On the subject of more markers
Mar. 26th, 2011 05:03 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
plantmanexeGlad a couple of you found the previous post useful. I thought you'd like to see a few samples of the way the markers behave and also give a few pointers of how the brands I've worked with well...work? lol Okay, I lied. It seems I have been working with watercolor markers without realizing it after all.
There's quite a bit of pictures so you get a cut to keep flists from assplodin'. The thumbnails all link to bigger pictures so you can notice the details. Long post is a little long.
First things first. These are all the markers I have to date, including duplicates. 318 total as far as I can remember. I mentioned to![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
anon_decepticon that I recommended against getting starter kits or those 12-24-48 kits of markers because of a couple of things.
Most of the time kits are assembled like pencils to give you a range of primary colors so you can get a 'taste' of the markers. Starting with Copics the primary set is composed of 12 basic colors, which is one color of each 'family' within Copics color coded system. Prismacolors do a very similar thing with their 6 and 12 sets. 24 and 36 or specialty sets later on have a tendency of duplicating markers. Let me tell you, that's more or less how I ended with more Prussian Blue markers than I'll ever need in my life, and why I have enough Yellow Green markers to color a few forests.
The only time it's worth to purchase sets to 'start up' is if you're going to buy 72 or 100+ sets because by then you have most of the colors in the right shades. Needless to say this is expensive as a these sets range no lower than $300 USD. The cheaper and IMHO better alternative for starter sets are the 6-12 pieces sets that are gray or monochromatic kits because these let you experience the marker with appropriate tones to get the feel of their blending and color layout capabilities.
What I do recommend to do when you want to try certain markers is to buy two or three markers of the same color family/shade, and play around blending those. Otherwise begin with monochromatic 6-12 pieces sets, and depending on how you like them, start adding more colors. That 72 pieces wallet was filled with markers of my own choice and a 12pc original copics set I inherited from a friend.
The brands in these pictures are:
Tombow Double Ended Brush - ::The long, thin round markers all bundled together with a tie::
These markers are water-based and are blendable. This has two things to keep in mind, because they are water based they tend to be very unforgiving with smooth papers, they soak it more unevenly and thus tend to eat away and streak the paper. Their color selection is a little everywhere, they have very bright, very nice shades of color and nice shades. These are relatively cheap and IMO work better if you use them a little more like watercolors with sketching, textured and water color friendly papers. These also work very nice with glossy papers, in fact for glossy paper I'd say these are the best markers to use.
Because of their water base, if you dip them in water, you can do some washes with them and can blend them easier amongst themselves. I also like to use them to lay down a base color coat and blend other marker kinds on top of them. These were my first markers and I love them, though as I said, gotta be careful with them. Last I checked their color count was somewhere around 90-100 colors. And you can find these almost everywhere and are priced $2.13 @ Dick Blick These are non-refillable.
Touch Twin by Shin Han - ::The markers with the squared black bodies::
These are Korean markers and are between the Copics and Prismas. In my pictures you see the European version. However they are becoming harder to acquire these days outside of europe as the original brand. A lot of graffiti art suppliers make imitations of these, the body structure is similar and the ink composition is pretty similar as well and at least given the one imitation set I've had access to, their color palette is the same. Sadly, the imitations sometimes are more expensive than the real deal. These were the first alcohol based markers I tried since it's the only brand available in the few shitty art stores in Mexico.
These are a little like Prismas go copics. They blend better than Prismas with different colors but like Prismas they are 'vibrant color everywhere yikes!'. There's very few shades of pale colors and even those are bright, too. You can see the color vibrancy in the chart below. They come in 160 colors and are chisel tip and bullet tip ended. These are non-refillable.
Charpack AD Markers - ::The single black marker in front of the Prismas::
These are Xylene markers, because they are solvent based they stink and you must absolutely work with these on a well ventilated area because you're going to get high with these things. Charpaks come with just one nib-end and thus their ink reservoir stores a lot more ink which makes these markers very very juicy, I'd say they're the juicier markers out there to the point if you're not careful in your handling, you will bleed through the edge of your outline pretty bad. As far as I know these are quite light-fast.
I personally didn't like this marker much, the cap is a monster to remove for me (I have to use pincers to uncap this monster) and on most papers I've tried, these form a yellowish stain on your paper around the black areas and transfers the stain to pages atop or below. As far as blendability goes, I haven't tried them myself, but I know they are around Prisma's blendability level, only a tad smoother. Thicker paper and well protected drawing surfices are a must for this marker. They are a little more expensive than Prismas but cheaper than copics $2.28 @ Dick Blick non-refillable.
Prismacolor Markers - ::The thick round black bodies with the colored wrapping::
I already talked about these and the copics, so I'll just cover a couple of details about the Prisma color markers. I had recommended to get a couple of similar shades when you first try these markers, so I must warn that you should not let yourself be tricked by the names of the markers as guide to buy your color selection, and only take the color wrappings with a grain of salt. Chances are the color of the ink is brighter than what the wrapping shows. If you can test the shades before you buy them, do so, or make sure to look up photos of color charts. You can find some through google or deviantart.
Here's a the color chart of what I have in Prismacolors. I seem to have lost the Crimson Red which pissed the hell off me because I love that marker and I hate misplacing my markers. Guess I should order a replacement online and get a poppy red while I'm at it because I'm sure it nearly died with the picture at the bottom of this post.
You can see even the light shades are very bright.
Copic Markers - ::The light grey bodies in different shapes::
These are my babies, expensive but worth every cent. I already spoke about their performance in general, but I'll use this photo below to show the different types of Copic Markers.
The oval shaped markers at the top are the Sketch family, the smaller round ones in the middle/bottom are the Ciao and the larger square body ones at the very bottom of the carrying wallet are the Original. Originals have by default chisel and bullet tips. The Chisel of the Original is bigger than that of the Ciao and Sketch. Both Sketch and Ciao have Copic's signature flexible brush tip.
The original has the biggest ink reservoir of the Copic brand while Sketch is the medium hold and Ciaos hold the less ink. All three are refillable. In my opinion Ciao's are a good starter marker for those that want to try copics, they are cheaper than sketch markers and the performance is the same, although their palette is more limited to start out they are available in the main colors you'd like to try first. I believe Ciao are available in 180 colors, while Original is available in 214 and Sketch in 346 colors.
Now, here's where Copic markers get a little complicated. Copic has a color code system that separates their shades in color families. There's the main R - red, B - blue, G - green, Y - yellow, V - violet, E - earth (these are shades of brown and earthy tones), and the C, N, T and W gray families (Cold, Neutral, Toner and Warm). These mix amongst themselves to create BV - Blue violet, RV - Red Violet, YR - Yellow Red, YG - Yellow Green, BG - Blue Green.
The first number in the marker denotes how dark/muted the shade of the color is (the amount of gray present in that color, the more grey, the closer to black and the more muted or unsaturated the color is), and the second number denotes the saturation or intensity of that color. So a marker, say R17 will be paler than marker R08.
The color coding in copics might look a little intimidating at first to select your shades, but staying within the color families (like RV, R and YR) and remembering the second numbers denote intensity it's easier to find shades that will make smoother blends. Still, I would recommend testing the markers to see what shades you like better for blending, fortunately there's a lot of photos of copic color charts already filled you can check as guides. And to make things even more helpful, the caps of the markers reflect the color of the ink fairly decently, so if the cap is a very pale color your marker's ink is also a very pale color. The caps tend to be just a little brighter than the actual ink.
Here are a couple of photos of my color chart.
On the second picture you can see almost the full range of the V - violet color family. If you pay attention, you can see that RV11 could easily fit before V12, and between V91 and V93.
Last but no least, below is a picture I took some time ago of an Optimus Prime picture I was coloring. I used different brands of markers for this one, as I usually like to mix my marker usage depending of what I need or what tones I want. I deliberately didn't use a darker shadow in the part colored in red copics because I wanted that piece to look as being different material or different part that is not visible when Prime's transformed in his Trukk not Munky mode.
The grey parts seen on his abdomen were colored with Touch Markers.
I hope these are of any help to people in my flist and even those that aren't! *goes back to drawing*
There's quite a bit of pictures so you get a cut to keep flists from assplodin'. The thumbnails all link to bigger pictures so you can notice the details. Long post is a little long.
First things first. These are all the markers I have to date, including duplicates. 318 total as far as I can remember. I mentioned to
anon_decepticon that I recommended against getting starter kits or those 12-24-48 kits of markers because of a couple of things.Most of the time kits are assembled like pencils to give you a range of primary colors so you can get a 'taste' of the markers. Starting with Copics the primary set is composed of 12 basic colors, which is one color of each 'family' within Copics color coded system. Prismacolors do a very similar thing with their 6 and 12 sets. 24 and 36 or specialty sets later on have a tendency of duplicating markers. Let me tell you, that's more or less how I ended with more Prussian Blue markers than I'll ever need in my life, and why I have enough Yellow Green markers to color a few forests.
The only time it's worth to purchase sets to 'start up' is if you're going to buy 72 or 100+ sets because by then you have most of the colors in the right shades. Needless to say this is expensive as a these sets range no lower than $300 USD. The cheaper and IMHO better alternative for starter sets are the 6-12 pieces sets that are gray or monochromatic kits because these let you experience the marker with appropriate tones to get the feel of their blending and color layout capabilities.
What I do recommend to do when you want to try certain markers is to buy two or three markers of the same color family/shade, and play around blending those. Otherwise begin with monochromatic 6-12 pieces sets, and depending on how you like them, start adding more colors. That 72 pieces wallet was filled with markers of my own choice and a 12pc original copics set I inherited from a friend.
The brands in these pictures are:
Tombow Double Ended Brush - ::The long, thin round markers all bundled together with a tie::
These markers are water-based and are blendable. This has two things to keep in mind, because they are water based they tend to be very unforgiving with smooth papers, they soak it more unevenly and thus tend to eat away and streak the paper. Their color selection is a little everywhere, they have very bright, very nice shades of color and nice shades. These are relatively cheap and IMO work better if you use them a little more like watercolors with sketching, textured and water color friendly papers. These also work very nice with glossy papers, in fact for glossy paper I'd say these are the best markers to use.
Because of their water base, if you dip them in water, you can do some washes with them and can blend them easier amongst themselves. I also like to use them to lay down a base color coat and blend other marker kinds on top of them. These were my first markers and I love them, though as I said, gotta be careful with them. Last I checked their color count was somewhere around 90-100 colors. And you can find these almost everywhere and are priced $2.13 @ Dick Blick These are non-refillable.
Touch Twin by Shin Han - ::The markers with the squared black bodies::
These are Korean markers and are between the Copics and Prismas. In my pictures you see the European version. However they are becoming harder to acquire these days outside of europe as the original brand. A lot of graffiti art suppliers make imitations of these, the body structure is similar and the ink composition is pretty similar as well and at least given the one imitation set I've had access to, their color palette is the same. Sadly, the imitations sometimes are more expensive than the real deal. These were the first alcohol based markers I tried since it's the only brand available in the few shitty art stores in Mexico.
These are a little like Prismas go copics. They blend better than Prismas with different colors but like Prismas they are 'vibrant color everywhere yikes!'. There's very few shades of pale colors and even those are bright, too. You can see the color vibrancy in the chart below. They come in 160 colors and are chisel tip and bullet tip ended. These are non-refillable.
Charpack AD Markers - ::The single black marker in front of the Prismas::
These are Xylene markers, because they are solvent based they stink and you must absolutely work with these on a well ventilated area because you're going to get high with these things. Charpaks come with just one nib-end and thus their ink reservoir stores a lot more ink which makes these markers very very juicy, I'd say they're the juicier markers out there to the point if you're not careful in your handling, you will bleed through the edge of your outline pretty bad. As far as I know these are quite light-fast.
I personally didn't like this marker much, the cap is a monster to remove for me (I have to use pincers to uncap this monster) and on most papers I've tried, these form a yellowish stain on your paper around the black areas and transfers the stain to pages atop or below. As far as blendability goes, I haven't tried them myself, but I know they are around Prisma's blendability level, only a tad smoother. Thicker paper and well protected drawing surfices are a must for this marker. They are a little more expensive than Prismas but cheaper than copics $2.28 @ Dick Blick non-refillable.
Prismacolor Markers - ::The thick round black bodies with the colored wrapping::
I already talked about these and the copics, so I'll just cover a couple of details about the Prisma color markers. I had recommended to get a couple of similar shades when you first try these markers, so I must warn that you should not let yourself be tricked by the names of the markers as guide to buy your color selection, and only take the color wrappings with a grain of salt. Chances are the color of the ink is brighter than what the wrapping shows. If you can test the shades before you buy them, do so, or make sure to look up photos of color charts. You can find some through google or deviantart.
Here's a the color chart of what I have in Prismacolors. I seem to have lost the Crimson Red which pissed the hell off me because I love that marker and I hate misplacing my markers. Guess I should order a replacement online and get a poppy red while I'm at it because I'm sure it nearly died with the picture at the bottom of this post.
You can see even the light shades are very bright.
Copic Markers - ::The light grey bodies in different shapes::
These are my babies, expensive but worth every cent. I already spoke about their performance in general, but I'll use this photo below to show the different types of Copic Markers.
The oval shaped markers at the top are the Sketch family, the smaller round ones in the middle/bottom are the Ciao and the larger square body ones at the very bottom of the carrying wallet are the Original. Originals have by default chisel and bullet tips. The Chisel of the Original is bigger than that of the Ciao and Sketch. Both Sketch and Ciao have Copic's signature flexible brush tip.
The original has the biggest ink reservoir of the Copic brand while Sketch is the medium hold and Ciaos hold the less ink. All three are refillable. In my opinion Ciao's are a good starter marker for those that want to try copics, they are cheaper than sketch markers and the performance is the same, although their palette is more limited to start out they are available in the main colors you'd like to try first. I believe Ciao are available in 180 colors, while Original is available in 214 and Sketch in 346 colors.
Now, here's where Copic markers get a little complicated. Copic has a color code system that separates their shades in color families. There's the main R - red, B - blue, G - green, Y - yellow, V - violet, E - earth (these are shades of brown and earthy tones), and the C, N, T and W gray families (Cold, Neutral, Toner and Warm). These mix amongst themselves to create BV - Blue violet, RV - Red Violet, YR - Yellow Red, YG - Yellow Green, BG - Blue Green.
The first number in the marker denotes how dark/muted the shade of the color is (the amount of gray present in that color, the more grey, the closer to black and the more muted or unsaturated the color is), and the second number denotes the saturation or intensity of that color. So a marker, say R17 will be paler than marker R08.
The color coding in copics might look a little intimidating at first to select your shades, but staying within the color families (like RV, R and YR) and remembering the second numbers denote intensity it's easier to find shades that will make smoother blends. Still, I would recommend testing the markers to see what shades you like better for blending, fortunately there's a lot of photos of copic color charts already filled you can check as guides. And to make things even more helpful, the caps of the markers reflect the color of the ink fairly decently, so if the cap is a very pale color your marker's ink is also a very pale color. The caps tend to be just a little brighter than the actual ink.
Here are a couple of photos of my color chart.
On the second picture you can see almost the full range of the V - violet color family. If you pay attention, you can see that RV11 could easily fit before V12, and between V91 and V93.
Last but no least, below is a picture I took some time ago of an Optimus Prime picture I was coloring. I used different brands of markers for this one, as I usually like to mix my marker usage depending of what I need or what tones I want. I deliberately didn't use a darker shadow in the part colored in red copics because I wanted that piece to look as being different material or different part that is not visible when Prime's transformed in his Trukk not Munky mode.
The grey parts seen on his abdomen were colored with Touch Markers.
I hope these are of any help to people in my flist and even those that aren't! *goes back to drawing*
