Fuzzy Wuzzy Copic Tutorial

I've been looking forward to Valentine-making season for quite awhile now because it is the perfect time to play with one of my very favorite animal sets "Cuddles and Hugs"! Today I'm using the koala, I got a TON of requests in the past couple days to see these little fellas colored, which has me thinking many of you are a little leery of coloring "fur", am I right? It's not hard, but different than that blended Copic look you've probably been trying to achieve for smooth objects. Let's start with a pic of the real thing, shall we? If you have access to the Internet, you have images, from multiple views and poses, of practically anything you need to color! This is really helpful for selecting shades and figuring out shadows.

Koala fur is a bit trickier than others because it has these white tipped dark hairs and then a downy white undercoat, giving you this salt and pepper effect. How to achieve it? Mine won't look exactly like this, but their coats will have a nice hairy texture when I'm done. :)

I'm only using 3 markers for this today: W-1, W-3, and W-5, three shades of Warm Gray. While some areas of the real koala have this warm "yellower" gray color, others are a cool silvery gray, which I have in my Copic collection, but these are better for my DP and CS I'll be using. First I'm putting in some feathered lines with W-3 in the areas that will eventually be the darkest so you can see where to concentrate the most color: around the ears, and the underside of their arms, legs and back. you make these little stokes quickly, with just the very tip of the brush tip end, it will make the finest of lines when you want.

Now I went and filled in the rest of the body with these same little strokes for hairs, working in on direction mainly on the limbs so the hair seems to follow the arm or leg down, and working outward on areas like the face starting from the eyes. be sure to leave room between the strokes so the white can show through. I left the tummy and chin area completely white.

Then I went over those first areas with W-5 to darken. (I could have just done that to begin with but it's easier to add dark than take away, just anted to make sure I was liking those colors! :)

Now I'm going in with my W-1, that palest gray in small circles to blend over the hairs, not the Colorless Blender. This will bring all the colors together and keep the fur from looking "patchy".

After blending, I went back in with just a few strokes of my W-5 again to make a few of the details (like the tufts at the ears) a little sharper. Aren't they huggable??

And here is my finished card! I used the So Sketchy December Square Card Sketch, Basic Grey Cupcake DP and Sahara Sand for my base, as you can see these warm grays look really nice with that CS.. I added a few halfback pearls, the threading water punch on my border to match the scallops on my heart punches. "Hugs and kisses" is also from the "Cuddles and Hugs" set.

If you don't have Copics, try coloring your koalas the way I did in this sample, and/or this sample!

Hope this gave you some warm fuzzies!! Have a great day!