Letters from Somnolescent November 8, 2022

fun with markers

by devon

Turns out that I actually like alcohol markers, after all.

I had an opportunity to get some markers for free, though they had pretty much not usual colors (mainly greens, rotten yellows and browns) that are more popular. Still, it was really good opportunity. Additionally got 3 light Promarker colors since I was missing lightest values, which are needed to make something work with this unfortunate color set. A proper paper was necessary, so I finally got a marker pad too.

First I sketched some Cat trying to get to know my weird color pallette I got. It’s not bad but not perfect, still it was good to use markers again. Need to get my other markers set (full of loud, intensive colors instead) to play around more, since I missed them a lot.

I tried again, this time with Devon. I wanted to use more of colors I got, managed to use most of yellows and some browns. Aimed for more lineless style but ended up lining everything in the end, markers are really good for it anyway. You need a bit stronger contrast in some places to pull it off, though.

I like that markers are uniformly transparent compared to watercolor, which has own quirks. Every color can be different due to pigment characteristics, some are opaque and some are transparent in varying degrees. Also I can use really light marker to sketching things out and avoid smeared pencil, since I can cover everything with darker colors.

I recently had problems with drawing humans since animal people in my case are easy option, due to their simplicity. Yesterday I doodled my characters again and it helped a lot to get back to this stuff. Today I wanted to try to make something slightly more polished and I just ended up drawing Deb (funnily enough I work on other characters more right now, but she’s kinda still the default character for me). It was lot of fun to draw these, markers being wet on marker paper for longer make blending easier and i just like how colors bleed in a bit and make things softer. Layering is great if you don’t have good darker maker for shading certain color, it just clashes a little less.

Now I definitely want to expand my marker colors, even if it’s a bit pricey. I want to gradually start to add colors, usually getting few colors once in a while for a monochromatic palette. At some point I’d like to treat myself with more of them, probably for some special occasion. Guess just proper paper and some fresh markers was enough for me to get into them back. Should go through my old markers for sure, some are running out of color or dried so they aren’t so useable anymore,,,

Tags: art,

About devon

An exotic housecat, local fanatic of TDRā„¢ and anything from so-called turn of the millennium. I love to draw boxes and graphic design is my passion.


Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *