and very kind of aggressive with the markers. Don't be shy, really, don't be too dainty with the markers, right? So there's good ink absorption here. I can feel it it's very smooth, but what you're going to notice is kind of the flimsiness of this paper detracts, should I say, from the ability to really use it for good work. It's very flimsy. And also, because it's 70 GSM and it's very thin, it also has a limitation just like copier paper in terms of how much ink can be absorbed before you start moving the ink across the page. The blend is very nice. The smoothness of the ink is very nice, right. But we're going to see that it has its limitations, and I'll show you the ink moving around just now as well. So you can see no residue on the other side. It doesn't go through. It won't go through on paper that is labeled as marker paper, but it's very, very thin and flimsy. And it's also extremely transparent paper, which is, you know, not always suitable. You don't really always want it to be super transparent. All right. So if I use, let's say, B zero, four again, we're going to start seeing that though there's no bleed through, we just end up just moving the marker around. Like, we can't we have a limitation as to how dark we can go. Like, it's still wet here, so it looks really dark. But you can actually see the ink is just kind of floating on the surface now. And it's just going to we're just moving ink around, right? Look at the edges there of that as I move the ink around. Let me bring this closer to the camera so you can see that. And so that's one of the reasons this paper is not that suitable, right? It's gray. It doesn't bleed through. It's got such a nice smooth finish. Even the texture on the dried parts is very nice. But we can only go so far in terms of layering the copax. And when you want to take your copax far and you want to get a lot out of a single copax by layering for different values, right, to bring it to darker or lighter values by using less or more layers, this paper is not going to be suitable. Moleskin paper, slightly yellow paper, not too different from your standard copy paper in a lot of ways. Let's do a triple blend here. And we'll just see what happens with this. So you can see as it goes on, I don't know if you can notice that from that distance. The texture before it dries is pretty rough, right? So you can see it's kind of rough, but as it dries, it gets smooth. This is something I've noticed specifically with moleskin paper, how the texture comes out very rough in the beginning, right? But kind of as the ink settles into the paper, it gets very, very smooth. All right. So let's get our three blends going here, just being very liberal with this. I'm going to blend it down and we will cover this in depth. Bunch of blending techniques coming up. All right. Just really trying to soften the edges between no three values here, just to get a nice blend going. Right, so it applies very roughly and dries very smoothly. All right. Take a look, and we have a lot of bleed happening, right? And so we have kind of less of a situation that we had with the mocha pad in terms of it floating on the top, because the maker pad is not going to allow the ink to move through it. But we still have that issue of the low gramage right, grams per square meter, the thickness of the paper. So it's still a bit thin. So it just goes straight through to the other sheet, right? And even this one's bleeding through a little bit here. So also not really the best solution. That's not to say you can't use any of these paper tarps. You certainly can. If you want to use Covix in your moleskin, and plenty of people do, including myself, you'll want to grab a sheet of paper and just place it underneath something hopefully that's bleedproof, maybe mock paper or a thicker GSM paper, just to stop it from bleeding through. But of course, you won't be able to draw on the other side of the page or do anything on the other side of the page because you're going to have this bleed through. So that is moleskin paper for you and how it reacts. It does leave kind of a slightly grainy texture. To it. Copia paper tends to do something a bit similar as well. But sometimes that really just adds to the piece, right? It's not all bad. All right. Now let's look at the papers that I definitely think you should consider using when you want to color with your Copic markers. So typically, when you go to your art and craft store, your stationery store, you are going to find paper labeled as blending card. Now, this is a local brand from my local art store, and it works pretty well. It's 250 GSM, so it's nice and thick. It can hold a lot of inks, and I can build up a lot of layers, and it also is very white, and very smooth that allows me to get those nice smooth blends. Let's take a look at how this works. So here I have two sheets, one underneath just to make sure that I don't make my table blue. And we're going to start blending on this local blending card that is 250 grams/square meter. It's nice and thick. Let's take a look at what blending card, which is the optimum type of paper we want to use for Copic looks like when we start doing some blends. So we've laid down the 00, blue, zero, zero, and we're coming in with the blue 02 here. And you can kind of hear that squeaking of the maker. That's a good sign. It's kind of how you know you're using good paper or good blending card. Okay, so I'm using the blender with the lighter color going into it, and then I'm going to move into blue 04. Just let it saturate the page and then I'm going to come back with blue 02 to blend that edge a little bit. Have a nice soft blend across that area. And then to finish off, I'm going to go back to blue zero, zero, and I'm going to do some blue 00 across the entire blend. Alright, so blending cd off the bat would get very nice smooth blends for a good ability to soften the edges when you have hard edges from different values because the paper can absorb so much ink. The more ink that is absorbed into certain types of blending card, the more texture you get, right? And you're probably never going to escape some degree of texture or other simply because that's how paper is made. It has a certain level of texture to it. Let's take a look at the bleed through. So it comes through a little bit, but typically it doesn't bleed all the way through to the other side of the page because it's very thick. This, in particular is quite thick. 250 GSM. You can see it's kind of like almost heading into cardboard territory. But the colors are vibrant and there's plenty of GSM for the ink to move around in. So that is our local blending cd or off brand blending card, if you want to, call it that. Next, we're going to take a look at CPAC official paper and how HIT handles the Copic Mcuss. Now we're going to use Copic paper selections, the custom paper version. You can see there is 150 grams squared per meter. It's A four size, and there are 20 sheets in this pack. And at the bottom, there's actually a little grid that says smoothness level, thickness level, and whiteness level says it's good for coloring and good for pins as well. So we're going to see how the official Copic paper stands up to using on their own markers. Using our B double zero, again, we're going to come in with our same test blending, and I'm just going to be fairly liberal with this. It's got a very smooth application at the start, then bring in b02. All right. Let me go back to b00 here just to blend that edge. Now, this is 150 gram squared permere, so it is a bit thinner than the local blending card that I had. The color really applies very thin here. The finish is somewhat less textured on the actual blend. And I would assume that's because they're using different materials in the Copic paper compared to the local paper. And here's our b04. We're just going to let that saturate into the page there, and I'm going to come back with b02 to blend the edge. All right. I'm going to come back with B zero, zero, just to finish off the final blending here. What we have with the Copic paper is very smooth blending and a minimal texture on the paper. It does bleed through to some extent, it's not bleed proof. We can see here that it's bled through. That could also be due to the GSM level. It is 150 GSM, which is still pretty good. It's not quite cardboard, but it's a nice thick piece of paper. It's extremely smooth and your blends come out extremely smoothly as well. And so my verdict is and has always been, if you want to get the best blending, use blending card, but the custom paper one is really a good all round one for achieving those nice smooth blends between your COVID markers. So blending card, that's the paper you want to use, and that's the end of the lesson. I'll see you in the next lesson. 6. Module 1.5 Color Theory : In order to understand the Copic color system, it's a good idea for us to understand general color theory first. In this lesson, we're going to be taking a look at hue, saturation, and value. Hue represents the frequency range of a color. In front of us, we have a very classical style color wheel that artists use to understand the color ranges. We have yellow, red, Magenta, blue, cyan and green moving clockwise around the color wheel. Take a note of the intermediary colors. Yellow moves into orange, orange into red, red into pink, pink into Magenta, Magenta into purple, and so on. Hue represents the spectrum of colors that we can choose from and it is the purest form of what people would call color. Though color is made up of the three parts of hue, saturation, and value. Saturation is how color rich a color is. A heavily saturated color is very rich and bright in that particular hue. A less saturated color has more gray added to it and is less color rich. We can understand saturation from a scale of nine to have more gray in it to zero that has less gray in it. The less gray, the more saturated. The more gray the less saturated. Value refers to the brightness or the darkness of a particular color. Value is extremely important art for helping the viewer differentiate between different objects by having them at different values. Values zero to three are considered light tones. Four, five, and six are considered mid tones, seven, eight, nine and ten are considered shadow tones or dark tones. The value scale is just an art representation and simplification of the values in reality, as is the saturation scale and even the hue color wheel. In reality, there are billions if not trillions of colors and different combinations of hues, saturation and values. In art, zero or 0% of value indicates the brightest possible color in a scene or on a character within your created works, and 100% or ten on the value scale indicates the darkest dark, the most blackest black. Colors then are made up of a given hue at a particular level of saturation, and at a particular brightness level of value. Now that we know how hue saturation and value work to create a given color, let's take a look at the Copic color system. I'll see you in the next lesson. 7. Module 1.6 Copic Color System: Now that you understand color theory, we can better understand the Copic color system. This Copic color chart is typically available for free, near the Copic markers in your stationary or art supply store. And the front cover here lists the Copic color system and all the colors available. Let's take a look at the system. First, we have the color families, and there are ten color families. We have the Earth family, the red violet family, red, yellow, red, yellow, yellow green, green, blue, green, blue, blue violet, and violet. Then in the inner ring, we have various gray tones, the N tones, which are the neutral grays, the C tones, which are the cool grays, the T tones, which are the toner grays, very similar to the neutral grays, and then the W tones which are the warm grays. Then we have a few fluorescent copic markers. In a nutshell, you can see how this relates somewhat to our color wheel, moving from yellows, greens, blues, violets, and reds. The color of every Copic marker is indicated firstly by the letters of the color family, followed by the saturation number and then the value number. The saturation number works from a scale of zero, most saturated to nine, least saturated. And the value scale works from a system of zero, lightest value to nine, darkest value. Taking a look at the markers I'm holding, you can see that we have yellow at a saturation of zero, which means it's very bright yellow and a value of two, which means it's a lighter tone value. For example, we have blue 02, which would be a very bright saturated blue with a saturation number of zero, and also a low value of two. If we look at the coral R 35, we know that it is a red marker with a saturation of three, so it's fairly bright and a value of five. It's definitely a mid tone marker. Therefore, the COPA color system will always have the letters for the color family, the saturation number, and the value number. You might notice that this differs when you're dealing with, for example, the colorless blender, which is simply zero. Or when you're looking at the cool tone or gray tone markers which will have just the saturation number. For example, C two is a cool tone with a number two for its value. Certain markers like red violet zero, have additional zeros indicating that they are moving into increasing levels of lightness, but they are also quite saturated. You will see triple zeros and even quadruple zeros for exceedingly light copic marker colors. Now that you have a good idea of how the Copic color system works and you're able to identify the color family, the saturation level, and especially the value of the maker, you'll be able to make better decisions when it comes to choosing which Copic markers blend well with each other. In the next module, we're going to take a look at blending, as well as how you can choose colors that blend well together and that don't leave two star contrasts or edges between the different colors as you're trying to make smooth and soft blends. I'll see you in the next module. 8. Module 2.1 Applying Flat Color: In this lesson, we're going to be taking a very quick look at basic marker application. And the first thing that we want to remember is that we want to avoid quick and streaky application. So if we're kind of applying the marker very quickly like this, we're going to have these horrible streaks, and we really don't want that. We want to use the benefits of Copic markers, which is achieving nice smooth fulls. So the first way to achieve that is to take your time and really saturate the page with the marker. And let it seep into the actual paper. Something important to remember with Copic markers is that they apply darker at first because the ink is still wet. But when you let them rest awhile and leave them to dry, you'll see that edges get smooth and you also get a nice flat full. And of course, the dried color will be a little lighter than the initial application. You notice that specifically with lighter markers, they apply as almost gray sometimes. That is just the wet alcohol. But when it evaporates, you're left with the nice color rich pigment. So a nice, consistent stroked application there will give you a nice smooth full. Another popular way to Copic markers is to use the circle method, and this gives you great coverage. So you'll see how you get really nice smooth coverage. Sometimes where areas don't get coverage, you'll get a bit of a cloudy type of effect. But you can simply just go over those areas again, resaturate the page to get that nice smooth full. Another thing to keep in mind with CPc markers is that when you apply them, the darkness of the application is often dependent on how hard you're pressing. If you press harder on your brush, you're going to saturate the page faster. Of course, if you press lighter on the brush tip, you are going to saturate the page more slowly, and therefore, you'll get a lighter stroke. So I would always recommend having more of a lighter touch in general when you're applying a markers so that you have more control over the pigment. You might want to have a slightly lighter finish, right, not such a dark finish. And so those are the basics of marker application. The key thing we want to remember is that we don't want to apply our markers too aggressively and too quickly in this streaky kind of fashion because it doesn't help us full regions, and it's really painful to fix these streaks, you end up using a lot of marker to kind of resaturate the page to get rid of the streaks. That is it for this basic marker application lesson. I'll see you in the next lesson. 9. Module 2.2 Copic Marker Blending: Now let's take a look at Copic marker blending and usage nuances. And the first thing to remember with blending is before you do any blends on your work, you want to get a small piece of blending card and test out the blending of the markers that you're wanting to blend together. Whether they're in the same color family, whether they have big or small value differences, always test first. Copic markers tend to blend differently based on their color family, based on their values, but also based on the paper type. Not all paper types blend the same. Even if you have blending cod, blending card from one manufacturer may blend the colors slightly differently to another manufacturer. And there are just so many different factors that testing on a blending cod first is very important. So always test your blends first before you want to try and do any kind of blending. Alright, let's get into the blending here. And what we want to do is remember the primary blending rule, and that is to go back to the previous later color. So over here, I have blue 02 and blue 04, and we're going to do a simple two color blend, keeping in mind some key rules. Right. So first of all, we're going to apply the late color first, and that is one of our key rules. We tend to want to work from light to dark when we're doing blends and when we're coloring in general. So I'm going to color a small area here with this blue. This is blue 02. I'm going to move into blue 04. Keep in mind that the marketing to slightly darker at first because the ink is still wet. And then I'm going to come back into this area again with my lighter color, which blue 02. Now, the same rule applies when you're using multiple different markers. Maybe you're doing a four color blend, where you go back to the lighter color, especially over that blend area, and you can even fill it over the entire color range to help you achieve a smooth blend without such a harsh edge to the blendable region, right, to that middle region where the values change. So you always want to go back to the lighter color. If I were doing four colors, I would do color one color two, back to color one to blend. Color three, back to color two to blend, color four, back to color three to blend. Of course, we're going to take a look at this in the next few lessons, but still keep in mind, you always want to do the kind of blending and edge removal with the line to color. And you can see, as the ink dries here how much more smooth the blend gets. You'll see over time, as it dries even more, you get an even smoother blend over time. Now, something that is particularly critical and you'll get better at this over time is to use a wet on wet methodology, right? So I'm actually going to take buzo two here, and I want to try and achieve my blends while the alcohol is nice and wet. Right. Now, the reason for this is because it's seeping into the fibers of the paper, when it's wet and I am mixing two colors together, the alkol is actually going to mix in the page. It's just going to pull together and mix in the page. And so being faster and more accurate, which will come with time, but it's pretty important to getting those nice smooth blends. Of course, you can do a bunch of practicing on this to make sure that you're really feeling it out, getting that wet on wet blend. That's not to say you can't blend the markers when they're somewhat dry. You can, but the blendability is significantly decreased. Of course, when you're putting more alcohol from the marker or more ink into the page because they are alcohol based markers, you are always going to have some effect of wetting the existing dry alcohol that's in the paper. And you will always be able to do some kind of blending, even if it's fairly dry because you're kind of reigniting that dried dye in the paper fibers. But keep in mind, wet and wet is the preferred way you want to work. So you want to kind of do small regions by regions and work as quickly and as accurately as you can. That said, don't panic, don't freak out. I also don't want you guys to be so, you know, overwhelmed with wanting to work wet on wet and quickly and accurately that you're going to over panic and it's just going to be a terrible experice for you. No, just do the best you can. Your speed and your accuracy will come over time, but do try to work wet on wet when you're using COVID Marcus for blending. So recapping this lesson, you always want to test your blends on blending card. First, you want to always use the lighter color, the previous lighter color to blend into the darker color that you're using the darker valued color. You want to try and work on wet and wet and be as fast and accurate as possible to achieve the smoothest blends. Don't forget that the markers apply more darkly the first time you use them and that the blends get softer over time as the ink dries. That's it for this lesson, and I'll see you in the next lesson. 10. Module 2.3 Two Color Blends: In this lesson, we're now going to take a look at blending two colors. You're going to look at two color blends. And as we did in the previous lesson, I'm going to use blue 02 and blue 04, as well as a number of other colors, popular colors, show you how they blend together and just do some examples of two color blends. Now, you might notice that the value here is a single step away. Two, we miss three, and we're using four in terms of the blue 02 to the blue 04. Now, you often want to do one, two, even sometimes three steps away in terms of your val values when you want to do your blending, whether it's two colors or more. But again, you always, always, always want to test on your blending test card to make sure that the blends actually work. Because like I said, previously, you will find that it doesn't always work out how you think it's going to work just because the numbers or the steps between your value numbers are different. All right, so let's do the blues again and take a look at some blending there. I'm going to start off with a circular blend with the blue 02 here and just do a kind of a small circular region like this, trying to work quickly and wet on wet tear. Now, remember the edge is always a little bit more stark while the ink is still drying, that is the edge between the two values. I'm going back to blue 02 here to just cover that area, and you can cover the entire area if you want to with the lighter color, or you can just cut color air just a specific area there by the two values. And you can already see we've got a very smooth blend there, and it will actually smooth out and become more cloudy and smooth as it dries. Alright, let's take a look at some different color ranges here. I'll be using red 83 into red 85. Alright. Red 83 and red 85. You might notice that this marker is black. Don't let it confuse you. It's just a black barrel for the 25th anniversary of Copic Sketch that they released a few years back. Alright. So let's get our red 83 here, and I'll do a more vertical stroke application of this particular one. Grab my red 85. So two great colors that tend to blend well together, generally speaking, paper dependent, of course. I'm going to come back in again with my red 83. These markers will be definitely of the kind that has a more stock edge in the beginning, but you'll see that as it dries, it smooths out. And, of course, the videos are in real time. So sometimes we have to just let it dry out a little bit, and we can come back and look at that blend as we move through the rest of the colors. Let's now look at violet 04 into violet 17. So we have a slight saturation change with these markers. Let's start with our later marker, violet 04. I'll do a circular blend over here. Circuit application. Like I always say, don't be shy when you're using your markers, go for it and learn as you go. You can't put your hope into false certainties, just learn as you go and enjoy the process and don't worry too much about your mistakes. Just keep going and you'll get better over time. You can see again quite a stock color range to go to in terms of jumping 4-7, right? We're going two stops away there. So four missing five, we're missing six, and then we're going in to seven. And again, it's quite stock, but as it dries, it does smooth out. Look at how the blend has come now with V red 83 into the red 85. It's really smoothed out nicely. Let's do a vertical blend with v04 into v17, violet 17 and see how that turns out. I put this one over here, starting with our lightest color here, Vzero four. This is more of a lighter touch application. All right. And bringing in the v17 here. And then going back in again with a lighter color to get that area blending, I see. All right. Sometimes you will notice that when the ink mixes a particular way, you get a slightly lighter zone here. Well, before you attempt to fix that, where you want to add in more of that darker value, I would say, just let it dry a little bit and just see what it looks like because it can be quite deceptive. You can see already that the value is fading to a little bit darker as it dries. But you can go in with your darker value and add a little bit more of the dark value over it to kind of cover it up. But just be careful that you don't go too close to your blend area because you want to keep that nice smooth blend between the two zones. Alright, and we'll let that dry. Now let's move on to very popular colors for Caucasian skin tones and lighter skinned tones, and this is E double zero and red 12, E double zero and red 12. Typically, when this is being applied to skin, and we'll definitely take a look at this later, EW E double zero is applied very lightly first with a soft touch, and then usually again using the ability to stack the copix to get darker values out of a single marker. Then again for a few shadowed areas, and then you can bring in darker shadows with red one, two, and we'll actually in the next video when we do three color blends, can even take the shadows to an even darker level. All right. So let's try two color blending E double zero, red one, two, notice the stops. We're going zero, we're missing one, and then we're going to two in terms of the value number. Let's bring out E double zero here and let's just do a nice circular blending here. It's a very nice light value, you can see it does apply a little gray at first. That's simply the wetness of the ink. When it dries, the color will come out nice and vibrant. Then here's the red one, two into it. We'll do a vertical application of this too, and then I'm going to come back in with our E double zero again. I still not quite dry there, but just keep an eye on it as we're working and I've worked in the E double zero into the blended area. And while that's drying, let's do a vertical blend. But I used red one, two first here. Not a huge deal. Though you do typically want to work light to dark, of course, in an actual image, you might want to have highlight areas. You will definitely cover how to plan ahead for that. But if you work dark first, you might lose the ability to go lighter. So that's primarily the reason you want to work light to dark. So there's our vertical blend. Same methodology, we're using the lighter tone over the darker tone to do the blend between the lines. This is still drying a little bit, so we'll have to give it some time. Now, while that is drying, let's take a look again at how smooth this vertical blend is here and also this one is quite smooth. The edge isn't as smooth as I think I would like, personally. You can just go in again with your lighter marker and just saturate the page, and you'll know you're saturating it because it kills the edge a little bit. All right. It's going to lighten that zone up somewhat because of the saturation of the paper. You can see we've already modified and killed the edge a little bit and we can leave that to dry out as well and get a bit of a smooth blend there. All right. Then let's move on to a final blending. We'll use yellow green 03 into yellow green 05. And these are really nice and blend well on this particular board. Let's start with the yellow green 03. And you might have noticed that I actually did the test blends on my test blending card beforehand, because I have especially noticed with various types of paper the differences in how some mockers can blend on some papers, and they just don't work that great on others. For example, e00 and Rid 12 do not really work that great on the Copic paper, and that really surprised me where on this particular mocha pad, not mocha pad, mind you, this particular blending cod, it worked really great. Nevertheless, he has yellow green, 03 and yellow green, 05. And off the bat, we already have a fairly nice blend between these two colors. Let's do a circular blend of these two to finish off. Again, we want to remember we always want to come back with our lighter value to get the blend that we want between the colors. All right. That's yellow green, 03 there, and then into yellow green, 05. Now, often you might see people doing blending tests and blending examples in little boxes or little ovals and things like that. The problem with that is especially if you're learning, it's going to add extra pressure on you to be neat and stay in the lines. I would say, look, it doesn't really it's not a big deal to have those boxes or ovals to test blends in. Just do them free hand like this, get used to it, be loose, be flow, get used to how the ink works. And then after that, you can actually test your staying in the line skills on your actual work. And so there we have our yellow green 03 into our yellow green 05 blend. Notice how smooth the blend has come now that this ink has dried. It's actually still drying. I don't know why it's taking so long to dry, but nevertheless, the blend has become very nice and smooth there, and also in the vertical strokes, a very nice smooth blend between the two. And remember, you can always take your la mocha and go back just don't be too heavy handed because what you can end up doing is creating very contrasted pooling where it pulls together, and it makes certain areas a bit too white. And you don't want that because that's going to mess up the flow. So determine how thick your paper is. I'd recommend 200 or 250 GSM blending card. But that is our lesson on two color blends. Definitely grab your markers, give it a try, and I'll see you in the next lesson for our three color blends. 11. Module 2.4 Three Color Blends : Now let's take a look at some demonstrations of three color blending and we're going to start off with our yellow greens, we're going to do a nice spectrum here of yellow green, 05, yellow green, 03, and yellow green, 07, starting with three, that would be three, five and seven. Here we're just going to do some vertical nice stroke application blends. That's our yellow green, 03, bringing in our yellow green 05 over here. I kind of want to keep it nice and smooth and consistent. We go back to our yellow green 03. Like I said, you can go over the region of blending or you can go over the entire blend itself, and then we're going to go into yellow green 07. This one's fairly dark. And then we're going to go to yellow green 05 for this blend to blend from five into seven. Now, keep in mind again, and I know I'll keep going on about this, but remember that the ink does need time to dry before the blend looks as smooth as it can. And we're going to come back in with our yellow green 03, and we're going to blend this yellow green 03 over the entire blendio just to kind of unify the entire blended area. And we'll leave that to dry up, but you can already see that it's got quite a pleasing blend to it. Now, this blending group here really is yellow green three, yellow green, five, yellow green seven. It's all from the yellow green family. And we have some nice stops, one stop in between green and five, not doing six into seven, and then of course, three, not doing four into five. We're missing one stop there, three, five and seven. That's one stop away from each other in terms of value. They all have the same saturation number of zero. It's a very bright green here. That's our basic three color blending there. Let's go into the skin tone blends. The skin tone blends, we shift families a little bit here. What we're going to be blending is E double zero. Into red 12 into e04, earth tone 04. You can see already that we have a darker value here. So we have one stop away in the value here, one stop away in the value from E double zero into red 12. But in terms of red one, two, we have a saturation difference here. So one, we're in the color family of red and two, we have a saturation difference. It's a desaturated red at a low value of two or a lighter value of two, and we're moving back into the earth tone family. Let's take a look and see how this looks. EDLsia of course, being our latest value here. Now, of course, you can blend colors across families, across saturation groups to get really cool looking blends, but you really have to test test test on your blending card. So that's the E double zero, and this is the red one too. These two complement each other really nicely, as you can see already, you don't have to do that much work to have these guys compliment each other. Back to E double zero. So remembering our back to the latest to get that blended area really nice and consistent and then I'm going to go into e04, which is our darker value. B fairly dark at the start here as we bring it in. Now we go to our red one, two, and we use that to blend this edge. Oversaturate it and we can let it dry just a little bit, and then I'm going to go over the entire blend again with E double zero. These lighter values have less pigment to them compared to the darker values, so there's more alkol and so you have more of that gray effect. Now, as we move on to the next triple blending, we're going to let this skin tone blend dry just a little bit, and that will, of course, smooth out the blends there, and it'll look a little nicer as it dries over time. Now we're going to do a kind of strange blend, at least on the face of it. We are going to blend red violet 06 as our lightest value into violet 04, which I know you're really thinking, how is red violet 06 lighter than violet oh four? And then violet oh four into violet 17. So we have a change of saturation. We have two color families here, red violet and violet. And then we also have this kind of strange blend of seemingly a darker value into a lighter value. Now, I may have mentioned this previously Colors have different values themselves. The different hues, if you will, the different color families, actually, they do not match one to one in terms of value. So red violet 04 and a violet 04 will not necessarily match one to one in terms of value. In fact, red violet 06 and violet 04, especially paired with this paper, actually have a very similar value. And so this pairing is to give us a nice darker purple into a brighter pink or magenta color and have that violet 04 making up the intermediary color to help us have a smooth blend across this particular color range. But again, it's test test test. Grab your blending card. You can see I have done many tests for various reasons and various demos in this course. And here you can see those blends there. Let's look at it in real time as we blend these colors together. So we're going to start with red violet 06, which will be our brightest value here. You can see it's extremely saturated and bright. It's a very, very nice color. It says red violet 06. And bring that into violet 04. Again, keep in mind that the incapls more wetly and darker at first. We'll go back to our red violet 06 to get this blend nice and smooth. I'll bleed it somewhat into that violet 04. And then we're going to bring in the violet 17. And this one's quite dark, quite stark. Definitely has quite a hard edge at first, which we need to work to soften that. And I just want to saturate this just a little bit more here. Then we're going to go back to our violet 04. Now, of course, four to the 17, four, five, six, we're doing two steps away. So we have to work a little harder with two steps to get that smooth blend, and I'm going to bring this violet 04 over those areas. You can let that dry a little bit. The blends already looking fairly good. It's not dry yet, but there is a nice softening of the edges as the colors blend past each other. Now we're going to try and unify everything using red violet 06 and bringing red violet 06 across the entire gamut of our colors here to kind of bring a unity to the entire blend. All right. And we'll need to let that dry a little bit before we can truly assess how well the blend has blended. Although we can really see that it's moving in the right direction. And so in this example, we have the red violet 06 into the violet 04 into the violet 17. We have two different color families, and we also have slightly different saturation levels, 20 saturations and one saturation. And in this example, we have a slightly strange jump from a 06 red violet 06 value to a violet 04 value and then into a 17 value. But like I mentioned, it's not one to one in terms of the values of the hues themselves, or the color families themselves when it comes to the values. A red violet 06 is really similar in value in many ways to a violet 04, if not slightly lighter. Here we have our examples of three color blends showing that we can mix and match color families, saturation levels and even value levels to achieve the blends that we're looking for in our work. That's it for this lesson, and I'll see you in the next lesson. 12. Module 2.5 Choosing Colors that Blend : Blending markers is really a trial and error process and you'll often have to test your blends on blending cod before you move ahead. Of course, the paper can impact the blend as well as the differences in the markers that you're using. Nevertheless, we can follow some key guidelines in choosing markers that blend. We're going to take a look at three different blending groups that you can use as a guideline or a foundation for building sets of colors that blend well. First off, we have a natural blending group. This has three steps. Step one, choose a single color family, for example, blue. Step two, choose markers with the same saturation, they would all be from the B two saturation group. And then step three, choose markers that are one or two steps apart in value B 24, B 26, and B 28. And this will give you a nice natural blend that will work well together. Next, we have a dynamic saturation blending group. This allows you to, as the name implies, have some dynamic saturation in the blend. Step one, choose a single color family. In this case, red violet, step two, choose markers that are one step away in saturation. So now we have a differentiation of saturation, red violet zero, red violet one, and red violet two in terms of the saturation families. And then step three, choose markers that are one or two steps apart in value. So now we have a set of red violet 02, red violet 14 and red violet 25. And of course, you can add more markers to this. It could just be a two blend or a three blend or a five blend, so that's up to you. Then lastly, we have a realistic blending group. Step one, choose three color families next to each other on the Copic color chart. For example, red, yellow, red and yellow. Then step two, choose markers one or two steps away in saturation. So we have red at zero, yellow red at two and yellow at three. Then the last step is to choose markers that are one or two steps apart in value. So you have red 02, yellow red 24, and yellow 38, and this lets you blend across the color families. And of course, these are complimentary blending groups here because on the COPA color chart, red, yellow, red and yellow are all next to each other. Choosing complimentary groups for blending is great. But don't limit yourself to that because you can blend straight across that color chart and you can find blending colors from any color family to any other color family that will work nicely. So in a nutshell, there are some guidelines on how you can choose markers that blend well. Feel free to revisit this lesson, and this will be provided for you as a resource to this module as well. So you can print this out and keep it on your wall to help you choose colors that blend well. That's the end of this lesson and the end of this module, and I'll see you in the next module. 13. Module 2.6 Marker and Pen Combinations : In this lesson, we're now going to take a look at how different pins react to Copic markers, and not everything is compatible. So you have to be careful what pins you use. My typical recommendation is to stick to Copic mult liners and brush pins because they are effectively Copic proof, so they're not going to bleed. But let's take a using yellow green 01 at what different effects have on the markers when the marker runs over the pen, right? And so what we don't want is we don't want bleeding and we don't want smudging, but we do want to see that there is no effect on the marker because that's going to help us have a nice clean look to our work. Alright, let's get started with this. All right. First up, we're going to test the Zigacartoonist Mangaka 01. This is a purple multi line of pen, and I'm going to just do a few lines like this, the top left here and we'll let that dry a little bit. And let's see what happens when we put yellow green 01 over. Now the reason I'm using yellow green 01 is it's kind of a light color and a decent kind of value, and it will show easily if there's any bleeding happening. There seems to be a very slight amount of bleed, but not much. So we can call this zygacartoonist, Mangaka 01 fairly Copic safe, I would say. I imagine as it dries even more, you probably would see very little bleed. Next, we're going to take a look at the Uni Pin fine line. And this is water and fade proof pigment ink. This is a 0.1 as well. Uni is a popular mult liner brand. So let's do the same thing. Put a couple of lines down. Sometimes I'm just going to double up the lines. I want to raise the stakes here, and let's see if this bleeds at all. It's letting it dry a little bit. I am seeing a little bit of bleeding, but also it's largely negligible. And again, I think if this dries, it should be fine. So the Uni pin fine line seems to be pretty fine. It does say it's water and fade proof, and that means, to some extent, I think that's going to help it be more consistent on the page. Right. Next up, we're going to just try some pencil. I'm going to put a few pencil lines down here and just see what happens with pencil. Now, I can tell you we're really ahead of time. Pencil is notoriously terrible with Copic markers. But just so that we're very clear, this is a uni kudutga pencil really nice. Pencil actually rotates the lead while you draw. Nevertheless, the lead inside is just normal HB lead. Let's run our yellow green 01 over this to see how it reacts. And, you know, I'm already getting pencil on the marker. And, you know, obviously, we can't wait for pencil to dry out. Like this is how it is. So that's a bit of a mess. Let's try and get that graphite off the marker. But that's not going to work, right. So pencil is a heck no on that note. Right, next up, we're going to try this juice up 04 biplt. It's kind of a gel pen, I believe, and we're going to just do some shapes. It's it's a little bit rough here. It's coming out a bit rough here. I think you can't use it too quickly. I got to be a little bit more slow with it. Let's see how gel ink stands up to copac maker. Definitely want to let this dry just a little bit. Let's give it a try. There's definitely color bleeding happening and smudging happening. I think after this test, I'll have to replace this nib and we do look at nib replacement in Module four. Do take a look at that. It's pretty easy to do. We're going to have to say no to the blue gel ink there and probably most gel inks when it comes to using Copic markers. Let's go for actual multiliner here, Copic mult liner SP, 0.7. 0.7 will give us quite a nice chunky tipia. Just do a few shapes. All right. Let that dry it. Heck, you don't have to let it dry too much. Let's see if it's still a little bit wet, how it reacts. So I have seen some bleeding the section over there. Just let it dry a little bit more. These are Copic proof, should be Copic proof, right? And it seems to be performing pretty well, very similar to the Mangoka pen from zig as well as the Uni pen, so that's good. Great. So Copic mark is own pins twos Own pen, should we say, the two corporation think is going to be fine just fine. Let's try a standard ballpoint pen now, right? You average ballpoint Bullpoint pen ink is pretty thick. Usually it should dry, fine. But let's see what happens. Whoa. That is some serious bleeding. Okay, so I don't want to even do the rest. It's just bleeding like crazy. Standard bullpoint ink is a no go for use with Copic markers, that's for sure. All right, so no to the bullpoint no to the gel inks. Right. Here we have a Copic multi line and 0.5. This is a purple pigment. So let's give this a try. It's quite an appealing color. Definitely nice to do your lines in this. We'll let that dry a little bit. Let's take a look. No bleed so far. No bleed at all. Well, great. We can definitely trust the CBI multiliner the 0.5 purple. Probably this whole line, of course, it comes in different sizes. So this is great as well. No bleeding. All right, let's try a pilot G 2.7 here. It's a multi liner type of ink in a ballpoint pin style design. So let's see what happens here. I go to grab our marker. So it's the pile of G two. And that's going to be a definite no go on the bleeding front. It just bleeds like crazy. So definitely no to the pile of G two, and it's ballpoint pen like nature with its jolishFd slash kind of mult liner type I'm not exactly show the kind of k here, but I can tell you that it's definitely not going to be suitable. It's going to smudge like crazy. Next up, the Garson Fodor brush, nylon brush from Copic. It's a very nice big black brush pen. You can get a very cool traditional look with it. All kinds of different stroke patterns, as well as just clean inked type of lines if you want. It's got a very nice sharp tip to it. We've put a bunch down tons down there. Just take a look and see how this deals with it should be Copic proof. Istead it just dry for a second. A little bit of bleeding there. It's not quite dry, 100% dry yet. But yes, generally Copic proof, I would say, you probably need to let this dry a bit though because I do see some smearing at certain sections. But it does seem relatively Copic proof. All right. Well, don't put your marker on this until it's dry. That's the Copic gasonf brush. Let's try a pintil sine pin here. All right. It's got quite a thick little fiber tip there. It feels like a marker, this particular pentil pen. It's very nice to use actually. All right. And let's see how this reacts to our yellow green 01. It's not quite dry, but it's not bleeding that much. There's a little bit of bleed. It's not as bad as the Garten fed, which I assume would really require decent amount of time to dry. This actually performs really well. I'm quite surprised at this actually. So that is the pintail sine pen made in Japan, and that actually works really great. So that's definitely want to keep in mind that has a good kind of mix with CPIC. It doesn't blend at all, works really great. All right, last but not least, let's try the Copic multi liner BS, which is the brush pen here. It's a smaller tip than the gas infer brush. More than likely the same ink inside here, though. Just get a bunch of things down for us to try out. Bring out a yellow green 01. Just let that dry a little bit. And I'm not seeing much or any bleeding of that ink, that's great. That's really great. Let's do a test quickly. We take the gas in fitter and let it dry. All right. I'm just going to put some lines here. Let it dry. Just want to see how it's going to react when it dries. Just try to keep the tip nice and sharp there, it's got a very much a brush tip. And while that's drying, let's see if we can get a better result with dried ballpoint pen, for example. Okay, that's a definite no. It just bleeds even after a few minutes. Same thing with the pentleG two. Let's just check that this is right story the punaG two. No, we're still getting bleed with a Puna G two even after it's dried. So that's definitely a no go as well. Alright, let's try it over this gas and feuda now. Look, I got to say, you know, I think we gave it a good 20 seconds to dry. I'm still seeing bleed on this. So in this instance, you know, perhaps it depends how dry it is. Maybe you have to give it some time, but definitely don't use your markers after immediately applying that. Or alternatively, apply the gas and feuda brush after you've done all your coloring. And that's typical of most of the pins. You know, if you're going to use them after you've done your CBC marker coloring, well, then that's fine. I think it's going to be okay. But before and then you want to use the marker on top, be careful what you use. This is a very nice tool. It just feels great in the hand to use. Let's be cautious when we're using the gas and feta. You don't want to put the marker on too early. Otherwise, the Copic marker line works great. That's the Copic multiline of pins. The unipen worked great. The UPN fine line worked great. Then we also know that the pentle sine pin worked super great. The Garson feuda that's kind of a maybe, especially at least at the beginning. The purple multi liner worked super great. Pencil was a heck no, right? You definitely don't want to use pencil at all. And actually, the zig cartoonist Mangaka 01 actually worked out pretty great. I was actually surprised because I've had a bad experience with this particular brand, but it actually worked pretty great here. And bad experience really was that these pens dry out very quickly, like, really, really quickly, they just dry out where Copic can last two years and it'll still be working fine. But nevertheless, still it worked great with Copic, so we can give that we a star for that. Right, so keep in mind that not every pen is compatible with Copic markers. We've done this test. You've seen the results. You definitely want to stay away especially from pencil and bullpoint pen, which have just extreme smudging and blurring and gel pens don't work great either. All right, that's it for this lesson, and I'll see you in the next lesson. 14. Module 3 Techniques Introduction: Welcome to this module. And in this module, we're going to be learning about core Copic marker techniques. These techniques can be applied to any work, whether you were doing manga illustration, cartooning, drawing illustrations, painting, you're a scrapbooker, or you're a stamper and you want to use opex for your projects. You can use these techniques in all of your work, and I'm really, really excited to show you just how far you can take Kopk markers and just how professional and how good they can look. Please do enjoy this module and feel free to revise it when you need to. Alright, let's get right into it. 15. Module 3.1 Planning Light Ahead: In this lesson, we're going to be using this illustration of an elf girl called Foggy to help us learn a few fundamentals of using our markers. The first thing that we want to learn is working from light to dark and planning out our light areas. Now, typically, you'll want to do this in your head. Know where the lightest areas are going to be as you're coloring your piece. I'm going to be using this pencil as an illustrative way of thinking about where we can place our lighting when we want to think of our lightest areas because when we go too dark with CBC, we just can't fix it, right? So we have to plan ahead of time where we want our lightest lights to be. And so what I will do here, working just on her skin alone is use this pencil to mark out some areas where I want to be the lightest lights, and then I'll go in with the starting light skin tone and fill those areas but not filling in the areas that I've marked out. Now, something to remember, please remember this pencil does not work well with Copix. We're only using this pencil to mark out the regions for illustrative purposes. You'll want to have it down in your mind where not to use your marker. Alright, so let's get started. So typically, I like to have a highlight on the nose. So I would leave this kind of shape maybe on the nose, possibly even a little bit there. And then I already know I'm definitely not going to be going into the eye space at any point. So I'll just put some pencil edges to mark out that I won't go there. A lighter area on the cheek is good because the cheek area is often raised. This could be on one or both sides, depending on how the characters lit. If I were coloring the lips, I'm not going to do so in this demo. But if I were coloring the lips, I'd make sure that I left one or two small highlight areas on the lips so that I didn't go into those zones either. And then I also probably want to leave some of this rim area here of her ear. Lighter, perhaps not pure white, but I want to leave it lighter, so that's just to help me remember that. And then I might want to also add a reflected light underneath her jaw line here heading into her chin. So I'm going to make sure I leave that quite white and maybe even a section of the neck quite white. So here you can see, as I mark these zones, I'm thinking very carefully about where I want to leave light, white space, where I can go in later with light markers and add the color to it, but it's going to keep its value. It's going to be bright. We always have to remember art white is the brightest we can go? You know, it's brighter than the sun in the art world or on the page, so to speak. And so we want to be careful how we use our brightest white, bright lights, right? And also conversely how we use our docs, especially when we're doing more realistic kinds of work. So I've gone ahead and marked out some additional areas of where we don't want to put the marker, and now I'm going to move in and use a very, very light earth tone E zero, and I'm just going to do some fulls not going into those regions. Now, once again, I repeat it again. Don't use pencil. You're going to see even in this demo that when the ink touches the pencil, it smudges a bit and it doesn't really go away easily. So don't use pencil. Is something you need to learn to do mentally to ensure that you're avoiding the areas that you don't want this color to go into. All right. So let's go for it. Now, as I do these color falls, we want to remember that the ink looks a little more gray because it's drying still. So it looks gray in the beginning, but as it dries, the saturation will come out. This particular image was done digitally and is printed on the Copic marker paper. Now, as you can see, as I'm applying this marker around the lips, even though I haven't marked the lip areas where the no lines is not going into as to not put the marker in there, I still know that I mustn't put the marker there because they're going to have their own unique color. Also, I vary my strokes between flat strokes and using the circular motions, and I do this based on the area that I'm trying to fill. I should be actually working a little bit faster here because I want to avoid a cloudy look. You can see there a little bit how the pencil smudges. Nevertheless, let me just work a little bit more aggressively. E zero is quite a light marker. And even though it does look somewhat cloudy in some zones here that I'm seeing, it's not too much of a problem because even at a very high level of saturating the page, it will still be very light compared to the next one up, which would be E double zero. And so I'm banking on the contrast between the two to make the E zero very light. So here I go and I'm filling these areas, having planned my lights ahead of time, And I'm making sure I don't go into those areas that I want to keep very light. Now, don't panic, be loose, be flowy, especially if you're working very light to dark, you can just go over areas that seem a little cloudy or not saturated enough and just add a little bit marker there because they only stack up to a point. And that is, in essence, us planning our lights ahead of time, thinking about where we want the lightest lights of the piece to be. Now, that's not to say that the lightest areas have to stay white. We might want to make them perhaps E zero at some point. But it's important that we know where we want to keep the lightest areas and we work from light to dark so that we don't accidentally bring in too dark values over our light areas, and then we can't fix it, and then our lighting looks a bit weird or messed up. That's it for this lesson, plan your light areas, and I'll see you in the next lesson. 16. Module 3.2 Single marker Shading : Now we're going to look at how we can use a single marker to build up values in our piece to allow us to do single marker shading. And so I have a new version of Foggy here, and what we're going to do is I'm going to fill in with E zero, her skin again, keeping in mind the areas that I want light just in my mind. And then I'm going to wait for some of the ink to dry and I'm going to actively press harder and add a little bit more ink to the areas where I want to have more shadow. And this is single marker shading, where we're building up layers with a single marker. This is really one of the great benefits of using Copic markers because you can get a lot out of a single marker. All right, let's go for it just working on the skin. So now I've done a bulk of the fulls, and what I'm doing is I am just kind of clearing up some areas that look a little cloudy. Looks a little bit different on camera to how it looks to me in reality. But nevertheless, and what I'm going to do now as I kind of finish this off here is I'm going to start putting in more and more marker in areas that are shadowed. So it'll look a little darker at first because the inks still drying, so it looks a little bit weird. But nevertheless, areas such as here on the eyelids in this particular zone here as it goes down to the nose here at the corners of the eyes, I'm just really saturating the page with the marker, build up those layers. Also, just the bottom of the nose is typically shaded. There's also a cast shadow that comes from the bottom of the nose there just like that. And then under the bottom lips as well, bottom lip, mind you, there's a shadow there usually, and I'm going to put a shadow on the edge here of her skin. Is kind of occlusion shadow. I just keep building this marker up. Trying to get nice contrast in. Does dry a little lighter, so you really have to be quite liberal with using it, saturating the page with it. Then, of course, the shadows of the hair, and as it casts a drop shadow, R cross shadow, mind you, over the skin surface. I can put those in. And you can see as I do this, I'm really building up some nice definition in the face and in the skin, helping us to have a better understanding of the three D forms of the face. So really, you just keep saturating the page, layering the marker on top of itself, giving you the ability to create really nice looking shading really easily, just by stacking the marker. So I'll go over these zones again. Don't panic too much if you do go into one of your areas where you wanted to keep it specifically light. If you go over just a little bit. It's not the end of the world. We'll look at how we can use the colorless blender to fix small errors like that. So here I am just kind of giving it a third coat in a way over those shadowed areas, building up the single marker here. Just using E zero for this. No additional markers. And you can already see there's a lot more definition to the face by stacking the marker. Now different markers will stack differently, so you're going to need to give them a try and just see which ones work best for you. But nevertheless, this is using a single Copic marker, very light marker here, and using it multiple times to build up form in the skin, and we will be using this exact image moving forward to also explore what does it look like when we start mixing multiple markers together to build forms and do our lights and shadows in our characters, whether it's skin or hair or clothes or what have you. That's it for this lesson, and I'll see you in the next lesson. 17. Module 3.3 Marker Layering 2 Multiple Marker: Let's now take a look at multiple marker shading, and we're going to be doing this by layering multiple markers together. Now, we already have a good degree of indication of the lights and the shadow areas using just a single marker, in this instance, E zero. Of course, depending on the paper that you're using, you can also do this quite easily with E double zero. But because E double zero is the next one up from E zero in terms of value, I'm going to use E double zero here, and we're going to enhance the shadows and build the shadows up whilst also keeping the light areas light. We'll probably end up going back to E zero to fill in and soften the edges of some of these highlight areas. So they stand out a little bit better, though they also fade in nicely to the rest of the skin tone. So let's start building up those shattered areas and doing the blends with our E double zero here. The thing we want to remember is that we're going to get some hard edges when we're using the darker marker on top of the lighter moker. Of course, we want to use our tried and trusted technique of using the lighter maker to soften those very edges when we go over it again. You can see that this EW zero is definitely darker in value than the E zero. And so we're getting quite a lot deeper shadows with this. I'll try and work relatively quickly for the sake of the video and of the lesson. I'm just imagining areas where I think there will be a lot of shadow. We're going to further enhance the shadows with darker markers still. All right. Just focusing on the skin for the purposes of looking at multiple marker shading. Now I've done the E double zero. I'm going back to E zero, and I'm literally just going to use circular movements on the edges of the E double zero and just blend out that edge. You can see I have quite a loose approach when it comes to the highlight areas. They're not the most neatest crisp, clear shapes, and they don't really need to be. Really, we just want to make sure we're leaving some lights where we need them. And as this marker dries, the zero being put over the E zero, we will see that those edges get nice and soft. I think we can have a little bit more full here. And now we've softened up those edges quite nicely. And we can actually go again and do another layer of E double zero. But I'm going to move on from that, and we're going to move straight to red one, two, and we're going to now kind of go inside those shadow shapes, a little bit more in and actually enhance those shadow shapes a little bit more. And then we'll return to E double zero to blend those. Something to remember with blending as well is you don't always have to blend out every single edge. You can leave a few edges nice and hard and nice and crisp and sharp, right? You can leave some soft. You can use your artistic discretion to help you with that. Hod and soft edges do say different things. Hot edges typically say, Hey, look at me and brings focus to the viewer. Soft edges allow the eye to kind of glide over the page. So there's a big compositional use there for them. You can see I went slightly into the yoga there. It's not a huge problem. We'll look at how to mitigate that to some degree, enhancing the shadow under the lip here. And the car shadow from the top part of the ear. Well as the occlusion shadow inside the ear gets really dark. Little shadows here. Of course, the car shadow on the neck, from the chin. You can see we've left this nice bright white highlight here to show reflected bounce lighting from the ground moving up into the bottom of the cheek. I don't think we need too much shading here. Let's do the car shadows of the hair. Then the occlusion shadows as we move into these tight spaces. Then we can, of course, return to E double zero and soften some of these edges up. Now, what I'll do here on the neck, for example, I'll leave the lowest point shop and then I'll kind of blend the rest a little bit. So we have soft into hard edge into soft edge. Similarly here, I might leave the inner line bit sharper, but I'll use this marker to blend out the rest. Now, also, don't be disheartened when you start with your base tone, your base color. I can look weird in the beginning until you start building up those darker tones because the darker tones will really help bring out the forms and the skin look. So just go through the whole process and experience the whole process. Don't get disheartened too early. Alright. Killing some of these edges. And lastly, we're going to use e04 to do smaller but even more enhanced shadows, and this gives us really a nice range of depth in our shadowing. And while I do this, I will just repeat the colors for you. I've used E zero for the base, E double zero for the layer on top of that. Red one, two for the layer above that and then finishing off with really the darkest, darkest shadow areas with e04. Of course, we'll definitely go in and blend this because this is quite a shadow color here. So all the darkest dark areas, I'll go in with a little bit of this just to enhance those regions. You can see I'm using the very tip of the marker to have a little bit more accuracy. Oh Yeah. Of course, I can then move in again and use the value just below that, the marker we use just below that, the red one, two, to blend the edges of this, and I'm going to use circular motions to do that. I really want to saturate marker into the page. Of course, I definitely recommend also testing how much ink saturation can the paper that you're currently using hold? Because that will also determine the capability of your ability to soften certain amounts of layers, once they've dried. Just going over that with red one, two, being a little aggressive with it. Then what I'll do to finish off is I will go over all of these shadows and over most of the piece with the lightest value to really get the final blends down and soften any regions that still seem a bit too hard. Now I'm going to take E zero, and now that I've seen that I have a really good value range in terms of the lights and shadows, I can actually move over some of my lightest light areas and just kind of soften them up a bit and also juice up some edges, any additional edges that I want to soften in the piece. Of course, you're saturating the paper with more ink, so you're going to get some degree of blending, which is really nice for softening up those hot edges. And don't be timid at this stage. You really want to push that ink into the paper to get the smooth blends you're looking for. And that is the end of this lesson on using multiple markers to shade your characters and your drawings. I'll see you in the next lesson. 18. Module 3.4 Grey Marker Shading: In this lesson, we're now going to take a look at how we can use gray markers to take the place of other markers and use them to create nice rich shadows where we need them when we don't have other markers, or we want to add a cool type of shadow to our particular flat filled area. So what I'm going to do is move ahead, fill in foggy's hair with just a base value, a base color, and then we're going to use a light gray marker to do the shading, and we'll achieve the full hair look with just those two markers. I'm going to start off with blue green 53, and I'll see you after the jump once I've done the flat falls. Now I've done my basic color fall with my single color marker, and I've gone and enhanced some of the areas I feel should be shadowed by saturating the page a little bit more like at the root area and here where the hairpiece covers the back of the hair in these areas over here. And I'm actually going to go in now with a C three marker, and I'm going to enhance the shadows and then we'll return to the blue green 53 and then blend in the shading that I've done with this marker. So we're using a gray marker here to now enhance color. And this is really great as a technique to use in general when you want to enhance your shadows. But it's also very good to use if you don't have exactly the right shadow available, whether that's because you don't have the marker or because there is no good or suitable shadow for that that you've found. You can then use grays. I'm using a cool tone gray, and that's what the C three is, the cool tone gray. You don't need all the grays, in my opinion. They have warm grays, cool grays, and neutral grays. I prefer a cooler look tending towards more cool colors and blues. So I would definitely recommend cool tones if you also prefer more of a cool look in your color tones versus a warm. And so what I'm doing here is I'm going in and I'm enhancing all the shadows with this C three gray. For this particular value, where we have a 53, so we've got a three on the value scale here, you can use two, three, four, even five gray tones in terms of value to really bring out the shadows a little bit better. I'm kind of imagining the hair strands and the hair line areas, kind of trying to move my brush with the flow as I attempt to shadow these zones. And, of course, I can stack the gray as well when I want darker zones, which I'll do right here. Really get that form in show the overlaps of the different strands of the hair. Even add miscellaneous strand detail, and you can just let the ink work sometimes. Copic are really fun to use, and you don't want to make it a super serious, you know, thing where it's not fun for you to use them, and it's just this very dramatic thing. Just have fun with them. Let some of the natural mistakes happen. You know, these natural mistakes really add flavor to a piece, so don't let them get you down. Just keep working and enjoy the process. A and so here I've used C three, cool gray three number three here to enhance my shadows and what we have achieved by using a pre planning of our light source, using a single marker for the base value and the base color, and then using a cool gray to enrich our shadows, we've achieved quite a broad range of values and saturation across the hair, giving us a very pleasing effect using just these two markers. So it's really impressive what you can do with a small amount of markers. So remember, if you don't have the shadow tones for your blue green color range, or you want to have a more gray look or a more cool then you can use your cool gray markers or your gray markers and a single value here to get the three dimension at the end of the lighting as you'd like to have it in your piece. Now that I've finished adding the cool gray C three, I'm going to go back over the zones with the BG 53, blue green 53, and just soften up some of those edges and even enrich the shadow zones again with my base color. Now, wherever I see certain edges that I don't want, I will just go in and blend them out. But sometimes, especially in hair, it's good to keep certain edges that appear to be defining specific hair zones. So don't be shy about leaving some of those harsh edges in. And using just two markers, we've colored the hair completely, bringing in a range of values across the surface of the hair and using our C three cool gray to really enhance our shadows. So if you only have a few markers, remember, you can stack your markers, and you can definitely use the gray tones to enhance your colors and then go over those gray tones again with the base color to really bring back some of that color richness and give you a pleasing cool, shadow defect. That's the end of this lesson, and I'll see you in the next lesson. 19. Module 3.5 Using the Copic Colorless Blender: The colorless blender is a fairly versatile tool when we want to soften edges, remove errors to some degree, never perfectly, and also add patterns to certain things, which we'll take a look at in another lesson. But for now, we want to color in the rest of the areas of Foggy the elf. And you can see that I've gone outside the lines, so to speak, and had ink bleed into her eyes, into her lips a little bit. This is the perfect opportunity to show you how you can use the colorless blender to mitigate to some extent this extra ink that has bleed into those zones. Colorless blender is, in fact, not really a blender. If you try to blend with it, you're just going to have white ink splotches everywhere where it's kind of separated your ink a little bit. Instead, it's more of a correction tool for these types of scenarios. And all it is really is a copic marker without any pigment. So it's really just the alcohol ink. And so what you can do is you work it in, and you'll need to work it in a few times to kind of soften the dye and the previous ink, and you can kind of use it to pull and push away the areas where you've made mistakes. Now, it's not really a Copic eraser, so it doesn't work 100% perfectly, but it's definitely great at lightening up areas. So we'll just keep working it in here and we'll return to those zones now. So you'll see let's just kind of note how dark that area is now. What we'll do is we'll saturate this area, really try and push it push that ink back the ink that has gone over. Now, your results will vary, of course, based on the drying time in the zone that you've allowed to happen, but, of course, also just based on the general values that you're using that you're allowed to bleed. You know, as I said previously, it's not really a Copic eraser. It's just a tool that allows you to kind of blend and soften edges a little bit from white paper going into the inc zones. So you really want to just do it the best you can and then carry on with your life. So while that inks drying, we've managed to lighten somewhat and push some of the ink away from those areas where I've had it running into the eye zones as well as the lip zones. That's it for this lesson on one way to use the colorless Copic blender, and I'll see you in the next lesson. 20. Module 3.6 Tip on Tip Copic Color Blending: We're now going to be taking a look at tip on tip coloring. And what I'm going to be doing is using E zero and red 83 to color Foggy the elfs lips. And we'll also add some blush, if you will, or some subsurface scattering to her nose and her cheek areas using this method. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to open both of these. And then I'm going to use the color of red 83 and dip into it with my E zero marker. I'm just going to do a little bit like this maybe a few times, three or four times, and then I'm going to color with my E zero onto her lips. And what I'm going to get is a very smooth blend of these two basically tinting the E zero with the red 83. And I can achieve such a nice smoothness because I'm using this tip on tip method. Of course, we want her lips to be a little bit more red than her skin tone because we know that the base of her tone is e t zero. And so at the shadowed areas, particularly the lip line, I will add more of this red to the tip of my E triple zero as I'm blending this color around. So I'm going to let that dry a little bit. And then what I'm going to do is take some clean blending card and just clean the tip of my e zero, and you can see the red coming off there. And you don't have to worry about permanently having other ink in the tip. By doing this, it'll just keep flowing through. The ink in the marker will eventually push all of the other color out. And we're back to our normal et zero. Even if there are markings of the other color on this marker, don't worry about it. The ink you'll get out is the original e zero ink. Just you'll know that it's clean when you clean it just like this. All right. And we're going to let that dry a little bit seems fairly drys, and I'm just going to blend those edges in just so we have a smooth edge at the edge of her lips. Being a bit aggressive here. All right. I'm going to add some of this red 83 into her nose colors to get a little bit of subsurface scattering happening in her nose. And subsurface scattering effectively is the light bouncing into the skin and then bouncing out, carrying some of the light from the blood under the skin, right? So that's what kind of gives you a bit of a redness to your skin is the subsurface scattering. And we'll add a little bit to her cheeks as well. Now there's a number of ways to add this kind of pink tone to the cheeks and the skin. This is just one of them. And I'll add it on the other side as well. I just gives the skin a more natural look. To have some pink skin tone in there. Another place I like to add it. It's kind of I don't want to call it a secret, but it's definitely a trick that I like to do is actually add some pink to the end eyelid areas here. And you can see I'm even going over my highlight regions with this. But I think the effect looks pleasing. So I'd like to add some of that redness in with this tip on tip. Technique. So there are really so many techniques and interesting things you can do with your markers. I would definitely encourage you to try new things out. You know, obviously, someone tried something out with this at some point to figure this out. So definitely give it a shot. And there I'm enhancing the shadows of the lips. Typically, the top lip will be a darker value than the lower lip, so I won't hold back with this pink tone on the top lip, but I want to keep my edges nice and smooth. All right. And I'm going to clean this marker again and just do some final blends to smooth out some edges. You can see the pink coming off over here. That's why I say, you need to definitely take a little bit more of a aggressive free approach, free flowing approach. Don't be too tight with your marker usage. Just go for it. And I'm just going to do a little bit more blending on these edges here. And it's really fun to use these markers. I'm not gonna lie. It's so much fun to use Copic markers. Just the things that can happen when you're using them and the naturalness of how they look. It's just really rewarding. It's a lot of fun. It's really rewarding. All right. And there we go. We've added some subsurface scattering, and we've used a tip on tip method to do so with the lightest base color here for the skin. And you can use tip on tip for anything really anywhere where you want to add extra gradients from one color to another or add a little extra nuance to your blends. That is the tip on tip method, and that is the end of this lesson. I'll see you in the next lesson. 21. Module 3.7 Adding Texture with the Colorless Blender: We're now going to take a look at using the zero colorless blender to actually create patterns in our clothing. And you can use this to create patterns in anything really in any kind of flat filled area. But it's really great for creating patterns and lines and clothing, such as stitching, such as repeatable patterns and designs and things like that. So what I'm going to do with Foggy now that we've kind of filled in her shirt area or her tunic area here is I'm going to do two zones. We're going to separate her sleeves as one zone and then kind of the main frontal section of the shirt here as another zone. And I'm going to create some patterns and design. What I'm doing here is I'm using the flat edge, the chisel edge of the marker, and I'm kind of just using it to create nice sharp lines, and I'm creating a line of definition there almost as if the sleeve starts there, and I'll do the same on the other side here. And this is just so that I can define some zones to give us some different looks so we can see what we can do with this marker, the colorless blender marker zero. And I'll do different patterns in these two zones. So I think in this main zone here, let's do circles and dots. And the good thing about using the harsher edge here, this chisel edge is that you can press pretty hard with it so you can get at the ink, right? You can get nice and close to the ink to make sure your patterns read. And this gives you a nice natural look to patterns and designs that you want to push across surfaces. Of course, if you wanted it to be pure white, you'd need to mark it out or leave it at pure white or use Copic opaque white on top of that, which we'll look at shortly in how to use Copic opaque white. But this is one great use of this blender tool to create these patterns. And as you keep going over and over, it's going to push the ink more and more up to a certain extent. So the areas where I feel like I'm not seeing that circle enough, I'm just going to go in a few more times and do it. Similarly with the dots. This work better in lighter colored areas, as I'm sure you can tell from this demo. You can definitely use the super brush nib as well, but you'll see that you can't press very hard with it when you're trying to make marks in the lighter areas of the page. So here I'm really just pressing hard, saturating these dots. And enhancing the circle patterns here. All right. Now on the sleeves, what I'd like to do is to do two kinds of stripes. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to use this wedge chip in its widest form for some of the striped lines and in its thinnest form for the others. So I'll start with a thin line here. And then I'll do a thick line. Back to the thin line. Of course, when you're doing patterns and things on clothing, you always want to follow the contour of the form, imagining the arm and there and imagine the direction that the clothing is moving in. I go to do the same on the other side here. Like always say, be loose. Don't be too stiff. Don't worry too much about mistakes. No piece of art is ever perfect anyways. So why strive for something that can't even exist, right? Just do your best and enjoy the process. Of course, your market tip will likely have some residual ink on it due to the different colors here. So you can actually just use a piece of blending card and clear that tip off and make it nice and clear, clean it for your next use. We'll add a double line here. Why not? And we'll put a double line here as well. That is how we can use our colorless blender to create patterns in our flat falls. Let's move on to the next lesson. 22. Module 3.8 Copic Opaque White Specular: In this lesson, I'm now going to show you how you can use products like Copic Opaque White to add very bright white highlights to your work. So Copic Opaque White is a zinc based white paint, really. And this particular version comes with a built in fine brush attached to the cap, kind of like a nail polish in a way, where you can use that to apply the opaque white. And what I would recommend you do is get a card, some blending card or any kind of paper or card or something that you're okay to put some of this opaque white onto and actually dip some of it on that paper first. Just put some here, get some of the liquid there, and just kind of get a nice tip to our brush. And what I'm going to do is I'm going to dip into this pull that I've made and then gently apply it where I want it on the image. Just going to move this a little bit higher up here so I don't accidentally put my hand in it. And so areas where I definitely want to apply this is in these big highlights on the eyes. Be very careful, of course, with this because once you've applied it, it's there, it's going to be very hard to take away. So take your time and be patient. And it can be tricky if you're not used to using brushes. So just be patient with yourself and try and get it as smooth as you can. So you'll want to probably take a more of a dabbing approach to this. I'm going to add some bright white into the pupil area here. And you can see that adding highlights to the Rs like this really brings life into the image. All right, she kind of seems like she's woken up. She's come alive now. And also she has a glass earring section here. So I want to put just a little bit of stroke of light there. It's kind of like a little glass gem or some such in her earring there. And of course, things that have these types of bright white highlights, they're called specular highlights. So things like metal tend to have these things glass, of course, eyes, things that are wet. So anywhere where you feel this would make sense to apply, just for the sake of this video, we'll apply it onto various objects. Just so we can get that nice shiny reflectivity of the light the specular light. And we'll put some on this button as well. And of course, an area that is kind of unfinished in some sense, until you have a specular on it, of course, it's not always necessary to do this, but I definitely want to get some of this Copic opaque white onto the lips, just so that we have a nice lip highlight over here. And there we have our finished application of Copic o Peck white to bring highlights into our image. That's it for this lesson, and I'll see you in the next lesson. 23. Module 3.9 Enriching Shadows Pencil : In this lesson, I'm now going to show you how you can use pencil to enhance your shadows. So what I'm going to do here is I have a clutch pencil with some normal HB lead in it, and I'm going to go into the areas where I want to darken shadows, and I'm going to do some cross hatching or general hatching. So I'm just going to come in here with my pencil, and anywhere that I feel I want to have slightly darker shadows or enhanced shadows, I'm going to put some of this pencil. And you can see I'm kind of sketching lines down and getting a slightly darker effect in these areas. Let's just for the sake of demonstration, I'm going to put some pencil lines here on the side of her neck and go into the white highlight area there. You can see I'm just kind of stroking some lines down. And I'll plot this liberally across the piece wherever I want to have slightly enhanced shadows. Let's add a little bit more here, for example, and we'll put some here as well. Pressing pretty lightly with this, but of course, you can press as hard as you need to press for your desired effect. I try to be fairly consistent. Now, of course, if you wanted a rough look, you could just leave it like that. But what I tend to do is I take one of my knuckles of my fingers, this knuckle, that knuckle, and I use it to smudge the pencil, and it gives a very soft look to these little shadows that I've created. This is a really great way to get a very advanced ambient clusion shadow look into your work where you're using the pencil on top of the Copic markers, once you've finished coloring the entire piece, to get a nice smooth, ambient occlusion shadowed look in your work. And that's the technique, and that's the end of this lesson. I'll see you in the next lesson. 24. Module 3.10 Softnening Harsh Lines with Pink Pencil: In this lesson, I'm going to show you how you can use colored pencils to soften the harsh dark lines that may be in your work. Now, in this particular illustration, Foggy's lines are particularly dark. She was drawn digitally and then printed with an laser jet printer onto this paper, and of course, softening her lines is going to be quite hot. It would have been ideally better to have given her brown lines or kind of less dark lines, maybe more gray lines in the first place if you wanted to give the work a bit of a softer. Of course, for more cartoony work, thick black lines work just fine. But in the instance where you're working either digitally or traditionally and you want to soften the lines and you have inked darker lines, I would recommend using this pencil technique, and it has quite a pleasing effect. So what we're going to do is use this pink pencil, which is kind of a good color for this particular skin type and go over the lines, slightly letting some of the pencil bleed out into the skin areas, and it'll create a softening effect over the lines and bring a bit more unity to the piece. So let's go ahead and do that. And what I'm really doing is I'm sketching on top of the line. I'm trying to be careful not to go outside of the line. Although if you do, you can erase a little bit. Just don't press too hard with your pencil. And you will have some of the graphite on the page, which you can just blow away or sweep away like that. Hopefully, you can see as I do the lips, how it has a kind of a softening effect. The line is not so black anymore. It's kind of getting closer to the skin tone. Now, of course, you would want to match the colored pencil that you're using to the region that you're working on. So for example, if I was working on the hair, I wouldn't want to use this pink, I'd probably use a blue. And something to keep in mind, as well is that Copic line of multi liners, if you want to manually ink your work with traditional tools, they come in different colors. And so you could actually do your linod in pink or do your linod in brown or even red. They have a number of colors. And that's how you can achieve a softer line look that way. But this pencil trick, this pencil method is really effective, and it just gives the work a nice finish, whether printed or manually line added. So I'm just going to do a few zones here, for example purposes. But I'm sure you get the idea. And anywhere where you mess up, of course, you can go back in with your eraser and just tidy it up. This technique is, of course, done after you've finished coloring your work. Keep in mind, copik do not mix well with pencils, and you're going to get weird smudging and blurring. So I really don't recommend you doing that. And that in a nutshell is the pencil technique for softening your line work and bringing a bit more unity to the piece. You don't want it to have such dark contrast from the thick black lines. See you in the next lesson. 25. Module 4.1 Copic Ink Refills: Welcome to this module on Copic refills and maintenance. And first, we're going to take a look at refilling a marker using your Copic various ink. And I'm going to be using this completely empty marker for this demonstration so you can see how you can easily refill your markers. What we're going to do first is we're going to take both caps off of this maker. Now, this marker is completely empty, and as you can see, both sides are very white on the nibs. And we're going to do this so that we can tell when the barrel is full of ink because we'll see that the far side of this marker is going to get nice and juicy with that ink in it. Something to remember when opening up your various ink is this plastic is very thin and very sensitive to pressure. So just hold it gently and open the lid very carefully. We're going to be filling this marker with E double zero. And what I'm going to do is I'm going to hold this empty marker or the perspective to be filled marker at an angle like this, and then I'm going to turn the various ink bottle down, and you can see that the nib doesn't immediately fill with ink there of the bottle, right? And so what we're gonna do is we're going to just gently drop by drop, add ink into the marker. Now, in the beginning, when you're new at this, this may seem like it's going to take 50,000 years, but it really won't you'll get pretty quick at squeezing a drop, dropping the drop, squeezing a drop, dropping the drop. And before you know it, you will have refilled your maker completely. I'm just going to go ahead and do this, and then after the jump, we will see that the ink has gone through the entirety of the maker and made the far side juicy. And as I continue to do this, you can see that the other side of the marker is getting quite saturated. And so we'll just go a little bit further, and this marker will be refilled and ready to use. When both sides of your marker are nice and juicy, the refill is complete, and that is how you refill your markers with the Copic various ink refill bottle. That's the end of this lesson, and I'll see you in the next lesson. 26. Module 4.2 Nib Replacement : In this lesson, we're going to take a look at Copic nib replacement. Whether you want to switch out to different nibs or replace a damaged nib, this can be done easily with some spare Copic nibs and a pair of tweezers. This particular pair of tweezers has been modified at its tips where I've bent the tips in with a pair of plies to make it easier to grab nibs in and out. Alright, let's change this nib out using these brand new super brush nibs. So I'm just going to grab this packet and take out one of the nibs. They come in really nice little resealable zip lock bags, so you can just close these and put them aside. Then I'm going to quickly remove this nib using my tweezers. Now, when you take a look at the one that is the replacement nib, you'll notice the sharper end is actually the tip and this flat edge over here goes into the barrel. Hold your marker upright so that you don't spill any ink out and be careful to dispose of your exchanged nib very carefully because it still may have some ink in it, so definitely put it to one side. Now I'm just going to take the new nib, place it inside the marker, and push it down. And that is pretty much it. Once you've placed the new nib in your marker, you can actually recap the marker, give it a few shakes. And the tip will have rejuvenated with ink, ready to use and ready to roll. And that is how you replace the nibs on your Copic markers. I'll see you in the next lesson. 27. Module 4.3 Copic Cleaning : You may find that your markers, your caps, and even the sides of the markers might get fairly inky from time to time depending on how you use your markers. Nevertheless, you'll want to clean them and maintain them so that they stay nice to use. The easiest way to do this is to use alcohol pads. Essentially, these pads are small alcohol swabs, small pieces of material that are saturated with alcohol and they're pretty wet and they're great for cleaning COVID markers. You can just go over your markers wherever there's dirt and just rub some of this on. Don't be too aggressive with it because it's quite powerful alcohol. And just go on and clean up all the edges of your marker, giving you a nice shiny new looking Gpik just like the day that you bought it. You can also clean inside the lids. Sometimes the ink, when handled aggressively, the ink will spill into the insides of the lids. And you can see that the prec pad here, the alcohol swab is absorbing all of that ink. So I'm going to just continue to clean this and check my marker's exterior, make sure it's nice and clean. And that is how you clean and maintain your CPIC markers using easily available alcohol swabs from your pharmacy or your drug store. That's it for the CPIC maintenance lesson, and I'll see you in the next module. 28. C7 Conclusion: Congratulations on finishing the course. I hope that you've added an excellent five star experience while you've moved through this course and learned to use Copic markers to their maximum potential. If there's any suggestions or improvements you have for me to make to the course, please do let me know. I'm very happy to add them and also to expand the course contents, perhaps in directions that I may myself not have thought of yet. It's always a good idea to revise what you've learned, so be sure to revisit any of the modules at any time if you're unsure of a particular technique or usage of your Copic markers. Other than that, I'm so grateful and thankful that you've taken this course. I hope that I have served you well and I'm excited to see your work in the Q&A. So I'll see you in the next course.