Copic Diary - 2013 Dec

This isn't exactly the first image I colored, but it's the first one completed on copic compatible paper - the Hammermill Color Copy paper 80# (the one with the tree frog image on the front).  It took me forever to find this paper...like a whole 3 weeks, which IS forever when you have pretty, shiny, brand new markers in front of you and only horrible copier paper in hand.  Finally found the paper at one of our local FedEx stores.  Being new at this, I just couldn't see spending a lot of money on the "good stuff" so I was quite delighted to have learned about the Hammermill.

The first image I wanted to color was one that would work for a "Red Hatters" card for my Mom and I found this cute little lady at a free (for personal use) coloring image website.

Dress Up

The coloring websites are actually for kids, but I have found them to be an awesome place to find images for practicing or even for making kids cards.

This is how she turned out:

Playing Red Hatter

Little did I know at the time that red could be a bugger to keep from bleeding, leave it to me to make it my first pick.  I have been thinking of redoing this on the XPressIT paper to see if I can improve her a bit.  The one thing I really had to think on was that fur stole, I've never done fur before and had to practice quite a bit before doing it "for real":

Nope

Nope

Hmmm...maybe

That One!

Because of all the cloth, this ended up being the best image to start out with for me.  I used to dabble with digital art in PaintShopPro (JASC, not Corel,...that's how long ago this was), Poser and Bryce.  One of my favorite things to play with was making cloth, I love all the shading.  But, that was over ten years ago, to get into that again would be a time consuming and costly affair.  Especially, to get caught up in the software that is currently out there and it doesn't help that I am not fond of relearning things I've already spent a lot of time learning before.

Anyhow, this image went a long way to reigniting the fun that I had way back when and made me feel like I'd found that creative outlet I'd been missing.