I am obviously not a trained artist. I did take all my college electives in graphic design, but it was only about 17 hours with one illustration class. I think I had one drawing class in 9th grade and I took some water color classes post college. I miss doing water colors but I’m so slow at it that I fell in love with using the Copic markers to do a faster piece with a similar look.

So, I’m being a little brave showing my rudimentary art. I know those that stumble upon my blog because Google hits “Copic” will be disappointed!

I was reading on someone else’s blog that they were doing Artist Trading Card (ATC) size illustrations every day for practice. And, I thought working small might be a great way for me to get some practice in with not a lot of time invested. (I just don’t have the patience to invest a hundred or so hours in a water color right now! When I was doing that I didn’t have a husband or children!)

Plus, I’m using my birthday money to add to my 72 marker Copic collection and I need to justify it! I’ve been trying to find videos by good illustrators to help me decide which colors I need. Here is one that I found on the Copic blog that I love…Trev Murphy. After doing this little illustration it firmed up my decision that some of the money needs to go toward some colored multi-liners. I just need to decide what widths! I know I want several widths of Sepia and black and maybe a pretty small width of each of the other colors.

I want to be able to get better without getting too frustrated on getting the drawings right. So, I decided to try messing with one of my own photos until I had a pseudo “sketch” and printed it on some Bristol board. First I used the magic wand selection tool in Photoshop to select my daughter’s form. Then I copied it to a new document and applied Atomic Cupcake’s pencil sketch action. I also used this action to create the shifted outline. Then I turned the photo into gray scale, blew the highlights until only a few details of her face and form showed and applied a drawing filter in Photoshop. I just wanted it to be a guide so I lowered the opacity of this layer to about 10%. Here is my cheater method “sketch.”

This is my illustration. I used the only two multiliners I have to finish it off with a very rough outline. I like the look of it but it did convince me that I need some very fine sepia multiliners for this type of work.

Finally, this is the original photo. If you know of any other great Copic videos by amazing illustrators please leave links!

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