Garden Dirt: Copic Marker Swatches for Power Poppy Stamps

Ready for a Citrus Punch?

Aloe and Oranges is a brand new digital stamp arriving this week at Power Poppy.

I’m here today with a bright, zesty, and totally unconventional Copic Marker blending combination to help you color it.

Hello, my name is Amy Shulke and I’m the illustrator and art instructor at VanillaArts.com. Welcome to my new feature series here at the blog; I’m calling this The Garden Dirt. 

Why dirt? We’ll get to that in a minute.

But first, I’ve got a whole series of artistic coloring articles here at the Power Poppy blog; here’s a quick link to a bunch of my previous articles.

Let's color an orange!

Today I’m showing you a close-up, tight shot of just one glorious orange. The entire Aloe and Oranges stamp has a lot more to color. This digital image will be available in the Power Poppy shop soon!

Confession time: I ate at least a half box of clementines during the week I worked on the full digital image. 

Fun fact: a trash can full of clementine peels makes your craft room smell divine!

I think this is the best orange in the digital stamp, it’s a juicy cut cross-section showing off the cute orange segments. It's perfect for fun texture details. I’ve colored the orange with a combination of Copic Markers and Prismacolor Premier Pencils.

So why would I name my color swatches after yucky dirty dirt?

Take a closer look. This isn’t just any old Copic color swatch.

In my freelance illustration work, I use a shading technique called Underpainting. I teach Copic Marker classes using this same technique. Instead of using a light, medium, and dark orange marker to color oranges or clementines, I deliberately throw in a clashing color to create a more realistic shade color.

The secret to my very dimensional orange rind is the green marker.

Where’s the green?

It’s UNDER the orange. That’s why we call this method underpainting. We’re using green to create the muddy, neutralized shade color that you’ll see on real oranges in real life.

Garden Dirt? Yep, we’re making dirty color!

Now to make this swatch work, you need to work dark to light. 

I know, I do everything backwards!

Start by adding YG63 with very light strokes to the shadiest areas of the orange rind. Don’t press too hard; you don’t need a lot of green to make this work. We want a little mud, not a swampy mess!

Then go over the YG63 with YR68, hiding the green completely. Let your orange strokes come out beyond the green strikes to create 2 colors— a dirty orange and a clean orange. Remember, no green is left uncoated! No-one should ever know it’s there. The rest of the world will think you used an ugly brick colored marker.

Now blend with the Y38 and Y35 just as you normally would.

Underpainting takes a bit of getting used to. The technique feels weird at first and the color looks even weirder… let’s call realistic shade an acquired taste. 

The funny thing is that once you get used to the color of real shade, you start to see it everywhere, all around you! Your entire life, you’ve been surrounded by murky colors, you just never noticed them.

Want to color Power Poppy’s “Aloe and Oranges” with me? 

Citrus Punch is part of the my Marker Painting Workshops series of online classes for intermediate to advanced Copic colorers. We broadcast the class live to show you real coloring in real time. I also take questions from the student audience. After the broadcast, you can watch and rewatch the class as many times as you want.

Can’t make the live session? No problem! We record and lightly edit every class. Purchase recorded Workshops at your convenience and enjoy anytime access.

Citrus Punch uses Power Poppy’s beautiful Aloe and Oranges digital stamp set.

You can find out more about Marker Painting Workshops here.

And I’ll see you back here next month for another fun color swatch!