Coloring Reddish-Brown Hair with Copics

I know you can’t believe it… neither can I, but I have the first tutorial ready to go. I really apologize for the delay with this. I tried to do this a couple of times with my larger digital SLR camera and it’s just to big to work with when I’m trying to color at the same time so I switched to our smaller Canon Powershot. You can see the image quality isn’t quite as nice but it really is much easier for this application. Now that I’ve got that worked out hopefully you’ll see more tutorials soon. 😀

As, I worked on this today I didn’t realize I was losing daylight as I went and the pictures gradually got a bit darker so hopefully they aren’t too dark.

I’m starting with the Ed special edition digi from The Greeting Farm. You can find a similar version here called Dressy Ed.

I’m going to start with Copics E08, E35, E29 and E37. You can see I’ve already colored his face with E00 and E02. It’s a little streaky as I’m in desperate need of an E00 refill.

When I start coloring I start with the lightest value of brown (E35) and I sweep it up from the hairline to about 1/2 to 2/3 of the way up the streak of hair that I’m working on. You can see I did all three of the streaks that are next to each other in the image below because the space was small.

Next I put a layer of E37 (the next darkest brown) right along the hairline as hair is darker where it grows out of the head.

Next I blend the two colors together with E35 sweeping the color up from the hair line to the tip of the hair and I cover the part I previously left white. If at all possible I only go over the part I left white with one stroke of ink so it stays lighter than the rest of the hair.

Now I’m going to add just a bit more darkness at the hair line since it’s not quite as dark as I like so I’m going to add just a bit of E29. Notice that I made it a bit streaky so it looks more naturally like hair.

I use E35 over the top to blend this in, again sweeping up from the hair line.

Now to make the reddish streaks I use E08 to add red highlights. For this I stay within one hair section and sweep down from the tip into the darker base.

I continue doing this through each clump of hair making sure the the base where the hair grows out of the head is the darkest part. And I try to keep the streaks of red random otherwise it will look very tiger-stripish and un-natural.

As I’m doing the hair I don’t worry to much about making a highlight that goes across the hair from left to right. I concentrate more on making it blend from root to tip. It’s kind of a personal preference thing for me. But, it looks good either way.

And this is how the hair looked all finished up:

And this is Edward all finished…

Ed’s not part of a card yet but he will be soon. 😀

So there you have it, my first Copic tutorial. I’d love feedback… too many pictures? Need more instructions? Less? And if you’d like to see more tutorials I’d love to hear that too… especially if you have something specific you’d like to see.