Thursday 24 April 2008

Fun with markers

Almost two weeks ago I was looking to buy more colour pencils, as my old set of 12 pencils didn't include any skin tones. Well, I found me a nice 24 piece set, which still doesn't contain many skin tones and actually I already had half of those colours. I would probably been better off finding a retailer with loose pencils and buying a couple skin tones.

Well nevertheless, colour pencils weren't what I was going to blog about. Markers are. At the same trip, I noticed some sets of markers next to the colour pencils. There were sets in different styles: bright colours, grays, skin tones... Wait, that's what I wanted, wasn't it? Well, I ended up buying a comic art set with one skin tone, brown, blue, red and black so I could test them out.

I tested those five markers out and I totally liked them. They're rather fast to work with and they produce strong and brilliant colours. But, five colours is rather limiting. So, after weekend I went and bought some more and now I'm a happy owner of some twenty Letraset ProMarkers. Nothing too much, but as even those cost a bit much for my budget, they'll have to do for now.

But, let's cut the long story short, here's a picture I drew with those markers:Well, ok. I did use a bit more than markers: black ink pen for the lines and colour pencil to smooth out the background somewhat.

One thing I can't seem to figure out, is how to draw areas of flat colour. Look at the floor in previous image, for example. While using special paper meant for marker drawing alleviates this problem somewhat, it's still really easy to get visible stripes.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Hey there,
Glad to see your enjoying you markers. : )

You should have gotten a blending pen in your marker set, but if you didn't you can order one. Craft shops and paper crafting websites sell some nice blending pens that will work very well with the letreset Pro markers to. ( I'm sure you know all this already by now, but thought I'd mention it.)
Because Marker Inks are chemically much different than most other Inks, using them for art requires learning a whole new kit of artistic Techniques. If you really like the look of the bright, dense colours, all that re-learning will be worth it. Check the Letreset website or search the Internet for some tutorials that can help speed that process along.
Best wishes