My New Copic Swatch Book

Back in February, I shared my little disc bound coupon book that I came up with.  I really do love these notebooks and I've been frustrated with my Copic swatch book for some time now.  I haven't been creating much lately (wallpaper removal was kicking my butt!!) but I still wanted to color, so I decided it was the perfect time to redo my swatch book.

I stopped at Staples to grab some discs to create a new book, but when I got there, I found this notebook with a clear hard cover and interchangeable cover designs.  

Originally, I thought I'd use some decorated chipboard, but this worked even better!  I decided to make my own little cover and display it through the clear plastic.  I wasn't sure what to do with the covers it came with, but figured they'd be usable...eventually ;)

The first thing I did was pull things out of my old book.  I was using a portfolio that I grabbed at Michael's and realized I wasn't really using it since it was a nuisance to pull the pages in and out any time I wanted to add a swatch.  With the disc notebook, the pages are easily accessible and the extra pages easily fold back out of the way.  When I went to add my Copic color chart to the book, I noticed when I would punch the holes it would cut off the top row of colors so I headed back to the Copic website and printed a new one - I adjusted my print settings so there would be a little bit of a margin to allow for the hole punching.

 I added wash tape to the edge to reinforce the hole punching.

I had been using some circles that I printed from my computer for color combos, but wasn't 100% happy with them, so I did a search and found this great combo chart.  I printed out a bunch of them, added some washi tape, punch the holes and started filling them in.

The rest of the items I already had in my swatch book were for people coloring - eyes, skin, hair combos.  I kept these same pages, adding a strip of washi to each one, then adding them to my book.

Free blank eye chart can be found here

I have my book organized into four sections (using the included covers as divider pages :))-
1.  color chart and tools.  I have some transparent light source guides that I put in a zipper pocket.

Free downloads of the guides can be found here

2.  the color combo charts.

3.  the eye, hair, and skin combo charts.

4.  I left some of the lined paper that came with the notebook to make notes and scribble drawings as needed.

To finish the whole thing off, I needed a cover!  I had purchased the Copica image from Saturated Canary when it first came out and kind of forgot about her.... until I was sifting through digi stamps to find one for my cover!!  I resized her to take up most of the page and added some outlined letters.  And then the fun began..... COLORING!!  I'm in love with this color combo that I ended up using on her.  Here's the full cover:

And here's a close up of Copica:

So now I'm happy with my swatch book and I have no excuse to not keep it current!

This weeks challenge at MarkerPop is Anything Goes so I'm playing along with the challenge:

Thanks for stopping by,

Angie