 Hi there, I'm Sandy Olnok and I have been trying out some other alcohol markers. I know I have been unfaithful, but I want to compare them to Copics. I've been asked a lot about other brands of alcohol markers, so I'm going to look at two of them. The Graffit are out of France and it could be Graffit but Graffit sounds French and I bought 12 markers for $64 and I have three bonus for another reason I'll explain later and I have 12 of these ABT pros from Tombow for $69. They're $5 more for the Tombows and these Graffit markers have all the colors on the back of this little box that they come in, not 300 and something colors like Copic, but if they're the right colors I don't think we need 300 and something colors. We could do with less. These are refillable and their refills are just a huge deal, $4 for 25 CCs, which is the size of the old Copic refills and the markers are $5.30. So if you can get the refills that dirt cheap then these are a really good buy. So I wanted to find out if they were actually all that and a bag of chips. So I compared the size to a Copic, you can see they're about the same size. The marker caps aren't always the same color as what's inside, which is a little bothersome, but I could get over that for something that's going to be less expensive. The marker body is a triangle rather than an oval or round body and the nib though is about the same, the brush nib. So this is the Copic one and this one of course has the two nibs pictured on the side of the marker and the super brush nib on that one. I don't know if they call it a super brush, but the brush nib is about the same size. The graphite has a stiffer super brush nib or whatever we call that one and I liked it. Maybe it's because it's brand new, that could be why. Maybe it'll soften over time, but all of my Copic markers suddenly felt really floppy next to these and I liked that a lot. I actually liked it for coloring better. I pulled out one of my charts. These are charts that you can download for free from my website if you need swatching charts and I'm doing half of each of these butterflies in the graphite color on the left and I did a color match to Copic on the right because I wanted to be able to do some apples to apples tests with them and have the same kinds of colors so I'd know whether things were different or not. And the color matching was easy for these, aside from of course caps not matching things, but the color matching went well. I find with cheap brands of things they tend to pick really weird off colors. I don't know if they're deliberately looking for colors nobody else has or if they just have bad taste or if it's cheaper to make ugly colors. I don't know, but the fact that I could find good matches in Copics, that just stands up in my book as far as having a good set of markers. I don't know what the full 96 is going to look like other than those teeny teeny tiny swatches on the back of the box, but I am curious about them for sure. And so each one of these gets its little butterfly colored in. The other three markers that I showed you, I will swatch as well here and yes they do have a black, they do have a colorless blender which is that one right there that I'm kind of putting invisible ink on. The other three colors I was talking to the folks at Imagination International who are the distributors of these markers and I said but I don't have anything to blend with, I have this rainbow set, it's not really helping. So they sent me these three and they're basically slightly darker versions of three of the colors I have and they blended fine. Like it almost was not a helpful exercise to have other than knowing that they do have ranges in each one of these colors. But again, until I see all the colors I won't really know whether they're all the right colors. I don't know what their full range of purples will be so that I can see how they all work together. So next let's take a quick look at the ABT pros from Tombow. My first mistake was dumping the box out. I did not realize that inside the box was a nice little plastic tray. I could have just pulled the tray out and that would have been a lot tidier. So there we go. I had to put them all back into the container again. But the markers themselves are clearly very much a Tombow marker. If you have their water based markers, these feel very much the same. Same size, same weight, same feel in your hand. And comparing them to a Copic marker, they're obviously taller and skinnier. They are also not refillable, which is a huge bummer. And they have a chisel nib and a super brush nib. And I keep saying super brush nib. It's just what I'm used to calling the Copic ones. But they have the, you know, decent brush nib, decent chisel nib. Not sure why you need both on one marker. Because I've never thought that was a smart decision from Copic either, except for the fact that I can use the chisel nib with my Copic airbrush, which is apparently going out of production soon. So if you want one of those, go get it. Because I'm really bummed that that I have heard rumors that they are not going to be making it anymore. Okay, back to the Tombows. Doing the same color match with them. And marking down the colors that they have written nice and big on the side of the marker. The others obviously had it on the end of each of the pens. The color name or color number, shall we say. These I found the color matching to be tougher because they're Tombow colors. And if you know anything about water based markers, most of them try to make the brightest, screamiest colors they possibly can. That's just the way that they make those markers. It's the audience they're making them for. And I prefer the richer colors and the more desaturated kinds of natural colors you can get in a Copic. So these are not colors that make me particularly thrilled. But I understand why it fits with their line of colors, the kinds of things that they normally do. So it is what it is. It's not my kind of set of colors. And I suspect their entire line is probably along this same kind of a thing. If you find Copics to be dull and boring, then you will find these to be much more interesting colors for you. But you can tell there's just some little differences in these little stars as I'm coloring each half of them. But they're not bad. They're just not the kinds of colors that I wouldn't actually choose to use. So next up, let's try a little bit of a test and see how they blend. So I took each one of the sets of colors that were sprawled out across my desk and tried to make little rainbows out of them. And what I basically decided from this is that alcohol ink is alcohol ink is alcohol ink. The difference would be in the color and the delivery system. So if you like the colors you got, then you're good. If you like the delivery system, the pen and the nib, then you're good. The colors blended between all of these. They all work eventually. It's just a matter of working at how different the colors are. When you're going from a really light color to a really dark color, it's just going to be harder. But all of these, the inks that are in them seem to work about the same. It's just a matter of how different they were from each other that made things harder or more difficult or more easy with each of the different sections. So that's where my focus turned when I started thinking about, do I want any of these markers? Do I need any of these other brands in my life? And then I thought, well, let's do a real-world test. Because swatching only does so much for me. I wanted to see what would happen if I tried to actually color something. And I printed out a giant version of a digi from Sweet November Stamps, who sent me this lovely little set of digis to play around with. Link will be in the doobly-doo if you like mermaids and you want to go see some of their stuff. They have whales and fish and all kinds of things to go with them. But these are the Tombow markers. And I found them to be a real pain in the drain in a number of different ways, particularly that a bunch of them were dry. And they weren't completely dry, but they were dry enough that they felt like a copic when it's on its way out. And I'm going to be grabbing from my refills. And that was a bummer to find right away that a whole bunch of them did not have all that much ink in them. And that that was depressing, thinking of all the money that I'd spent on them as well as the fact that I can't re-ink them. I could probably find the the color, the copic color that I found was near it and just add that, just drip a little bit of it onto the nib itself and sort of pretend like it's refillable. But that would seem kind of silly because I could just use the copic marker instead. So I was disappointed in that and the colors, again, are not quite my colors. So I was not super thrilled with the way that worked out. And given the fact that I already didn't like things like the non-refillability of them and the cost of them, that just kind of sealed the deal for me. So these graphite markers, I'm using the greens that they gave me and they blended just fine. As I said, they're, you know, they're a mid-tone and a light and mid-tones and lights are just going to work. This is using that little tiny fine nib. I thought it would be really cool on hair. It looked really dorky. But the cool thing is, even though it looked dorky, I could get rid of it by putting other colors over it because it's alcohol ink. That's alcohol in that pen. So I can blend it back and make it go away. I can easily see using that tiny nib for making things like patterns on fabrics and all different kinds of fun little details. Maybe not hair or maybe doing hair on a smaller scale. Like this big one just, it didn't seem to work particularly well. But I can, I can definitely see maybe using those. The skin tone choices I had were pretty miserable. I had an orange and a yellow and a colorless blender and a brown and I tried making a mix out of them. Started by just making a puddle of the brown to add to things. And then I thought, well, maybe I can mix a color on that little puddle. So I added yellow and orange into the brown and none of that worked. So finally I switched to the daggone Copic and just made her a dark skinned mermaid and just used the, the graphite brown for the shadows and then blended it out with a Copic. I just couldn't, couldn't handle it. Not having the full set of colors was definitely a problem here. And a lot of their colors I was trying to mix a pink with a red. And yes, you can do tip to tip, but it just didn't sing. These were not colors that I think were meant to blend from one to the other because there's not really good transitions in this set that I bought. And given that I would have to have the full set of 90 something colors to make it work, that could be a problem in trying to make all this happen. One of the things I did do to pull this back together was add that mid-tone yellow, the extra yellow they sent me and put it right over top of that pink area. And yes, I lost the pink, but things seemed to blend a little bit better together once it had a middle level type of color. So that wasn't necessarily my happiest experiment in coloring, but I did decide on a few things. So while I color this gal, this same stamp in Copic markers, I will talk about my final decisions, my thoughts on these two sets of markers. And yes, I'm using skin tones that I want to use. I'm going to use my purples for shadows and a skin tone mid-tone to bring it back to looking skin tone after I get the purples in. But the rest of the colors I will be using are the ones that I pulled out for these two sets of matchings to these markers, just so that I'm not cheating and going for my favorite kinds of colors to blend because I wouldn't choose any of these colors to color this stamp. I'll just, I'll just be honest with you. These are not colors that I would pick. And maybe I'll, you know, get another one done in what colors I would pick and color that up and put it over on the blog. But let's get to my assessment of these markers. The Tombows first, I am a big no on those a big, big no. I am really disappointed in them. I see why everybody wants to compete with Copic, but they should not compete with Copic. They're the fact that they're not re reinkable, that they're more expensive to start with, that their color selection is not what I am interested in anyway, just makes them something that I'm not really particularly interested in. I could also see myself easily confusing them on my table for the water-based markers. I would have to, I don't know, put tape around them to remind myself that they're alcohol markers because they look pretty much like their other markers. They're the same caps and stuff. So yeah, I'm a no on those. They're going to go in the prize box. So someday when somebody gets a prize box in the next couple months, they're going to have a set of markers in there. The other set, the graph feet, I am much more interested in. I liked the nibs on them a lot. I liked the feel of the marker in my hand. I love the price. I think that is a huge selling point. The biggest concern for me is what are all those colors? I almost would have to sit with the full set of markers for a couple months and color a bunch of stuff with them and see if there are colors that I miss. Are there colors that I can't easily mix from stuff that's already there? I'm big on layering colors. I don't need to have every color in my collection. I would be fine with having a smaller batch of markers to work with, but I am also not interested in buying 100 markers and spending all that money just to see if I like them. But the reason that I find them interesting is because of what's going on over at Copic. Copic was supposed to come out with, I heard, the spring new refill bottles. And I saw on one site, one retail site, they posted pictures of the bottles and the price that they were going to be. And they indicated that it's going to be half the size, the smaller bottles, but they're charging the same price. Now that's just one retailer. It could well be that once they actually do come out that it's going to be fine and they're going to have better pricing and stuff. And it'll be within the realm of normal. But if they're doubling the cost of refills, that's going to be a major problem. So I'm hoping that that website was wrong, but that's one of the reasons why I'm entertaining other options because even though I have all the markers, I have refills for everything right now. Long term, I don't know what's going to happen. If they price everybody out of using them for art and for crafting and stuff, then I can see myself maybe shaking my loyalty and finding something else that's going to be equally as good for a better price. So if anybody comes into a lot of money and wants to buy a full set of these graphic markers and send it to me and I will test them out and try them and see if I like them and then send them back to you, then I would do that. So if anybody's got independently wealthy lots of mula, then I would be very curious to run that experiment with these because I think they have they have a lot of good things going for them as I've said. But for right now, I'm not jumping ship. I am not leaving using my Copic markers because I've spent a lot of money on the markers and the refills and I'm going to keep using them till they're gone. I'm just curious about the future long term to see if there's other options out there. If anybody is going to make a product that's going to rival Copic for the quality of what they've produced. And I also want to see what these nibs I want to see how long these nibs last and stay stay nice and that sort of thing. So there's a lot of testing that I would want to run before I fully endorse anything. But I'm much more curious about these than I am with the Tombows. So there's my two cents worth might be worth maybe a penny, even though I call it two cents, but there you go. I hope this was helpful to some of you who have been entertaining the thought of potentially trying some new markers. You can see I'm adding yellow because yellow is my friend everywhere. I just love yellow. So this needed more yellow. All right guys, I hope you enjoyed this. If you did click the like button. If you learned something, let me know in the comments and I will see you again very soon in a new video because I put out new videos all the time. There's also links to all the stuff I used. There's links to the Sweet November stamps. There's links to my classes if you want to learn how to color and I'll see you later. Take care. Bye.