JOANA MIRANDA STUDIO

As promised, I’m back today with my redone “Love Letter to New York” illustration along with some tips on Copic rendering techniques.

For comparison purposes, here’s the old illustration…

And the new!

You’ll notice that I not only broke up the blocks of grey with the shading (more on that below), but I also created some architectural interest and added a few chinks of sky (along with some stars!)  Josephine’s costume is more elegant and her features are softer, too.

Besides learning a thing or two about composition, my journey with this illustration has also taught me some successful ways to work with Copic Markers.

#1.  If you’re creating an illustration for print purposes (in this case, this design is for a new business card for MOI), you don’t need to render the original at a large size.  As you can see, I actually shrunk down my original line drawing so that I would have less area to color in…not to mention that it saved me on ink.  Woo hoo!

#2. For the actual rendering techniques, I did a refresher art school course (oh wait, I didn’t go to art school!) by watching this helpful YouTube video on laying down initial color and blending with Copic Markers :

And, although I used grey from the same family of Cool Grey Copic markers as in the first illustration, I broadened the range of grey so that there would be more visual depth.

#3. I added light touches of white pencil (I used a Conté a Paris pencil since I don’t have a white gel pen) to bring out the highlights in Jo’s dress:

#4. I did the final details (i.e. adding the shadow underneath the ledge and adding the text) in my Corel Paint Shop Pro X5 photo editing program…

And that’s a wrap business card!