Awesome Opportunity!

Howdy Everyone!

Just checking in today to share an awesome opportunity I had on Friday! I was lucky enough to attend two Copic Color & Ink Workshops that were held here in Boulder.

The classes were taught by Marianne Walker who is the North American Product Director for Copic Markers at Imagination International, Inc. She’s a very talented colorist and she’s written several books on Copic coloring and also an excellent book on Shadows and Shading. You can find her blog here. Did I mention how lucky I felt to be able to watch Marianne color in person and to soak up her tidbits of knowledge about coloring with Copics?! Crazy lucky and so excited!!

My day started at 8am with a Coloring Flowers class. I actually learned a lot about adding depth and dimension to flowers as well as some background techniques in this class. Our images were colored on Copic paper specifically for Stamping and Illustration. We colored several different types of flowers as you can see below from the images below:

I also was able to purchase Marianne’s book on coloring flowers and she was kind enough to sign it:

The afternoon class began at 2pm and ended at 6pm. This class was so different from anything I’ve ever done and way outside of my comfort zone. It was the Tracing Memories: Coloring Photo Line Art. Basically this class teaches you to take your photographs and convert them to Line Art and then you to recolor the line art through your own interpretation of the original photo. Although I enjoyed the class and learned a lot of new techniques for coloring, I found this class very challenging. However I learned from Marianne that art of this type is used to help senior adults retain memories and helps improve brain function because it forces you to use both sides of your brain. Scientists in the medical field are finally realizing how therapeutic art is for people. It’s a great way to relieve stress.

Here’s a couple of samples of the very detailed line art pictures we colored for this class. The photo on the left is the original photo of the cute doggie and the one on the right is my colored photo. The class moved pretty fast so I wasn’t able to completely finish all of my photos but I wanted to share the two that are mostly complete.

In the photo below the one of the top is the original photo of the park and the bottom is my interpretation. This one was very challenging with all of the various kinds of foliage, trees and grass.

And finally I got my Certificates and my Copic Workshop pin:

Coloring from 8am to 6pm makes for a long day! I was exhausted a the end of my very long day, but felt so good about what I’d be taking away from these two workshops.

I’m optimistic that they will bring more Copic Workshops or even a Certification Class to Colorado in the near future as there is quite a bit of demand for it here.

If you have the opportunity to take any of the Copic workshops, I highly recommend it!!

I also feel like I need to add in here that I’m so very blessed to have been able to attend these classes. I really have to thank my husband for always being so understanding and supportive of my hobby and my quest to learn and absorb as much information as I can. He’s so awesome!

Also since Art is a great stress reliever and forces us to use both sides of our brain, I say we all need to be doing something artistic everyday to flex our brain muscles!!

You can find more information about Copic markers, products and classes here.

Some Copic news for anyone who’s interested. Marianne did mention that several of the existing Copic color names will be changing early next year to more acceptable or politically correct names (ie baby skin pink). Additionally, at this time there aren’t any plans to release any new colors. She said that Copic manufacturing in Japan is having a difficult time keeping up with the current demand for Copic markers and until they can get a handle on that they likely won’t release any new colors. I guess that gives us all plenty of time to complete our Copic collections.

Thanks for stopping by!