Working With White Tones: 1

 I get asked a lot about working with white tones when it comes to using Copics.  Its a complicated subject because while copic does make an opaque white--it is not meant for covering large areas, it's more of a highlighting color.  The actual whites that are markers aren't what most people think of as a true white--and I hear a lot of times from people that they don't like how the white doesn't "look white."

So I thought I'd do a little post on working with white tones.  The ones I selected to use today are all in the earth tones (there are some that are in the other tones like g20 wax white, bg11 moon white etc. but those are colors for another day...)

The first thing you need to know is that the earth tone whites fall into 2 categories; grey whites and yellow or cream whites. 

Here are the grey whites: 

 You can see that the darkest of these has gone into a tan shade.  We'll talk about that in a minute. 

Now we've got the cream whites:  

 

Again, the last shade here doesn' look very "white" it's more of a caramel color.

So the question is, how do you make these whites look white?

Well, the simple anwser is that you don't.  

The truth is that white, for white's whole "I'm not a color" attitude, it is fussy about it's environment like a color. When we look at something that's true white, there's a problem, because true white reflects the colors around it, so it rarely looks "white" the way we imagine it in our minds.  Think about the snow in the winter--it looks different depending on the light and what's around it. 

So what does this mean for us when we render?  Well the first thing you have to think about is the quality of your light source.  If you're inside your whites are going to go more to the blues and the grey tones.  If your object is outside, you'll need the cream ones.  Of course this is just a general rule--you can still have grey whites outside and cream ones inside.  

But what about if there's something near by that makes the whit go blue or purple?  Well that's where the quad zeros come in.  For my image today I used bg0000 and v0000 along with e0000.  E0000 is called floral white and is a nice base for either the grey or yellow white tones since its pale enough to masquerade as either depending on what you put with it.

 So now that we've covered all of our bases let's get down to coloring.  Here is my image:

I wanted to use all of the whites I talked about above so that you could see them in action.  The skirt is using the grey whites notice the darkest color here--now doesn't look as tan as it did above?  It's the layering of it on top of the other e40's that helps tone it down.

The ruffles were done using the v0000 with a little v000 thrown in for shading.  The teal part of the skirt was done using a combination of the e40-whites and bg0000.  Surprising how the colors change when put together.  I like that the tones from the upper part of the skirt carry on down into the bottom ruffle while the paleness of the bg is still present. 

For the bodice I used the e50-whites.  Notice how brown they look?  Much more brown than when I colored them above.  Its because of the skin being more yellow-orange.  It changes the way we see the white.  It's the same thing with the socks--they look much more white than the skirt, even though I used the same colors.  The skin tone changes how we see the white of the socks. 

At first glance, the purple parts of the drawing are the whitest--which is something to remember when you're trying to go for a more "true white" don't think of it so much as a color as a really desaturated version of the colors around it. 

Personally, when it comes to the earth white tones, I like to use them like I did on the teal part of the skirt.  As an added layer of shadows and shading.  There is something about doing my shadows all in white and then going over it with a paler color that I just love the look of. 

Hope everyone is having a good week.  I'm going to try to get part 2 of this done and up later in the week, so check back!