I promised you I’d tell you about the unique colors in Sketchmarker and Olo, as well as my overall assessment of the three brands….and this is the day. But I’m SUPER excited to also have a new Human Rainbow class ready – scroll on to see more of that, and in the video you’ll see a little peek inside class!

The art demo in this video, in addition to lots of color tests I’ll explain, is this picture of these birds – if you’ve taken the Whimsical Sketching class you might recognize these cuties! I scanned my original and printed it out smaller.

Tutorial: Alcohol Marker comparison: Unique Colors + Human Rainbow

Watch the video below and scroll to the end to leave comments or questions — or click HERE to watch it on YouTube and leave comments over there. I read both dutifully!

Unique colors

I gathered up the colors that were not included in my conversion charts for Sketchmarker and Olo – these colors may still be close to a Copic color, but when I did the assessment I found a color that’s a better match to that color, so that’s why some colors you may recognize are here. But I’ve noted a few colors I find particularly interesting to a Copic user:

Greens

I wish I’d done this little exercise before the previous video – it really would have helped me out! ha. Better late than never though. You can see here the progression of colors – in Copic it shows the relatively regular steps toward desaturation; in Sketchmarker it shows….well, that they call YG green, and they call BG green, and BG is blue gray, and the numbers…well yeah. I’m lost, but it’s not necessary for the numbering systems to make complete sense, it just helps!

The number system for Olo generally-ish seems to jive with Copic’s; they place a dot (.) between the digits, which helps to separate them – because each digit means something different, just like with Copic. Great idea to help us remember that fact.

Grays, grays, and more grays

I’ve always said for the majority of folks, some warm and cool grays are plenty….though some of these new ones are interesting!

Pinks and purples

For those who love these colors, you might be especially excited here! Note that this is marker paper, which shows color more dull-ly than a nice bright cardstock. 

Browns for flesh, hair, animals

I wanted to see how much each brand is “weighted” in their browns, and this was the one way I could figure out how to depict that for myself. What it shows me is there are few light tones in Olo, wayyy lots in Sketchmarker. And for my own liking, since I love my dark colors, I wish everyone had more darks in all the columns (reddish, yellowish, greenish and purplish).

The Human Rainbow!

The browns were a big part of choosing colors for the new course – I’m SO PROUD of Human Rainbow II. The last time I created a class with people drawings in it, they were embarrassingly bad to me given my current skill level – and rather than being down on myself for HRI, I’m just ECSTATIC that I’ve made progress that’s truly visible! My Life Drawing Group as well as a lot of pen and ink practice has really grown me. So even if no one takes this class, I’m still going to puff out my chest a little bit and cheer for me!

But if you WOULD like to take this class, well, I hope you love it as much as me! It comes with the printable images ($30 value, included in the price). You could also purchase just the images and color them without the class. If you do that and change your mind later about class, just email me and I’ll invoice you just for the class fee minus what you paid for the images. All the printables are here.

I’m pooped!

Do you ever bite off more than you can chew, artistically? Does it drain you like the past few weeks/months have done to me? Man, oh man, I even made myself sick! (Might have been norovirus by my symptoms…but they went away as soon as I had everything prepped for today, so I’m thinking it was stress!)

I’m hoping to now return to my more chill artistic self and let go of some of the testing I’ve been inundated with. What would you like to see me playing with next? Either a medium or a subject, lmk if you have a challenge or an idea!

Supplies

1. Copic Markers 
2. Sketchmarker Brush Pro Alcohol Markers 
3. Olo markers 
4. Hex charts 

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