I don't often get the chance to color larger images of people, so every now and then I like to brush up on my Copic people coloring skills. This Copic Coloring Foundations: Faces & Hair book helps tremendously! It gives you guidance, tips and tricks on coloring everything from simple straight or wavy/curly hair and simple eyes, to detailed wavy or ringlet hair, braided or dreadlock hair, bald heads, glasses, skin tones with more colors, highlights and shadows! It also covers the Copic color system, using a color chart, and tips on growing your Copic collection. You are given blank images of the images used in the tutorials, so you can copy them onto your own Copic-friendly paper and practice as many times as you'd like!
That's exactly what I did -- photocopied one of the pages onto Copic's X-Press It Blending Card. Then, armed with my Copic 6-piece Ciao Skin Set, I got started:
This set contains Copic colors: E000, E00, E11, E15, E18, E93 -- perfect for coloring everything from light, medium or dark skin tones. Using a combination of a few different tutorials in the book, I started coloring the left two women with E000:
Then I added shadows with E11:
Then I went back and blended those two colors together with the first E000 color:
Next, I deepened some of the shadows with pink-toned E93:
Using some of the book's suggestions on skin tones with more colors, I added some BV00 shading to where the darkest shadows would be -- under the chin and behind the jaw, to the left side of the face (furtherest away from the light source), sockets of the eyes and under them, and along some of the hairline:
Next, I started on hair. For the top woman, I worked a little backwards than I normally would, just to show you that I used the same E33 color as one of the darkest colors for her hair, while using the same E33 color as the lightest color for the lower woman's hair:
Next, I used the darkest two colors from the Copic 6-piece Ciao Skin Set, E15 and E18, to finish the lower woman's hair:
B21 and B26 were used to color both women's eyes:
To complete the top woman's hair, I followed the Detailed Wavy Hair tutorial in the book. I used these Copic Sketch colors for blonde hair, adding a little E15 from the 6-piece Ciao Skin Set as the darkest accents:
Finally, E93 from the 6-piece Ciao Skin Set and RV63 were combined to color the lips of both women. E00 (also from the 6-piece Ciao Skin Set) was used to create the look of cheekbone hollows:
And here are the final results:
I certainly had fun brushing up on my people coloring skills today and I hope you found a few tips to use, too. I'm telling you -- this Coloring Faces & Hair book is full of fabulous information and the Skin Ciao set is great for coloring skin as well as hair ... a wonderful combination!
