You know the Friday drill . . . Beate's Weekend Sketch Challenge! Here's the sketch for this week. I decided I was in the mood for shabby & distress, and looking through my Lockhart stamps I found this new Itty Bitty Teapot that I thought would work well as a background stamp for the Teabag.
So here's how it all came together:
I knew I wanted to work with browns on the teabag, so I chose this Memory Box Inspire printed paper that has a brown pattern in it. Next, I stamped the teapot all over a manila tag (5-1/4" x 2-5/8") with Ranger's Adirondack Espresso dye ink.
I knew I wanted to color the teapots with green to match the paper, so I got out my Copic color chart and matched up the greens. (Edited: this blank color chart is now available to be downloaded from this post).
I also wanted to share with you how I store my Copic markers. It was driving me crazy trying to keep them in numeric order in the clear boxes they come in (they were forever getting all mixed up!), so I tried this solution and am really liking it:
This is a cabinet for storing dies (by QuicKutz). It measures about 14" tall x 10.5" wide x 4.75" deep. The markers stick out about 1.50" -- just perfect for grabbing! I have my markers separated by (L-R): Blue/Blue-Violet, Red/Red-Violet, Yellow/Yellow-Red, Green/Yellow-Green, Blue/Blue-Green, Earth, Neutrals, Grays, Blenders. It sits right in front of my work space, within easy reach.
I find this system works very well for me: I use the color chart to choose the colors I want to work with, then pull them out of the cabinet. When I'm finished, clean up is a breeze -- just toss them back into their individual cubbies and I'm done . . . no more worrying about keeping them in order!
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To color the the teapots, I chose a lighter shade of green (G21-Lime Green) and applied that to the entire teapot:
Then I shaded the darker areas with G24-Willow:
Then I went back with a lighter G40-Dim Green (shown in the very last photo below) and softly blended the two together. I'm happy to report this combo of ink with the coated manila tag worked very well with the Copics -- no bleeding whatsoever!
For the teabag, I decided I wanted to cut the image with a smaller, square die (Spellbinders Nestabilities Classic Square) instead of the usual rectangle shape you would probably normally use to cut out the whole image (and so I would stay within the sketch guidelines). But this left me with the string and tag of the image being cut off. We'll get back to that later! So I went ahead and die cut/embossed the image.
The image was on shimmer white cardstock, but this looked too stark next to the manila tag, so this is what I did: I colored within that infamous Spellbinders' embossed edge with Copic E00-Skin White, leaving the embossed edges white, and it was a very close match to the manila (it looks pinker than it actually is in parts of this photo):
Then I went back with my Colorless Blender and removed some of the color around the teabag:
After coloring the rest of the teabag and teapots and distressing the tag with Ranger Vintage Photo Distress Ink, here's how it turned out:
I cut out the rest of the teabag's string & tag and mounted it on a tiny bit of pop-dot. The tag was crumpled and it and teabag were mounted with dimensional foam tape to the card. The corners of the card were faux stitched with dark brown marker and a paper piercing tool.
Here are all the Copic Sketch markers I used to color this image:
This photo is a good indicator of how you should choose your Copic markers if you are just starting to collect them: about 2 or 3 shades within a color family. You'll notice the greens are a few depth-of-shades apart (indicated by the ending number of the color code, in this instance 0, 1 & 4. 0 being the lightest shade and 4 being darker). The first number of the code is the clarity of the color -- the smaller number being the more true/pure color of the spectrum (in this case, the 2's), while the 4 has a little more gray in it. Selecting your colors this way will allow you the ability to shade images for a very natural look, with a lot of impact!
Be sure to also check out the blogs of Cambria Turnbow, Charmaine Ikach, Jenn Balcer, Laurie Schmidlin, Lori Craig and MaryJo Albright -- they'll have some awesome samples, I'm sure! I hope you have a lovely spring weekend wherever you are. The trees and grass are blooming here in Texas and I'm coughing & sneezing my head off (seasonal allergies)!
