 Well, hi there, it's Sandy Allnag, artist and crafter here on YouTube, and today I'm going to talk about the Copic numbering system, as well as later on in this video, the blue green blending groups, and talk about how some of the numbering system things play out in a color family. This is a free handout that you can download over on my teaching site, and it comes in both the colored version that has my numbers on it, as well as a black and white version, with no numbers so you can fill in your own colors. You may not have the colors that I have, and you might have different favorite color blending groups than I have. These are just some of the ones that I can recommend, because I've used them before, and I find that they work, but there's no rule that says this is the color blending groups. This is just one iteration of them, and I had to recolor mine because I lost the original one, I have no idea where in the studio it is, so I recolored it based on the list that I give you in the color sheet that has all the numbers on it. And it has, in addition to this little rainbow section, it also has a section for neutrals for skin tones and hair, and that sort of thing. There's also a completely separate human rainbow handout, and you can download that one and get tons and tons more combination ideas, and fill out another chart, because yeah, we'd like to do charts apparently, I guess. So for the chart lovers, there's a link in the doodly-doo down below to the whole charts page where you can get lots of freebies. But let's talk about what's on this sheet. This section is all about the naming convention. There's letters, and there's numbers, and there's either one or two letters, and then the numbers, there can be usually two, but sometimes four. But let's talk about the letters. It's the color family. It's R for red, B for blue, Y for yellow. YR is for yellow-red. They don't call it orange, because that would be O21, which would be weird. So it's yellow-red. The numbers that follow have a pattern to them, and it's not 21, it's 21. The two means something separate. It means it's the blending group number two in the YR color group. The color family. So the group itself tells you how saturated it is. If it's a low number, a zero, one or two, it's very bright and intense. If it's a really high number, it's going to be grayed out and desaturated. The one or the last digit will tell you how light or how dark it is. So a low number is a light color. A high number is a dark color. That's why a whole bunch of zeros means it's a super, super light color. There's a couple different kinds of groups. There's natural groups, and in those kinds of groups, the letter and the first digit are the same. So a B24, a B26, and a B28 are a natural blending group. You know they're going to work together, because they're all in that same saturation level in the same color family. But there's some like this one, a Y11, Y17, and a YR16. They all have that first number as a one, but there's a yellow and a yellow red. And they're next to each other on the color wheel. So you can go, aside from the color wheel, one or two steps over to find something that will blend with them. But if they have that same first digit, they're going to be easier to blend, because that means they're the same brightness. So you can look at nearby groups, or you can look at natural groups. The bottom section, I give you kind of a basic rainbow of colors. So this is just, as I said, a smattering of the different kinds of color combinations that I use. And I tried for in the main hexagons here to have numbers that the first digit, the light, the saturation of it, is going to be around a 0 or a 1, sometimes a 2, that sort of thing, in order to get a rainbow that kind of matches, because they're all going to be the same saturation level or close to it. The second digit, I tried to also keep the same in most of them. There's a few where the number is off just because of the visual of the color is different, and there's no science to it. It's art, remember that. But I was trying for something that kind of made sense to me visually, to make a rainbow, and then give you a color combination for each one. As I said, this is just one of many options for color combinations, and you can choose one. And I'll be using the blue-green combination as a jumping point in the second part of this video. And then there's, of course, this neutrals section, just a few ideas to put a few down on paper. If you're brand new and you're looking for a couple of colors, choose what kind of objects you like to color and that you like to draw, and then pick some colors that apply to that. Don't feel like you have to get the whole rainbow in order to get started. I'm going to show you now some different blue-greens and how they relate to each other, and we'll do a little bit of blending. So the first color combination is going to be the one that's on the sheet. This is the one that I have chosen to put there for my blue-green combination. Notice that middle color is a BG05. It's a little more bluish, and I don't have a color that's super light in that combination, and you'll see why in the example I give you later. The BG09 is brighter than the BG18. Remember, I said the lower the number, the higher the saturation level, same thing with these middle colors. And then, of course, those both have O1, those first colors. The lightest color that you're using will depend on a lot of different factors. What color is the object, et cetera. So we're going to look at what it's like when you color something with a super light color as your base or a not-so-light color. These bottom three, notice, are more grayed out. That's because they are BG7s. 7 is a higher number, which means it's a more grayed out or desaturated type of blue-green. If you're somebody who likes desaturated colors like I do, I make a lot of things in very natural colors. You're going to want a lot more of the desaturated colors than the highly intense and bright ones. So I'm going to show you the flick. The flick is a motion that is very common in coloring with Copic markers. You lay the marker down and as you make your stroke, you lift up. The lighter the color is, the easier it is to make an edge that kind of disappears. Sometimes you'll need to fuss around with it and a colorless blender marker to try to lighten that and make it go to white, et cetera. But this is the basic motion of making a flick. Sometimes it'll just take evening after evening of sitting in front of the TV set and just practicing the flick over and over again to get the feel of it. I'm going to flick the other direction with the darker color and notice the two of them come together in the middle. And in the first example, they're not so far apart. So there's not a vast difference between them. But look at these second ones. There's a huge difference between the really light and the really dark. That's going to need more work in order to get a blend to happen. And sometimes it's going to need more colors in between. And then this one as well. There's a fairly good difference, not as big, but a good difference in the BG7s between them. So the middle stroke that you'll end up doing to join those colors can be what I call the pendulum. So you're basically swinging the marker back and forth, starting above the paper, hitting the paper in the middle, and then lifting up again, almost like a plane landing and taking off again, landing and taking off, or like a pendulum swinging back and forth across the paper. And then you can go in with the light color again and flick back into the main section. Well, now everything looks the same. There's no difference because you darkened the light color. And then when you color over the dark color, it starts to lighten. So you'll have to add potentially another layer or two of the darkest color. Wait in between, let them dry first, because if you just keep adding more moisture over and over and over again, when you try to add more of a dark color, you're going to end up just saturating the paper and it'll start bleeding. So sometimes you just need to wait. Next up, I'm going to try the blending of the second one, which, remember, has a very, very light color into a very, very dark color. So it's going to be a little more challenging. The edges in between are going to be a little fussier. And now that I've added a couple layers of strokes to the BG11, it's kind of made everything disappear. There's just not a very light color anymore. So there's a lot of different ways you can get back to achieving that, but for the most part, your best bet is just to start working back into the darks again and adding more of the dark layer. When you add in your mid-tone, you can also start right over top of the dark. Instead of starting in the middle and doing that pendulum, you could just start there, but it also will lighten the dark area. That's just what colors do. When you take a lighter color and color it over a darker color, it starts to erase what's already there. So there's a lot of back and forth to play around with. Well, here's one thing not to do, which is to start your mid-tone color and end up with a line like I do on that right-hand side. That's not going to work, because you need to either work that pendulum so you're starting and ending up in the air, or you need to start by coloring over the dark area and start moving toward the light area. Again, this one, as soon as I went back in with the BG7II, it all went to flatness. That's natural. Don't feel like you're not getting it, because that happens to you. It happens to everybody. It's just the way things go. My normal way of coloring is to start with a whole block, though, of the lightest color. Just color the whole thing solid, then add in the darkest, work my way toward the medium by going over the dark area. Because I know I'm going to potentially add another layer to it, but that's going to help me to start building toward the light section and then go back in from the left with my lightest color and start working that blend. And then I'll just go back in, if I need to, to darken the darkest area again. Sometimes when the paper is really wet, when it's nice and saturated, you won't have to do any of the back and forth blending. But you also risk bleeding outside of the lines if you're coloring in a stamped image or something, too. So let's try this in a real-world example. I've got a stamp set from Avery L that I'm going to color each one of these two flight vehicles in different ways. First is the combination that was on the chart. So it's the very first one I showed you in the last little graphic. And I've got a lot of different colors and I've got that blue-green color for the base color. The dark color is the BG09. And then the second color, the one in the middle, is going to be the BG05. Remember how blueish that was? Watch what happens to the overall color because I'm adding that element that has a little more blue in it. It's going to change the tenor of the blue-green color. And you can change any color out and make that kind of an adaptation. You can change the BG13 to something else as well. And that will have an effect on the entire color combination because each color layers over top of all the other colors. They start to blend together and they create new colors as they're all together in the same picture. So I'm now going to go back in with the BG13 to start smoothing out some of the areas that I've already colored with the medium color. And notice that I'm not doing a direct flick back and forth. When you're talking about small objects like stamps like this, it's really hard to keep an exact flick going every single time. That's one of the reasons why flicking isn't really helpful sometimes for beginners because you expect there's going to be a large area. And a lot of stamps are very, very tiny and they're really hard to do that. I'm doing little flicks in different directions. Just trying to get less ink on the side that I have to blend with and more ink on the side where I want the shadow. And then just trying to use as few strokes as possible for any final blending steps. And that's kind of the secret of it. The more strokes you put in there, the more chances you have for things to get crazy and messed up. So now I'm going to do some blending on the wing by putting the dark color on the edges of the wing on both sides. And then I'm going to use the BG05 to start blending the edges of those even further. I'm just using a flick stroke toward the center. And then the BG13 going over it with the lightest color again to join them. Now let's use a different angle so maybe that will help in seeing what the flick mark looks like. And I'm going to start by coloring with the BG11. And here I'm going in with the BG18. And the bottom part is going to be solid. And I'm using the side of the marker to make nice solid strokes. And then as I get toward the side that's going to go up the plane and start to blend, I'm lifting the pen up as I get to the top of the stroke. Same here now with the BG13. As I move up and start to try to get to the area that's going to be light, then I lift the marker so that I get a softer edge. It's going to make it easier to do any blending on the other side of it. Now some new colorists like to put all the shading on the outside edges of whatever they're coloring. And while I understand that because shading is a little complex to understand sometimes, it does make it harder to blend because now you're limiting the area where there's highlight because you have two shadow sides because you're coming in from all sides of the image. And it's sometimes easier to just have a highlight on the top and a shadow on the bottom and leave it plain and simple that way. Don't worry about the light. Just give it a one direction for the light coming from the top. And you may find your shading goes a lot easier because you have more room for that gradation to happen. So now I'm going to use a tiny gradation, itty bitty, that's just like the wings for the above plane, but I'm doing it in a very, very small area, not room for nice, big, long flicks. But I make very short marks with the marker instead so I can still get that same kind of blend. And then we'll color this little dunce cap on the top of the chopper. And then I filled in the rest of this with purples just to have another color in there. I am using some flick marks with the BG72 and the BG11 to make some kind of shiny window glass on it. And these are literally just flicks back and forth from both sides layering the two colors together until I make something that feels like glass. So each one of these is saturated to a different level of the paper. So you can see the bleeding through on the top one has more pleasant blending. The bleeding through on the back is stronger because of that. A lot of people get really worried because they think it went through the paper. I want paper that doesn't bleed through and Copic blends in the fibers of the paper. The better the blend, the more the bleed through. And that's okay. Don't stress out about that. I needed little characters to put inside my plane. So I cut out the fox and glued him into one. But the sheep I decided to stamp into the window on the chopper. And I'll show you how I did that. It's kind of a little quick bonus technique here. I fussy cut it out with scissors and then I used two post-its to block it off. And I got my Inkon 3 no-line ink. And you could use any kind of a really light gray type of ink if you want to do something like this and stamp the sheep inside the window. So he's there waving through the glass. And in order to make him look like he's really there, I took the BG72 and just started adding a few strokes here and there. Not everywhere. You don't want to make it look like he's outlined. But adding a little bit of shading around each part of the sheep makes him more visible inside the window. And he just looks really cute peeking out. I kind of like that. You just see parts of him. And it's kind of what you would see if you were looking through glass. So I cut out a bunch of clouds from a dye set from Ellen Hudson and airbrushed them. But you can use inking techniques if you want. And just make a design out of them. I used blue-green paper for one and purple paper for another. And I did color a plane in the BG7s as well. And I used an orange color, a very rusty kind of antique orange to go with those very neutral types of blue-green colors. But for most people, the BG1s and BG0s are going to be much more pleasing for card makers because y'all like really bright colors. So that is it for this video. But I do want to let you know something's coming up very soon. I have a birthday coming up on March 27th and I'm going to do a livestream here on YouTube. And I want to show off all your cards that you make. So I would like for you, if you would like to be a star on my little YouTube video that day, to send me a card in the mail. The address is in the doobly-doo down below. You can just drop that sucker in the mail. I'd love to see what you're creating and share your work here online. And then we'll do a little artwork that day too. I don't even know what I'm going to do yet. But I thought I'll throw my own birthday party because we still have a pandemic. So I am going to have my own party. I'm ready. I will see you guys again in another video very soon. Thank you for sticking around for this extra long video. And I'll see you in a couple of days with another one. Bye-bye.