Improve your Coloring: How Research Leads to More Creativity (Copic Markers, Colored Pencils)
New stamp, no ideas?
Yep, this happens a lot.
You found the cutest digital stamp. You couldn’t wait to color it. Now that you’ve finally found a bit of spare time to sneak off with your Copic Markers and colored pencils… and the house is all quiet with no one bugging you?
You’re just sitting there staring at the stamp.
You have no idea what to do with it.
Artistic Coloring: 3 Mistakes Everyone Makes with Stamps (Copic Markers, Colored Pencils)
Are your coloring projects pretty but boring? You find a wonderful stamp. You can’t wait to color it with your Copic Markers, colored pencils, or maybe you’ll use watercolor. So you color it really well. And yet the finished project is just a little… Boring? Even worse is when you stumble across sixteen other people who colored the stamp exactly like you did. Why is it so hard to color a jaw-dropping stamp in an eye-popping way? Let’s look closer at why great stamps go mediocre during the coloring process.
The Artist's Notebook: What is Artistic Coloring? (Copic Marker, Colored Pencil)
Confession time…
I spend a lot of time doing something without a name. Yep, I spend hours coloring highly detailed projects with Copic Markers and colored pencils. They’re little paintings. Lots of other people do it too— some working with digital stamps and others with their own original line art.
You’d think there’d be a name for this… Hobby? Pastime? Obsession? For want of a better name, I call it: Artistic Coloring.
Artistic Coloring… It’s a sub-niche of something fine-artsy, almost like watercolor but crossed with illustration, the step-child of paper crafting, and cousins to card makers and art journaling… whew!
See? We’re the Duckbilled Platypus of the coloring world…
Learn to Capture Accurate details for Realism (coloring Classes vs. demonstrations)
Do you want to play a game? “Okay class, pick up your R35 and we will color the tail of this ribbon.” That’s how Copic and even some colored pencil classes work, right? If you do exactly what the teacher does, you’ll end up with something amazing. And it works… Kinda. You walk away with a very pretty project. Your Christmas scene looks just as cute as the instructor’s. Your ribbon is smooth, your ornaments look shiny and the box looks perfectly dimensional… maybe even realistic.