Summer Drawing Challenge Day 3

I’ve been experimenting with markers for a little while, gradually slipping down the proverbial slope. It started with three grey Prismacolor markers I got to experiment with values, and ended up using to colour my Iris the Art Muse comics. Then I got a few more, to have more of a range. Then I found some Pitt brush markers on sale, and bought several handfuls of those, to use on the first page of the Spam and the Sasquatch graphic novel. I had toyed with the idea of buying a set of Copic markers, the ones the really serious marker users are into. But the other day, Opus, the largest of our 3 local art supply stores, was having a rare sale on the Prismacolors, 40% off of their regular price (which is much less than the Copics, which is why I bought the first experimental greys in that brand). How could I resist? The hard part was choosing…

But choose I did. When I get a new set of any kind of colours, I like to make colour charts. It’s especially helpful with markers, because the colours on the outside of them rarely approach the actual ink colour. Usually with paints, I make neat rows of boxes, and diligently label them. But since I had a drawing to make today, i decided to make my colour chart a bit more interesting. I started with the greens, since I had picked out a lot of them, because I like to have a variety for landscapes. Here’s the result — I think I should make all my colour charts more like this in the future!

The little leaves around the outside have the pure marker colours. There’s room to add more if I buy more greens. Since I had fifteen different greens, and five letters, I chose three colours to try blending for each letter. I wanted to see how transparent they were (this didn’t completely answer my question, as there was no “control” group). I also wanted to try the colourless blender marker. I had more success when I kept both markers open in my hand so I could quickly switch to the blender before the other one completely dried. The paper is Paper for Pens, a very smooth, very white paper with a high clay content. Nice stuff to work on, and the pure white helped the markers’ colours shine out beautifully. The lettering is what I call my “hippie balloon lettering” because it’s kind of  reminiscent of that era and it’s groovy , man!