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Love/Hate Relationship with Markers

This is more a person blog type write, based round my personal experience with alcohol markers. I have nothing against those that love alcohol markers and yes I do like them to a point, but mostly its very much a love/hate relationship.

By Alixzandra WisemanPublished 4 years ago 4 min read
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When it comes to art supplies there is one things that I mostly avoid these days and that is alcohol markers. Now don't get me wrong they can work really effectively HOWEVER more often than not in my personal experience they are nothing more than flit tip pens that you would use as a child.

Now you may all be jumping up and down with the line "What the heck is the women talking about? Alcohol markers are great" blah blah blah, but let me fully explain. Most artists who use alcohol markers will have a colourless alcohol blender pen, and yes most of the time when you watch youtubers using alcohol markers they will by pass this fact, and this is were a lot of people like me who would love to use alcohol markers as a professional medium for our art work end up going "nah".

I have not tried every alcohol marker out in the world purely because after trying a few sets you end up going what's the point. The main set that I work with is Spectrum Noir Alcohol markers, and yes i have a small collection of them, I won't lie and say I utterly hate them because I don't utterly hate them, they have their uses mostly if you just want a quick easy drawing to colour, for example if you are doing a quick colour for a design and want to have a rough idea what colours you want for your main art piece then yes alcohol markers are a good rough draft idea, or if you have the spectrum noir colour books (which are a nightmare to find and buy) then yea they can be great. But other than than, forget it.

Most people will talk about how they blend really easily, how they are "not steaky" but from my personal experience that just seem to be B.S! Honestly it really does seem like unless you have a colourless blending pen you will have steaky ink blot pieces.

This rant all started a few days ago when I started creating an imaged called The Lizard Man, which was a character from one of my stories (not yet published) I used Marker paper and set to work. I swatches the colours, even testing out layering and blending, and to a point on swatches they worked okay, but I noticed that the blending wasn't as nice as what I would expect, and there was no mistaking the streaks there were clearly there. But I continued creating this art piece but to no joy, the piece turned out streaky and ink blob heavy, I even found that previous designs I had added in other colours were lost and had to be recreated with fine liner pens, to an extent I had expected to do that but not to the point of giving details to the facial structure.

Now if your like me and enjoy art, you have probably watched loads of videos on youtube about alcohol markers, and yes I went back on the hunt to find out if there was something I was doing wrong, but no, I found other people having the same problem but ignoring it and them noticing the streaks were gone from the image, it was only when I watched a few more videos that I noticed someone using a colourless blender, which lead me to the real thought of "Alcohol markers are no more than a expensive felt tip pen" and believe me when I say if you don't have a colourless alcohol blender expect your work to be streaky.

It could be the pens themselves but I'm not convinced as things like Sharpies which are permeant alcohol based markers work the same way as other alcohol markers. It could also be the paper but again I doubt that as other paper I used did exactly the same thing.

Don't get me wrong I love the idea of alcohol markers, but they only seem good for splashes of colour, and if your using them as your main go to you need to have a colourless blender pen. But this now leads me to the problem of the cost, most people look at sharpies because they are a great staple in cost, colour and use specially as they pretty much colour on everything and anything usually the bigger packs of sharpies can be anywhere from £20 to £30 but you get a wide number of pens and a wide number of colours. Were as something like Spectrum noir comes in small sets of 6 for £15 to £20, and they don't come with a colourless blender you have you buy that separately, which alone can be anywhere from £3 to £10 depending on were you find it and whether of not its in a set as well as what brand the blender pen is.

Now honestly don't get me wrong those that work with alcohol markers can create some great stuff, but when you have these tools just sitting there and have to remind yourself by you have a love/hate relationship with them its disappointing, I personally rather stick with sharpies.

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