 Hi, it's Sandy Olnock and I'm going to be working in Copic Marker today, adding some reflections in the water of a Copic waterfall. It's World Watercolor Month and even though this is not watercolor, I am coloring water. So we're going to count it as part of my World Watercolor Month celebration here on YouTube. The whole picture is not recorded, just so you know. That was like 12, 14 hours worth of coloring and I just decided at the end I would turn on the camera and see how this water came out. This was the most daunting part of it. I am not really great at this portion of coloring water and I'm working on it. I'm trying to learn how to do it because one of the things that happens with water when it's pooled at the bottom of something like this is it turns the color of what's under it. So it has a lot of brown underneath, all these rocks that are under the waterfall and trying to have those colors come up through the surface is a challenge. It's hard to do in any medium and in Copic Marker, at least it's a little bit easier for me since I know my Copics so well and can do a lot of things with them. So I'm building up colors from the lower layers so that when I get to the top layer some of that peeks through but one thing that I thought would be interesting at least to talk about here on YouTube is the reflections and there's not a specific reflection that I'm coloring in this that I'm drawing on the waterfall that's shining into the water except for there's going to be more of the bluish color in the section right above where the water is cascading down as opposed to where the rocks and the grasses and the shrubberies and things are reflecting down. So there's going to be more of a dark brown green kind of color on those other sections and I'm trying to figure out how to work out leaving the blues in one part how to transition from one to the other and looking very carefully at the picture that I was following to see what I could tell and when you're looking at a photo resource for something when you're creating your artwork you almost need to divorce yourself from the fact that I am seeing water you need to not think about the object that you're looking at because what you need to start to see is what is really there not what you think is there because if I were going with my gut I would grab a lot of blues and make all this water blue the water is not blue and I was looking just really carefully at the shapes that I was coloring the shapes that were on the surface of the water the shapes I could see underneath and what that transparency look like how those color transitions worked and was just trying to build up colors slowly from underneath to on top while retaining some of the light I noticed on the surface of the water in the picture that there was really no white white even though we might think there's going to be white reflections in this particular one the only white white is in the cascading water everything else has some kind of light color to it so I you know covered over a lot of that with the light blue so even though your mind might tell you there's more light in there there really isn't all that much it's it's a very light tint of something else and that's the case in a lot of artwork that you'll create is there's color that you think you see and there's color that's actually there and what I'm building up is now my darkest colors and I have to be a little bit on the careful side because I need to leave the spaces open that need to remain open and have the color showing through or highlights on the water and I'm doing this with a dark blue because the dark blue is now going to push it back into the thought that it's water because all of the other stuff that's in the picture is very clearly water but it's also not got blue as its main thing until it gets to the top layer as I did all of the waterfalls I drew the rocks in first and I'll zoom in and kind of give you a tour of the artwork in a minute here at the end but I drew all the brown portions with the rocks and then put the blues on top which meant I had to be really careful with where I was leaving the browns because I needed to not have those appear in the areas where the blues were but I wanted the blues to sit on top same thing here in the water down below in this flat portion is allowing this to feel blue even though it's got all these other colors shining through from underneath so you can see the difference between the left side and the right side the left side feels more like it's in the same colors as the area above it whereas the right side just feels much brighter and sort of more olive than does the left side so I need to go color over that portion and put some blues into that so it starts to pull it into matching with the entire picture because you don't want to leave part of your image looking like it doesn't belong in the scene at all that the colors just aren't working but as an undercoat that's what all these undercoats looked like all the sections of rocks they have multiple multiple multiple layers and with Copic markers you can at least push some color back into something as well so if there was spots where I didn't have enough light you can actually lighten it up using lighter markers and just forcing more color in there so that it removes some but it's much better if you can just do light layers one over top of each other and that starts to build up the realism and gives you that sense that you're looking through the water and seeing all these colors coming in from underneath as well as some stuff that's reflected from up above so I I'm hoping that you know seeing this little transformation of just this section helps you to understand the value of layering and the value of building up that color little by little and determining which colors are going to be the dominant ones on top at the end because that's what I had to figure out with all the other rocks as well did I want to put the blue down first which is your gut instinct because the blue is really glowing but to put it down at the end starts to unify everything that's underneath of it as opposed to putting all the other colors on top and then it starts to feel more brown or feel more green rather than just feeling like it's part of the same kind of bluish scene overall I'm not sure if I'm making any sense with this but it was trying to figure out how to explain this to you and share a little bit of this picture here on the YouTubes but as I said this took me many many ridiculous many hours and one of the things that you'll see in the tour and the tour is very short I promise at the end here is how much of the the marker strokes are still there even though this looks to your eye as you're looking at it right now as very realistic when you look at the marker strokes really close they look like just scribbly marker strokes so when you're looking at your work up close just know that when somebody looks at the whole piece they're not looking zoomed in at all the little stuff they're not looking at all those places that looks scribbly here see this it's just scribbles but there are strategic scribbles to create textures and when you step away from your artwork you can start to see that those things work as opposed to when you're trying to put your nose down on top of it and critique yourself and say this this is just not good give yourself some grace because the overall impression is what people are gonna get from your artwork not sticking their nose right up against it that's it for me you can buy this print over on society six if you would like and study it for yourself and I will see you again very soon take care bye guys