 Hi there, it's Sandy Olak and today I'm going to give you some tips to help stop Copic Bleeding and I don't mean bleeding through the paper but bleeding when you're doing your coloring and it bleeds outside the lines of what you're trying to create. And I want to talk first about how it happens because the obsession with the perfect blend I think is the problem. Here if you want to leave the white belly on the rabbit, you try to make a softer color, a lighter color to fade into that light color and it just keeps taking over until the belly is now going to be a cream one. So now you have to darken everything else to make the belly look lighter and you start adding colors and then those edges, you want to soften them. You want to make them perfectly soft and I put forth that you don't really have to be that perfect. Go back and look at my Copic waterfall drawing that I did just recently. I'll link you to it in the doobly-doo as well as at the end screen on this video. You don't have to have perfection but nonetheless that's where it really starts is because we're trying to make everything blended and when you're working with a small area it just keeps taking over and you keep pouring more and more color in until it starts bleeding. The hedgehog on the left I had started doing the same thing with and I was trying deliberately to channel what I see other people do when they're struggling and the whole stomach had taken on that really dark color so I tried to wait until it was a little drier to push some lighter color back in and then had to soften the edges and it just became a mess, just bleeding all over the place. Having this problem years ago was what started me making scenes on cards because I wanted to cover up all that bleeding. I didn't want to waste all the coloring so in this stamp set I stamped as you saw three of the critters you can also stamp the whole scene with them all put together and not have to do any masking or anything but I created a scene around them that would cover up those areas that bled around the animals. You could do a strip just a little strip of trees behind them or something it doesn't have to be a massive scene but creating something behind them helps. I mean you can fussy cut them out that sort of thing but on little creatures like this it can be a problem to try to do that. Next tip is to use good paper and I don't necessarily mean you have to have the highest end of anything but if you're trying to go really cheap just know when you're doing anything with art supplies the cheaper you go the less productive things are. The GP-110 is available at Walmart it's really dirt cheap versus the Nina which is what I use and the GP-110 is going to beat it on price but look at the grayishness of the color for one of the paper it's not very bright it's also not as thick as a Nina 80 pound paper even though it says 110 it's not really technically 110 because it's an office paper it's not an art paper and I guess technically Nina cardstock that I use is not technically an art paper but it works better than the GP-110 and I did this head-to-head test because I couldn't really remember what I didn't like about the GP-110 from years ago because when I was you know struggling for money I bought that and was coloring on it and it's really hard there's a drag on the paper that you don't feel when you're working on the Nina it doesn't get things really smooth which means you have to do more work you're scrubbing more to try to get more color in there to get it to blend and I found that immediately on the GP-110 there's all kinds of weird modeling going on in there and then the Nina didn't have as much a problem with that normally my solution for that when I've just tried really hard to get my blending perfect is to just let it rest for a minute and then go back in with one more pass a real quick pass with just a very very minimal strokes perhaps the mid-tone color and I tried that on both of these the GP-110 didn't really do anything when I did this I it worked a little bit but not very much when I did it on the Nina though it worked right away and whatever it is about the paper if you're having trouble with a lot of bleeding and you're really pouring ink in to try to fix it step up to the next level of paper whatever you can find doesn't have to be Nina but it might be your paper so this card when I finished it up was with this stamp set I used a couple different classes that I teach so the tree is from the Holiday Interiors class the scene with the hallway down the in the back and the flooring is from the blueprints class so if you're interested in getting those but I put enough color behind this because I wanted the whiskers of the cat to stand out and I used a white gel pen to add those in so next up next tip using more colors if you're going from a very very dark to a real medium and then to a really light color you can end up doing a lot of scrubbing and just going back and forth and back and forth and back and forth to try to melt out the edges of say the dark color as it goes into the medium or the medium as it goes into the light if you use instead of the traditional three colors if you use six or seven colors which is what I'm doing here I think it was seven colors if you use a whole bunch of different colors and really build that gradation with lighter marker strokes you're going to be pouring less of the color into the image itself you're just staying on the surface and using a lot lighter colors for fabric this is especially great because you can get all those folds that sort of thing and this stamp set has both a boy and a girl in it the girl has her hands out and the way that I stamped it I decided not to mask her other hand because what I did was create a dramatic scene so that I could hide the fact that her hand was she's kind of got her hands on the other side of Santa but I put the lighting in the back so that I could then really dramaticize, dramatize, that's the word, dramatize the lighting, putting lots of shading on Santa, lots of shading on the girl leaving just the highlights in the center and when I did that it gave me room to put the holiday interiors class tree as well as the fireplace in there and a little bit from the blueprints class and combine all that so you didn't really notice that the hands were stamped weird if I hadn't told you you might not know that next tip is to put some cotton paper underneath I say cotton it doesn't have to actually be cotton but it shouldn't be something shiny because Copic marker blends within the fibers of the paper that's where the action happens so having something behind it that is going to catch all that extra color that goes through the paper is going to push it potentially back into where you're coloring it's going to add more marker to it so you can see underneath here all of that pushed back up would have pushed back up into the scarf but instead it was absorbed by the paper underneath and that is a huge thing don't use a mat or anything underneath yours that's made of plastic or glass so this card I put a kind of simple ish background behind it just put some trees back there in the dark and did some dramatic lighting and I just put heavy shadows on one side and if you've ever got something like a kitten here in this picture where you can do something dramatic with the feet figure out where the lighting can be that those feet indicate a really good light source it's one thing to have the shadow on the snowman but as soon as you put those little feet there it just looks amazing next up is using a white gel pen to fix things and we're all experienced with using the white gel pen probably I use the Signo Uniball white gel pen and on an image like this there's also some other decisions you can make one of which is not to use red for this chair the reason is if you know that you have trouble with red bleeding because red is hard to blend and that makes you end up using lots and lots of ink and pouring into it notice that there's a little tiny string for the stocking there's also a tiny tail for the mouse sitting on the cushion and you know this is gonna bleed you just know it without even having to start doing the coloring so use a light color for it don't put yourself through this if you don't want to have to use a white gel pen white gel pen on color is often going to absorb the color that's underneath of it and that's just the way it is I don't know of any really good mediums for using with this I mean you can use some paints and stuff to try to put some white on things but I tend to think that that's overkill when you've got a Copic marker card I prefer to just use a white gel pen and this does work for me remember with gel pens you don't want to press really hard with it you need to leave room for that ink to roll around that roller ball see if that helps you to get your gel pen working better so for the finishing off of this one I made dramatic lighting again I love dramatic lighting where the light is all coming from the moon I put the sentiment right over top the part of the card that I didn't like because underneath of that I tried to draw the legs of the chair because there's no legs on this one and I screwed him up and it looked terrible so I just covered it with the sentiment but I kept all that lighting coming from the moon hitting the window and just those areas next up create a distraction scroll over there just look over there if you can create a distraction on your card then people will be looking where your art tells them to look and the thing that is going to do that is either contrast so the darkest darks next to the lightest lights usually tend to be the things that draw attention so you want to draw their attention to something specific that is not the thing that you had the bleeding problem on so I was having trouble with the sleigh I couldn't figure out this construction of the sleigh the lines on it I just couldn't visualize what it was supposed to look like so I just put some general shading in there but I created a distraction with the scene again just using that that scene to fix the things that I didn't like I put dramatic shading on Santa and I put it dramatic shading on the deer as well you can see the full stamp set here it's almost full size for a slimline card but not quite it's a little shorter but I threw some color into the trees entirely there's no white snow on the trees and then there's little highlights on the snow on the ground and then the white in the moon and then just a couple highlights on Santa and a little bit on the back of the deer and that's it I left everything else muted and you don't even notice that the sleigh is a a whole hot mess I just didn't know how to color it I don't know how anybody would drive that sleigh that I colored because I know I did it wrong but nonetheless next tip is to let it rest lots of people think that you have to color it right away while it's still wet and it's not necessarily true in this card that I did I let it rest repeatedly throughout because there's a lot of coloring going on here I stamped the mice and then masked them out and then behind it I stamped the house and I put all kinds of details in that and every time I got to an area where I felt like I'm getting close to where it's gonna bleed I stopped and I moved to something else to color I started putting on the icing on the roof I started adding you know some of the dots the white pen dots onto the gumdrops and stuff I added elements of the scene the backsplash the cabinets and everything in the counter and the shadows I just moved from one to another so that one area that was starting to get too saturated and too wet would dry and then you can go back in and rework it you don't have to like totally re-soak everything to get it to blend just move on to something else when you start feeling that bleeding coming on now this stamp set has no Copic coloring in the cards that I made this is a background that I'll link you to something I did on my fine art Instagram account I guess a couple days ago and I did some beautiful backgrounds was a giant piece of scrap watercolor paper that I didn't like so I did a different technique on it so I wouldn't have to paint and ended up using some watercolors to do something totally different and crazy and added these sentiments to it from this beautiful stamp set so that is my tips on Copic marker stuff I want to remind you that the holiday challenge send me a holiday card is still on I've been getting some cards that have come in they're coming in faster as time goes on each time I go to the mailbox I get more and more so thank you for that the PDF is linked in the doobly-doo so you can check it out if you have not heard about it I'll also put the link to the video down there as well so that is it from me I will see you again soon be sure to check out the new release for Colorado craft company because there are lots of fun stamps especially if you like making scenes like I do I'll see you guys later take care bye