Color Changes Everyting

I was showing this above page that I'd colored to someone recently and I got this very polite "Ahh, that's nice." You know that sort of response where you can hear the person thinking; "Ohh, look you colored a picture, my third grader can do that too."

I'm not trying to be snarky about her response, I actually get that people who don't work with color rarely think about how challenging it can be and how color changes everything. I happened to have a copy of the uncolored original so I went and pulled it and then showed them to her side-by-side.
Suddenly, the response was "WOW!" It is shocking to see them side-by-side. How suddenly the color helps the image have shape and movement.
To get a really good look, you'll have to click on the above picture so that you can see the difference. It never ceases to amaze me when I finish a page how different it looks. Something as simple as using a brighter shade for the items that are closer to you and a darker shade for those that are further away can make a huge difference. That's one of the things that I really love about the Copic markers system, is that it makes it really easy to pick out shades in the same family that have different gray values. Let's take for example the leaves on the flowers:

I used g02 for the leaves that were on top and towards the front, and g12 for those in the back. Looking at those two colors on the color chart it doesn't look like they'd go together at all, let alone be part of the same plant, but that's the difference of distance and light. Once the base coat was on my leaves, I started going in and adding shadows. I used g14, and yg45 for the ones up close and g21, g24, and yg45 for the ones further away. I really like yg45, because I think it's color really changes depending on what else you put with it, so it works well for both the light and dark leaves in small amounts.

For the flowers I used y13, y21, y34, yr000, yr00, yr02, and r000. For the dress I used bv00, bv02, bv04, bv11, bv12, bv20, bv25, and bv29, v91, and v93. For her hair I used e33, e37, e44, and e49, and for her skin I used e0000, e00, e01 and rv11.