In this week’s guest tutorial, Brandi York shares some tips for creating reflective objects with Copics. Enjoy!
Reflecting objects are difficult to render in any medium. With a transparent medium like Copic Markers, you need to be thinking a few steps ahead, to know where to leave your lights, or where a different color will be laid down. Working with reflections is a good lesson in local color versus perceptual color, ergo, what color is it really versus what color does it look like.
Take time to study your reference, whether it’s a photo or real life. This sort of observation is handy when rendering things like Christmas ornaments (as you’ll see below), the surface of water, chrome bumpers, so on and so forth.
For the sake of this tutorial, I’ll only talk about rendering one of the ornaments. I used Copic Sketchbook Bleed Resistant Marker paper for this tutorial. For this ornament, I used Y17, Y32, R02, R08, R17, R59, RV21, B39.
I start by carefully looking at my reference and the colors that are actually reflected in the ornament. Laying down a quick layer of Colorless Blender, I layer Y32 and Y17 for the lights reflecting on the edges of the ornament. Using R08, I lay in the base, local color of the ornament with a little R17 to help soften some of the edges:
Using R02, I knock down some of the yellows, before breaking out the BG45 and B39 for the reflected blues. Afterward, I choose RV21 for the lighter reflected pinks, and a little more of the Y17 and B39 to reflect the swirl:
Next comes the R59 to add in some of the darker reds, with some B39 layered over for more depth. Much of this is push and pull, using the Colorless Blender, to achieve the softer edges and shifts in color:
One trick is to keep layering the same color over itself to achieve a deeper, richer tone that doesn’t drastically change, like switching to another color. For example, I layered R59 over the darker portion of the ornament to deepen the tone without completely shifting it, as I did where I added the B39.
It takes a little experimenting to see just how the colors play together in layering, as well as utilize that Colorless Blender to soften transitions from one color to the next. But once you get the hang of it, your reflections will knock people’s socks off! Have fun and play!
36 different colors were used. Check out my Copic Color page for the complete list:
http://copiccolor.com/BrandiYork
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