have mercy with me

A long time ago an anon asked my thoughts about drawing backgrounds, so I finally got around to putting this together. It’s more prop-centric, but it still represents my philosophy to backgrounds. 

Never refill a Copic with regular isopropyl alcohol unless you have absolutely no other option.

Copic markers have their own ink refills to go with each marker,

They look like this and cost around the same price as a Copic Sketch maybe slightly more however they can be used to refill a marker several times

By using isopropyl alcohol what you’re doing, in fact, is diluting what little ink you have left in your make, therefore changing the shade of it.

Of course the one exception to this rule is the colourless blender 0 which is a marker that is full of regular isopropyl alcohol.

As a side note, DON’T throw away your marker if one/both of the is damaged

Copic also make replacement nibs for all of their markers

For #LEARNUARY today, here’s how to THINK when you draw EYE DIRECTION!

hey yall its me the Art Mom™ to help you shade pretty

rule 1: DO NOT SHADE WITH BLACK. EVER. IT NEVER LOOKS GOOD. 

red- shade with a slightly darker shade of purple

orange- slightly darker and more saturated shade of red

yellow- i think like..a peach could work but make it a really light peach

green- shade with darker and less saturated shade of blue or teal

blue- shade with purple

purple- a shade thats darker than the purple you’re using and maybe a little pink (MAYBE blue)

pink- darker shade of red

white- a really light lavender or blue..or i guess any really light colour??

black- okay listen dont use pure black to colour anything unless you want to leave it with flat colours because you cant really shade black lol

grey- a slightly darker shade of purple or blue (less saturated)

brown- slightly darker and less saturated shade of purple or red

I made some Balls of Colour to go with Art Mom™’s post:

anoosha syed (foxville_art) on Twitter made a really interesting tutorial on how to colour non-white skin in illustrations that I thought people who follow this blog might find useful (: