Serendipity Stamping: fave Copic colour combos

Sep 12, 2011

fave Copic colour combos

I’ve had lots of questions lately about favourite or best Copic colour combos, so I thought I’d write something about my suggestions this week.

First of all, if you don’t already have it, I would suggest that you get the Copic colour swatch book. Because it is printed on Copic friendly paper, you can try out colour combos right beside your chart. I get my ideas mostly from reading blogs. When I see a card that I like, I’ll write down the colour combo and try it out myself. I always write down my Copic colours in my blog entries and I know many other crafters do as well. Sometimes I just experiment and find colours that blend nicely together, and I’ll add them to my swatch book.

In no particular order, here are some of my favourites with examples of where I’ve used them.

Pinks:

My favourite pinky pinks are R81, R83, R85. Here you can see them on the little girl’s shorts. These blend into a nice pink, not too peachy and not too red.

If you want to "spice it up" a bit, you can use the combination of R89, R85, R83, and RV02. The R89 brings in some nice deep shadows which I like, and the RV02 brings a brightness. I like the contrast which you can see in this image in the skirt:

Greens:

This image also shows one of my favourite green combos: YG67, G24, G21, YG06. Same as with the pinks, the YG06 brings a nice "brightness" to the combination, making it not as flat or dull a green as it would be otherwise.

Blues:

I love deep, rich blues with deep, rich shadows. This is a card I made a long time ago, and I might do it a little differently now, as my style has certainly evolved. But I still like the combination of these blues. I used B99, B97, B95, and B93. The B99 is a beautifully dark, rich blue which gives some great shadows.

Skin:

Skin is always a tough one, and always a personal prefernce. Some people like a dark skin tone, while others prefer a pale look. Personally, I like a nice contrast with some deep shadows and I use E11, E02, E01, E00, R20. You can see how the skin under her bangs is shadowed and a deeper tone, with her cheek which is out in the sun, is much "brighter".

Hair:

Another popular topic in Copic classes and always a personal preference as well. Real hair comes in an infinite array of colours, so the sky is the limit when colouring hair! There are some great manga artists out there who colour in blues, pinks, and purples too. My "go-to" choice for hair is E35, E31, YR20. Depending on how many times you layer, and how deeply you colour, they can look quite different each time. Here are two images where I've used the exact same colours for the hair and you can see how much darker the second one is.