July 23, 2013

BEHOLD! Glorious Skintone Swatches! (And A Mini Tutorial)

So I had myself a bad arm day. What's a bad arm day you ask? Well it's when my tendonitis flares up a little and it makes it really hard to do things like grab and click using a mouse, and holding pencils and all sorts of other precise work.

I was determined to do something productive with my day even if I couldn't ink comic pages today. So I set out on a task to find out what kind of color combinations people use for coloring in people with Copic Markers.

I did a lot of searching and discovered that I learned the most from, believe it or not, scrapbooking tutorials. WEIRD, AMIRITE? Well, I came across this little page called "CopicOz". You can find it here: http://copicoz.blogspot.com.au/. They have all sorts of little tutorials and I look forward to reading through them.

However, I did come across some tutorials of their that had... EMPTY TEMPLATES. They have templates for hair and for... you guessed it, SKINTONES. So I printed some of those empty templates out, broke out all my "E" labeled markers (I think it's for "earth tones", but I use em for skin), and started going to town. A day later I have 4 pages of swatches to share with you, along with a short tutorial on how I shade skintones.

First of all, if you're coloring with copics and you have more than say, 6 of them, I STRONGLY ENCOURAGE you guys to go and print out one of these with a laser printer:


You can find these at: http://www.copicmarker.com/resources

Preferably on SMOOTH CARDSTOCK. Chances are likely that you are coloring on bristol board of some kind - and it's best to get as close to the actual colors as you can. Markers will react differently on different paper. Once you have a handful of these things it'll get really confusing and you will waste time deciding what color works best. This at least eliminates some of the "what color do I need" and instead you spend all your time looking for the markers.

And if you didn't read the caption, the blank templates can be found at: http://www.copicmarker.com/resources

GO GET ONE. I DEMAND IT.

*ahem*

Anyway, onto the next part of this, my templates! I filled in 4 pages of skin tones, underneath each swatch is a listing of letters and numbers. These indicate the markers you are using, darkest shade to lightest (L to R).

Any numbers in parentheses (#) are shades added after the intial coloring (see tutorial below).

I used the same extra shading colors on each sheet to demonstrate what the same color does on varying skintones.

And without further ado... THE SWATCHES:






I color with copics in a very particular way. Namely, I am coloring darkest shade to lightest. So I will start with the deepest color and put that onto my figure/object/etc, and slowly work up to the lightest shade which I then cover the entire area with as a "glaze" which helps to blend all the colors together.

For the more visual, here's a reference!



So there you have it. You may now enjoy the fruits of my labor, without having to do as much of it yourself. I highly recommend making your own swatches though! It's quite educational!

Empty Templates can be found here: http://copicoz.blogspot.com/2013/05/copic-technique-journal-2-skin-swatches.html

3 comments:

  1. I may have just squealed with unadulterated joy! Thank you for this!

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    Replies
    1. You're welcome! I hope that people find it useful. I can't tell you how many times I've lamented over what skintones to use. I'm sure there's more,I just need to get more of those colors...

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  2. Skintone tends to be the bane of my coloring existence, so this definitely helps.

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