Copic Training

This past week I was in Orlando for Copic certification training. My understanding is that now my name will go onto their website showing me as a certified Copic instructor. I hope I understood that right!

I have to say that before I went I didn't know a thing about using copic markers, as you can very clearly see in the above photo - haha! The first thing we worked on was blending. (I was going to say 'the first thing we learned' but somehow you don't get that from the results in this picture. More like I was was 'working' on it. We used three shades in each of these color families to blend the colors in these spheres.

From there we advanced. I am not showing everything we did. I am especially NOT going to show you my red suited Santa. I told our instructor Sherrie that I was going to come home and throw away every red Copic I could find. It was that bad. The technique shown above was called feathering - the way you blend two colors into each other - as you see with the lilac and blue. I really, really liked this one a lot! Finally a technique I mostly understood.

At the end of day one we played with Sherrie's airbrush setup. The hand in the center came from a stencil that I airbrushed through.  I had a journal that I was keeping all my notes in, and I wanted to incorporate this right into the journal, so I airbrushed on the next page. The pen blobbed out a wad of ink - note: green blob of ink. I was not a happy camper, but I recalled Sherrie saying if this happened to take off the bottom cap of the pen to equalize the pressure. Or something like that. So, I removed the bottom cap and continued on my merry way. Then I changed to the pink ink with no trouble. I thought I'd go for a little purple contrast and came across blob #2, which fortunately was mostly contained onto the stencil itself. I showed my friend in the class - Brenda - what the airbrush had done to my page. She commented that it looked so bad. I told her it wouldn't when I was finished with it. So that night in my hotel room I tangled me up a bunch of Diva Dance variations and now those blobs look like bits of watercolor. Blob 1 and Blob 2 tangled and lost! Moving on.

Day two saw us tackle skin. I never in a million years would have thought I'd be able to color skin and it not look horrible. Here are three variations that I can't believe I did! Looks like hispanic, asian, caucasian. I have one more to work with. Once I get the right color Copics.

And some hair color variations. Who knew I'd be able to do this? Not me, that's for sure! Skin and hair? ✓

Then we moved on to our final project - a completed piece for our portfolios. It pretty much incorporated everything we learned. Check out that shading, and even a cast shadow of a leaf onto a leaf. All these photos were taken with my phone - they look even better in person. Well, except maybe for that sphere shot. Not sure anything would make it look better - haha! (And definitely not the Santa that I can't force myself to show you.) Copic Certified Instructor, wow! That's awesome!