 Hello, and welcome to my YouTube channel. My name is Sandy Olnok, and I'm an artist. I work in a lot of different mediums, and I love to help you grow in your art as well. If there's anything I can do to help you out, please let me know if you've got suggestions for video topics. And I also might already have answered your question in one of my many, many videos in my playlists on my channel. Today, I'm going to be talking about alcohol markers. I've been using Copic since I think it was 2006, when I bought my first little handful of Easter colors. And I've loved them ever since. I recently came into possession of a full set of sketch marker and a full set of Olo due to the generosity of those companies who wanted me to make hex charts for their users. And I have introduced those sets of markers here on YouTube, but I haven't really done a head-to-head comparison. I'll put links in the doobly-do to those introductory videos, but today I'm going to start doing some actual comparison to show you how they differ from each other. This video is going to be broken into sections. So you can fast forward to one of these, or you can just get a cup of coffee and a donut and hang out with me for a little while, because this is going to be a long video. The first section is going to be about the marker brands themselves and what the basic differences are that I can see. Second is going to be introducing you to my resource book. Oh my goodness, this thing is huge and has gotten revamped of late. There are some downloadables that you can make your own resource book with. Third, I'm going to talk about conversion charts and some caveats about them, whether it's my conversion charts or anybody else's. And then we're going to get into the actual art. I'm going to do a head-to-head blending test with reds. Yes, I know. Scary reds using pretty much identical colors in all three brands and seeing how they perform on the same small image. And then I'm going to do a speed drawing in greens. Why have I chosen greens? Because the three brands don't have a lot of greens in common. So can I use the greens that are in each set and create a consistent drawing with all three brands when they don't have the same colors? Because that might answer some questions for you about whether you actually need to buy more colors or whether you can use the ones you have to create things you don't have. Stick around to find out if that was a successful test. And then at the very end, I'll give you a little piece of history that you won't want to miss. My next video on Saturday is going to be about earth tones for skin and hair and animals, as well as the colors in Olo and Sketch Marker that are unique to them that might fill in some gaps that you've been missing in a Copic collection. All right, let's get started. Copic is by far the oldest brand of these three. It's been around for decades and decades and they have not made any major changes. They haven't added any colors in a long time. They did reformulate the body of the refill bottles while back. Sketch Marker has 448 colors, Copic 358, Olo 128. I fully suspect that Sketch Marker and Olo will add more colors in time. They're just newer and hungrier companies. Shapes of markers, if you don't mind markers that roll, round bodies are fine. The Copic Sketch in the center are oval bodies so they don't roll anywhere. Olo markers you can buy in two halves and mine are two tone markers. I have one color on one side, one color on the other, and they're both brush nibs. But you can also get the same marker color and just a brush nib on one side and a chisel on the other, which is how Sketch Marker and Copic both come. And the markers each have the designation written on the body or on a sticker on the body. So you can find out what color it is that way. Easier way is to just look at the end caps and they have the numbers and everything on them. And the Copic Sketch Markers have a little gray line to indicate where the brush nib is and Sketch Markers have that line and it indicates where the chisel nib is. So, you know, the differences between them. It's a little mental jump when you're trying to go from one to the other because some of the companies just flip upside down what the other company does. Like the numbering system for Sketch Marker is opposite what the numbering system for Copic is. And Olo has a whole different kind of system and it's, yeah, it's a long story. But nonetheless, they're all like within the realm of possible to use. Olo feels the biggest in your hand. It feels the heaviest because it's got basically twice the amount of ink of a regular marker. So they are a little larger, a little heavier. So that's the basics on the three brands. But let's look at my alcohol marker resource book. Anonymous, an anonymous donor in Michigan sent me a sweet card that had a gift card in it for Office Depot. And she just said she appreciated my videos and wanted to give me something. So I went shopping and I got this cool notebook. I got one for my pencils and my other mediums and stuff. So you'll be seeing more of these in the future. I have had these beat up old binders for a long time and now they're all nice. I even got new protector pages for the front. I need to put a piece of art there. And I got new plastic non glare pages to hold everything in here. So I've got my hex charts. That's my primary thing that's in here and I have one printed out on craft paper as well. If you use other colors of paper, I keep the original colored version that I scanned in. And the Copic Human Rainbow is in here. It's called the Copic Human Rainbow now because that download now has two other brands within it. Talk about that a little more later. Then there's a Copic blending groups suggested colors that's free for download as well as that human rainbow is free for download. Then I made these swatches. I made these a long time ago bought these pages a long time ago. Don't recommend them. I'm not really sure that they're all that helpful. I mean, I use them here and there when I'm teaching, but not not a big deal. The next section is the Olo marker section and the chart is only one page. The hex chart because there's not enough colors. There's only 128 and I've got that one printed out on the craft as well. And I keep the original. I've got a blending group suggestion suggestion for free download. And then this is the one that's in that human rainbow packet. It's just a whole collection has everything in it. If you've already downloaded it and got the one for Copic and you don't need to redownload, but if it's in your account, you can just redownload for free anyway. And then I made smaller swatches for Olo markers and I put the designations on the bottom because you'll see the sketch marker ones are on the top. And here's the sketch marker chart. Now, this one has been revamped since I released it a few months ago. There were a few colors I needed to move around and I moved most of them around. It's never going to be 100% perfect. But if you want to redownload it, you can. The other one will work fine if you've already redownloaded it, but it won't cost you anything to download it a second time if you've already paid for it once. I'm keeping these old charts in there just for the heck of it for the moment. Don't think I need them though. And then there is a blending groups suggested color chart for sketch marker and there is a sketch marker human rainbow version as well. And more swatches and these have the notations on a different side as the Olo ones did so I don't get them mixed up. All of the charts that you're seeing in this video are free except for hex charts which are $5.99. Everything else is free. Links are in the doobly-doo down below. Next up conversion charts which are different like the same people can look at a color and see it differently or it looks different next to something else. So I do have a free Olo to Copic and Copic to Olo chart and then I have a sketch marker to Copic and Copic to sketch marker chart. Neither of these has all the colors on it because I tried to pick the closest color, the best match for each of the Copic colors. And if something was a secondary match, I didn't include it. It just seemed like it was too confusing to do that. And then sometimes when I redid a chart, like my eye told me something different. If it was next to another color, I picked something different. So when you're talking about anybody making conversion charts, they all should come with a big caveat. It's not perfect. I even tried to make one chart that has all three brands on it. So I could kind of track which one has all three that are close-ish in case I use those for classes. I can try to choose from those colors so everybody could do the classes. And even there I was discovering things that were like, oh, that one didn't match so well, that one should move over there. All that to say when you find somebody that tells you this is a match for that. Remember, you might need to use less of that color or tone it down or beef it up with another color. I'm beginning with a very basic blending and I'm using one of the other free charts that I do recommend you download and print out and put some of these in your resource book. It's a PDF that has lots of different shapes in it for color combination reference that you can mark down your favorite combinations or if you find somebody has done a video and they use a particular combination you like, write it down. Put it in one of these charts and then leave it in a resource notebook so you can go back and find it again. It's a lot better than sticky notes stuck to the wall. And here I've chosen reds because I could find a really good match or well, I should say fairly good match between the light, medium and dark reds between the brands. And I'm coloring the butterflies by putting down first the base color and then the dark, the medium and then back to blending again with the base color. And one of the reasons that I used to say that I did the base color first was to kind of wet the paper. So I was ready to accept all those other colors and I've come to believe I don't think that that's really necessarily true. But what it does do is give you more, I guess, bravery to put down dark color because otherwise when you're putting dark color, if you start with your darks and you put that down first on white paper, it just looks like, oh my gosh, that looks terrible. But if you put that dark onto a color, it doesn't have that harsh appeal. And I find it's a little easier to dive in and put that dark in because otherwise you end up getting nervous because you're like, did I put down too much? Is that edge look right? And for me, this works to be the best way that I do my blending on pretty much everything. So I put down the dark color using the flick motion. So putting down the marker and then lifting up as I get to the end of each stroke. And you can do short strokes. You can do long strokes. And in the Copic Jumpstart class, I took all about different kinds of motions to use with your pens. And then the midtone, I start within the center of that dark and I try to soften the edge of the dark. I'm not worried about the outside edge of the medium. Just worried about the dark because I'm going to blend the medium using the light color. And then I can go in with that light. If your markers are drying, you're going to have trouble blending. So if you find that, you know, you're just being chintzy on reinking your markers, you're making life harder for yourself in creating your artwork. Because juicy markers work much, much better at blending than do dry ish markers. The Olo marker had a decent dark color, but it felt a little more brown than it did red, but it still is going to work. And one of the things that I started really playing with as I've been sketching with these markers in my studio in my daily sketch time is really paying attention to the temperature of colors. And, you know, if I end up with a dark color that's too desaturated, I might choose a midtone that's more saturated to compensate for that. And you'll see some of that in the green test that I end up doing in just a few minutes. But once all of these were blended and dried because you want to let them dry before you start doing this portion, I took the colorless blender for each marker and tried to make some spots on the butterflies. I wanted to see how well each one lifts. And there was a significant difference in this. If you're going to buy one pen and just test out a pen in Sketch marker or Olo, this might be a decent one to do because it performs differently than the colorless blender from Copic. It still does take, you know, like a few seconds of putting the the colorless blender into the paper to let it really soak in, especially when you're working on reds. You might know reds are a little bit of overtaking of color. But once you do it, it does push that color away. It doesn't, with the Sketch marker and Olo, it doesn't make a puddle around the white spot the way that Copic does. And you'll see when they're all dry, there is a big visual difference between the Copic and the other two. I don't know what's in the blender solutions, but it's one of the reasons that I tell people don't ever put isopropyl alcohol into your blender pens. That's not what it is. There's a solution of some kind in there. But here you can see the Copic difference. It's whiter, but it also is sploogey. And the other two pushed color away, but the red did come back. So they didn't end up as white, but I didn't try timing it so that I was using the same amount of seconds of application of that colorless blender. And that's what it ended up doing. All that was on Nina cardstock and there will be various differences based on the papers that you're using as well and which colors because red is just a bear of a color. Now for this green drawing, I pulled out all the greens and the yellow greens in each of the marker brands to do their section. So I drew the little P pods and then began to color them with Copics. And since that for me is the standard, I want to see how things perform compared to my expectation of an alcohol marker because I've used those like forever. I wanted to give that one the old college try first. I've always thought there's been some colors missing in the green range with Copic. Like there's just not very many in the desaturated range in the darks. And it's just like really difficult to build up darks. I made myself not use any reds because usually I when I'm trying to make a really dark color out of something that I don't have a dark color for. I grab a dark complement and then layer with that. But here I you can see there's something that looks kind of brownish and I did use a dark yellow. And when you're using a dark yellow, those tend to be warmer colors because yellow when it gets into the very dark numbers, it looks green when it's by itself. But then when it's in comparison to these kind of spring green bright colors, it looks brownish. But layering that with all the other colors, I was able to build up the right kinds of darks that I was looking for. There was going to be water spots on this and some of that in the inside of the P pod is like kind of shiny water. But I'm going to add water drops to it. You haven't ever done water drops. They're pretty easy to do and they actually work better with the Copic colorless blender, which was interesting to see that that technique work better. It does take a couple seconds for that to appear and you have to have enough color to push away or else nothing happens. But Copic makes a little circle of dark color around the spot where you've put the colorless blender. And then all you have to do is take a white pen. I use a Signo Uniball white pen and just put a little highlight on the dark on the shadow side with water drops. The highlight is not on the front side of the drop like it is with every other object because the light is coming through the drop and hitting the back of the drop. So you put the highlight on the backside and it was very easy to do with these. It was not as easy to do with the other two. But let's look at the sketch marker greens. They do have a lot of greens and that's a good thing. They don't have as many as Copic, I don't think. I mean, the handful seems smaller, but it's also that the pen bodies are round so they're smaller. They take up less space and that could be part of it. And I did include some dark Y colors. And the dark desaturated yellows in any brand seem to follow the same pattern that Copic always has. They're kind of greenish, which is why I included them because I wanted to have as many colors to work with as possible. But here I didn't have those same spring green colors. A lot of the greens in the sketch marker group are actually blue greens. Like, I don't understand how their scientists or whoever decided to name their colors, that sort of thing. They called things greens. There are G colors, but they are not usable for this because they're blue. So it didn't help except that I could take something that was very much an olive green because they do have some really kind of intense greenish kind of olive green colors, which I do like, and they actually put that together with putting that together with the blues makes for kind of a respectable spring green, which was nice. So a lot of your testing might be taking some of those the sheets that I showed you for testing swatches and test out what happens when you use a yellow green with a blue over it. What kind of color does that make? It's the same kind of testing that you do with, like, watercolor and trying to mix different colors to make it the color that you want because you don't need to buy a, you know, $15 tube of watercolor in everything just like you don't need to buy every color of marker. So here I just wanted to slow this down and let you watch this one section. It's trying to find a way to make it match the greens in the others, but it was very blue because that a lot of their greens are very heavy on the blue side. And I put a yellow green kind of color over top of it and I just kept layering and when you keep layering. Mostly the papers and I've tried don't pill up with alcohol markers so you can keep going don't be afraid to keep adding more color. And if you add the wrong color, then add a compensatory something else. If you add something that's too yellowish or too brownish, you know, like that that dark yellow color can feel kind of brown, then add something that's more of an intense green to it. And your swatch sheets can be great places to practice that and then keep a record of it in your alcohol marker reference book so that you don't end up forgetting. What the heck was that? How did they make that color? But adding the dots on here with the colorless blender did not work as well. I had to really squint to see where those dots were. But then I did add the white pen to them and they did do a reasonable semblance of what I was trying for with the Copic markers. And now for the poor Olo collection. Remember this is they only have 128 markers and you can see here there's a yellow, a blue and a y o a yellow orange in here. Well, the reason is because remember these are two sided markers in my world. I can use that y 8.7 but on the other side is all my greens. But they don't have very many. So this one had me the most worried. I wasn't really sure if I had enough colors to really work this and get it to look like these other two and make this whole drawing work as one. So I began with the yellowish green colors to start with in hopes that this was just going to work. I made myself not go to too many other colors. I tried to just stick with the yellows and the greens and the blues to try to layer them. But for the most part, their greens, the lighter green colors, they are very blueish. I didn't really need any blues like I did with the sketch marker, but at least there's were labeled G's. So I could get away with that, right? And they do have some dark greens. They're relatively close to each other. And it was just an interesting thing to try to figure out, okay, what color do I layer over this now? So here I ended up with a really muted olive green. So I added more bright green to it. It was just an exercise in color study. And this is one of the reasons why I teach color theory in all of my jumpstart classes and I teach it here on YouTube and talk about it all the time. Because once you have an idea that you can add a compliment to something to push the color in a different direction to change the saturation and change the value, then you've got all kinds of tools at your disposal. You don't have to buy new markers just to have a certain kind of color. In my next video that I mentioned, I'm going to be talking about earth tones or animals and people as well as some specific colors that are unique to Olo and to sketch marker. So if you're somebody who's got the full Copic collection and you're just looking to add a couple of markers here or there that you found that Copic seems to be missing, then a couple of those recommendations might be good for you. I don't think there's a whole ton of them necessarily, but if you like purples and pinks, there are some gap fillers in there and there's just a few scattered throughout the collections. The colorless blender from Olo is one that I really do like. I definitely can recommend that just right off the bat. But I was pretty pleased with how this came out and thought, well, maybe I've been using too many colors all along because even the Olo one that I use so few colors for came out looking like peas. So now I promise you a little piece of history. If you ever were around when Marian Walker was teaching the Copic certification, I took mine in 2008 and I had been already working with the markers for about two years. Didn't really need the class, but I wanted the certificate. So it was fun meeting up with her and all the other people coloring there. I hope this video was helpful to you. Maybe you learned something. There's tons of links in the doobly-doo down below. So please do check those out and I will see you again on Saturday when we talk about earth tones and unique colors. I'll see you then. And in the meantime, go create something every day.