A Coloring Tutorial with SWALK

Hello everyone! I have something great to share today, it's one of the newest SWALK stamps that is about to be released by Crafter's Companion. Along with it, I am going to do a quick little Copic Coloring tutorial to give you an idea of the work that goes into the coloring in the images that go into my cards. Here's the final card that's being created today.Now, let's show how the coloring happens to create the wonderful SWALK image on this card. This image is one of the newest SWALK images that is about to be released at the Crafter's Companion store.



I started by stamping the image out onto white paper with some Memento ink in Tuxedo Black. I let the image dry throughly before using my Copic markers. The first color that I like to use is the skin tone that I have chosen. In this image it is E00. (For this tutorial, I will use the color codes written on the Copic Markers.)



This image adds two additional copic colors, you can see which colors I am adding by looking at the color chart shown on the left hand side. You will notice that the inital layer of color is not done perfectly. It's mostly complete, but not super neat or even. I am just putting in a light layer of the lightest version of the color I want knowing that I am going to be adding additional layers of coloring throughout each step.





Now I am starting to add in additional colors on top of the layers that I already have. The wonderful thing about Copic Markers versus typical water based markers is that additional coloring with the same color marker will result in a darker tone and coloring ON TOP of a marker with a different color marker will result in the new marker replacing the current marker color. This will be the case until your paper is saturated with color.

Now I keep coloring in additional colors on top of my current colors. The wonderful things about Copic Markers is they are grouped into color families. Copic does this by numbering their markers. For Example, E33 and E35 are markers that will match together perfectly. They are all part of the E30 family and the last digit is the darkness factor with 0 being lightest and 9 being darkest. Always start coloring with the lightest colors then add in touches with the darker colors. In this case I started with E33 for the hair and added in E35.



Next I have continue to add in additional darker colors for each color family. Once adding the additional color, I often take the lighter shade and go back over the edging slightly. For example. Look at the SWALKS hair coloring here...you can see the darker shade BUT you can also see that there is no harsh lines as there was in the previous image. This is because I added darker color using marker E37 and then went over the coloring with the E33 to blend the coloring together.



Here's the final image. I added the final touches to my coloring and just a few more highlights including a bit of extra depth in the facial coloring by adding more shading in the skin tones and on the tiny flowers by adding additional coloring to the flowers. Now this image is ready to be cut out and added to my card!

Once the coloring has been completed, to make my final card, I took the colored image and used a Spellbinders die cut to cut it out. The card is comprised of a 6x12 inch paper folded in half from the Crafter's Companion Fairyopolis paper, some wonderful shimmery purple pearlescent paper from the the package, some great corner punches, and cute buttons. I also used a wonderful saying from the same SWALK set as the image shown that says "Daydream Believer".

Here's the finished card again:

I hope this little tutorial gives you some inspiration for using your copic markers and some ideas behind the work that goes into some of the wonderful cards you see. Have a crafty day!

There's a wonderful drawing going on at the Crafter's Companion Blog!! They are giving away SIX sets of wonderful SWALK stamps. Go to their blog (CLICK HERE) and leave a comment on the Sept 28th posting (look for MY CARD!!) to be eligible. Winner will be announced on Oct 6th.