I'm Copic Certified!

Greetings from CHA!! OMG - what an experience this is - I am having an absolute blast up here in good ol' Chicago! My CHA experience started yesterday with my Copic Certification course - and WOW - it was truly one of the most fun and informative classes I have ever set thru. The fabulous and insanely talented Marianne from Copic taught the class and I have to say BIG BIG BIG thanks to her for sharing her knowledge and love of these markers with us - not only is she extremely knowledgeable about Copics - but she is an absolute riot - so BIG thanks to her for a wonderful experience! The class was technique driven - we learned so many different blending techniques and you truly begin to see just how much you can do with Copics. I thought it may be fun to share some of the images that I colored in the class yesterday so you can see the techniques we learned about. This first image is a Whipper Snapper stamp I colored in class - this is some shading done with marker to marker on paper - Marianne taught us the key to nice even color is to really saturate the paper with the marker by coloring in small circles and keeping your edges wet - this will give that nice even color. To do the shading - go back in with a color 2-3 shades darker and put in your shadows - then go back in with your original base color and blend two shades together. The halo around my little Boo Boo bear was me playing with the Colorless Blender...

Here's a Penny Black image I did with the same marker to marker blending technique - and notice the little bit of sparkle on the flower leaf and stem - that was done with a Copic Spica glitter pen - OMG - LOVE these!!!

One of my favorite blending techniques we learned in class was this feathering technique - I LOVE this technique - it's done with 2 different colors - you start each color on opposite ends and then feather them together - I am describing it terribly - so I will show you some images I did using this technique and if you want more info - Marianne has a entire post about it on her blog (http://www.ilikemarkers.blogspot.com/) - here's another Penny Black - I did some feathering on the belly (pink into green) and then I did some feathering on the flower (yellow into pink)...

Here's an unfinished Hanna I wanted to share with you - I apologize I didn't finish coloring her in - but I wanted to show you the feathering I did with the orange and yellow on her towel - check it out - doesn't it look like flames??

Oh - and did I mention the goodie bag?? Copics galore!! Here's a pic of the goodies I got at the class - this is very exciting to me because there are some different Copics that I hadn't tried before - the wide marker is just too fun, LOVE the Spica Glitter pen - and they even gave us a couple of multiliner pens - I am VERY excited to have the black multiliner pen!


We also learned how to use the airbrush system (so now I can go home and really get the full potential out of mine). One of the most interesting parts of the class was learning about the colorless blender and all the fun things you can do with the colorless blender solution - Marianne does some very neat special effects with this stuff - she showed us a pic of a pair of burlap pants she had colored on one of her Manga characters that literally looked like real burlap - she had done it with a piece of burlap and the blender solution. We also did some altering on items like dew drops, flowers, etc. - basically just really emphasizing the fact that the ink in Copics is an alcohol ink and you can do all the same things you can with other alcohol ink. Overall - I would give the class 2 very enthousiatic thumbs up (I think that's from a movie - just can't think which one - LOL) - anywho - it's an AMAZING class - well worth the money and the trip up - I can't wait to get home and try out all these fun techniques!!