A new coloring video, featuring the Beautiful Narcissus stamp set and Copic markers!
January 13, 2019
Hello, Julie here, with another coloring video! Today’s project uses the new Beautiful Narcissus stamp set and Copic markers. Copics are a fairly new medium for me, so I learned a lot as I prepared for this video. The first thing I learned was how to pronounce it – a little like cope-ic. I even went to the official website to watch a video just to hear how they pronounced it. I still think it looks like it should rhyme with topic, but oh well.
Step-By-Step Instructions For Coloring the Beautiful Narcissus image with Copic Markers
If you'd like to print out step-by-step instructions, here they are. Or bookmark this page for future reference!
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I stamped my image on multimedia paper here, with a water-based ink. Because many waterproof inks are alcohol-based, they don’t work so well with the alcohol-based Copic markers. It just blends into the color you’re adding. So, water-based inks are our friends here.
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I started with the greens. I found the color system easy to navigate, with the help of the Copic Marker site’s color chart and explanation. I chose three colors in the yellow green family - YG21, YG23, and YG25.
I started with the lightest color, YG21, and filled in all the leaves and stems. After that, I put in shadows with the medium color, YG23. Then I used the darkest color, YG25, very sparingly in the very darkest spots. I will say that the stems here are fairly thin, so I didn’t do any detailed shading on them. Next, I went back to YG21 and used it as a blender. Now, I could have used an actual colorless blender to do this, but I didn’t really need to, as the lightest of the three colors worked well. This final layer blended the three colors a bit, and smoothed out any hard lines.
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Next came the flowers. I used three markers from the yellow family – Y13, Y15, and Y19. I started with Y13, the lightest color, then the medium color, Y15, then the darkest, Y19, and finally went back in with the lightest and blended them. One of the things that have kept me from trying Copics in the past was the fact that when I started to put down color, like I did here with the light yellow, it would start out looking sort of muddy. Tam, here at the office, encouraged me to keep trying, and I came back to a trial piece that I hadn’t liked as I colored it, but which looked amazing once it was dry! So these yellows are going to dry to be nice and bright.
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Next was the orange center. I used three in the yellow red family YR00, YR02, and YR04. Of course, I started with the lightest, and filled in the whole shape with it. Then the medium color went in, and because the lighter color is so light, I used a good bit of the medium. Next comes the darkest, which I used for just a couple of shadow touches. Finally, I used the lightest orange to blend them together.
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Once the flowers are all done, I started on the puffballs, which Tam and I decided are thistles, so they’re blue. I started with B60, and just swirled it around on each of the bits of fluff. Next was a touch of B63 for the start of the shadows, and finally some B66 for the darkest bit. The blending here started out looking a bit muddy but dried nicely.
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And lastly, I did the thistle stems in brown (I thought of them as dried thistles). Because these stems are thin, I once again only did the barest bit of color, avoiding any shading, because it got out of control when I tried too much detail with these.
Here is the final piece. I added a touch of the blue in the little tie at the bottom and now I’m ready to make a card or gift tag out of it. I’ll see about putting the finished product up on the website when I’ve finished it.
I hope you enjoyed seeing how I used Copic markers to color the Beautiful Narcissus image. And I hope you saw something you can use on your next project!