Getting Started with Copic Markers

How on earth do you start your collection when there are 358 marker colours to choose from and there is no way you can afford to buy them all (and certainly not all at the same time)? I started with just a few colours and was very pleased with the combinations I was able to get. I tried them out on my new Tim Holtz’ Crazy Cats and even managed to get a passable ginger cat without having an orange marker. I’ll share these colour combinations for you in this post.

I have been crafting and card-making for many years now and have loved the pleasure of colouring stamped images. I like the vivid colours of markers and although I have some great colours with my water-based markers, the colours don’t blend well and I’ve had to content myself with a more ‘cartoon’ look for many things. Whilst this has been perfect with young nephews to cater for, I have always wanted to learn how to create much more realistic coloured images.

COPIC markers are professional standard markers with permanent, non-toxic, alcohol ink.  They have the benefit that they blend beautifully together and come in a wide range of different colour blending families. They come in different standards if you want to try them out with the cheaper Ciao Markers being suitable for beginners. I decided that I if I wanted to get into them, I would do it properly from the start rather than buying some of the basic pens and then quickly wanting to replace them. The Copic Sketch markers are the most popular and have a chisel-style tip at one end and a brush tip at the other, are refillable and you can get replacement tips so they should last a very long time.

But having made the decision that I would invest in some markers, how on earth was I going to choose which colours to start with? There are 358 colours and the pens are ‘an investment’. The smaller sets of markers didn’t seem to have the colour combinations I was interested in. I bought  Copic Colouring Guides: ‘Basics’ and ‘Nature’ hoping they would help identify some must have basics but they didn’t really help in that regard. I did a lot of searching on-line and found various people’s must-have lists of basic markers but it really does depend on the sorts of things you will be colouring. The colours you need if you are mainly interested in flowers will be completely different from someone interested in architecture or animals.

A few weeks ago I attended the SENZ Expo and one of the stores was running a series of tutorial classes. I quite liked the images they were colouring and decided that maybe the best way to start was to buy the markers that they were using for the tutorials. There was also a show special if you bought 20 markers. I bought:

C2, C3 (Cool Grays); E43, E44, E50 (Earth tones); R32, R35, R37 (Reds); Y00, Y02, Y06 (Yellows); B00, B02, B04, B06 (Blues); G82, G85 (Greens); BG45, BG49 (Blue Greens); V04 (Violets) [and the Blending Marker 0]

I never start with anything simple but decided that I would challenge myself to do a set of 6 cards using my new Tim Holtz Crazy Cats stamps and have all the cats be a different colour. I got more adventurous as I progressed and even managed to create a ginger cat without having an orange marker and a dark gray cat even though I only had 2 shades of pale gray.

I decide to keep these cards clean and simple, so finished them off with a bit of shadow under the images, a sentiment and then highlighted the eyes and the ‘accessories’ with Glossy Accents. Then I chose a matt card colour to emphasise each image and put them onto a plain white card.