 What causes alcohol marker to look so flat on colored card stock? Even if you add some of the fine details in a black pen, well, I've got the answer for you. And that's because the paper you're using is a mid tone color of some kind, rather than being a nice bright white to give you those white highlights. You don't want to add white on top of that because you're generally going to end up with something that looks like a pale yellow highlight. Instead darken using colored pencils, the darkest areas and make them nice and rich and have sharp detail in them that you can get with colored pencils. And then you can end up with a card that looks like this. Let me know if you try it.