Copic Marker Europe: It's Spring already!

Hi everyone, it’s Sandra from Portugal. It’s Spring already!!!

To celebrate, today I am bringing you a girly, flowery card that I made using a Conie Fong’s digistamp: “Braids in my hair”.

Before I started colouring, I chose the layout and the paper I would be using on the final card later. This helped me to choose matching colours for my image, and saved me some time later looking for something that would fit nicely with a finished project. I chose one beautiful paper from Bo Bunny's Soirée 6x6 paper pad. And then die cut the image to the size needed using Elizabeth Crafts' Entwine Ovals die.

I started colouring the background using BG0000. I added three layers of colour to make it evenly smooth. You can see the paper is still warped while it’s drying.

When it dried I moved to the dress folds, assuming that light came towards her back (left-front light source) and using BV00/01/02/04. From the folds I moved to the sleeves and then to the dress corset.

The next thing I coloured was the bow/belt, using YR01/02/04 to make it pop against the dress (complimentary colours).

The girl was almost dressed by now, so I decided to do her hair, using one of my favourite techniques – colouring each hair strand at a time. It is quite time consuming but I love the end result: the hair appears looser and with more volume. I began with the braid tail moving upwards, and coloured each part at a time. As you know the hair will look darker where it’s tied together so I mapped those spots with E49 (only a small millimeter since I wanted to use several markers in tiny, tiny spots). I then extended it towards the middle with E57, then E55 and lastly E53. I repeated those steps until all the hair was coloured.

To colour the hair garland I used YG01/03 for the leaves, Y04/06 for the daisies and R30/32/43 for the rose. When I finished, I thought that the daisies’ petals looked a bit monochromatic in yellow, so I picked Y08 to add some dimension. I can’t understand how, but Y08 decided to blob and not only did it completely cover one of the daisies but also stained my beautifully light pink rose. Remember colour theory from school? It made one of the rose petals look orangey!

I “saved“ the daisy pushing the Y08 towards the middle with Y0000. I couldn’t disguise the orangey look on that rose petal, even with the colourless blender, so I decided to turn the pink rose, peach, layering YR61 all over it. I rather liked that tone of pink, but I was not about to lose all the work because of that. I think it didn’t turn out that bad in the end, what do you think?

I coloured the skin using E000/00/11/21.

Don’t forget the cast shadows: closer to the hair strands when the hair is lying on the face/body and a little separate from the strands if the hair is further away (in the air). I used E11 for this.

I chose to colour the blouse with E40/41 to get a pearly look.

And after I finished my colouring, I added some discreet (I know, I am a coward) cast shadows.

I used BV02 for the shadows the bow casts on the dress; YR02 for the shadows the bow’s ribbons cast on each other; and E11 for shadows cast on skin by the sleeves.

Notice how even small and shy cast shadows can help accentuate contrasts and make your colouring appear more realistic.

Finally it didn’t give me much time to assemble the card. This die cut frame came with some flowers that I could place over the circles on the frame, I guess. But I really like simple cards, and think how sad would it be if, after all my colouring, people’s attention got diverted to the frame, so I left it plain and simple. 😏

I tried to give the frame a 3D look though, not gluing the frame completely and raising some arches in the air (yes, I know it won’t stand in the air when I mail it, but until then it will look pretty! 😁)