 Hello and welcome to my YouTube channel. My name is Sandy Aldock. I'm an artist working in all kinds of mediums and I love to teach. So I love working with artists of all levels. I am going to be talking about alcohol markers today, specifically Olo markers. These are a DIY pen that I reviewed a while back and I didn't really have very many colors in them, but I was interested in them because each half of the marker and you buy them half by half. Each half has the equivalent of a Copic sketch marker in terms of the ink. The nibs were nice and that sort of thing. The markers themselves, I ended up getting all brush nibs. So I have two different colors in one pen. They just screwed together with a little connector. However, I wasn't able to assess the color range. Well, guess what? The colors have all arrived. Thank you to Olo and their US distributor for this, but I was able to make a hex chart and a hex chart meant that I could really dig in and assess the color range of Olo. I discovered some gaps that they have a very few in terms of greens and therefore I decided the second half of this video is going to be about using complementary colors and analogous colors to mix some things that you might not have in your collection, whether Olo markers or not. They work for all different kinds of mediums and all different kinds of alcohol markers. Let's get started. Full disclosure, my friend Lori works for the US distributor for Olo and she coordinated the deal for me to get these markers so I can make a hex chart and the hex chart is of course on my website. That link will be down below. The markers always come with funnel stickers. They come with a brochure that tells you all about the pens, the kind of a DIY marker, their alcohol pens, and you choose your ink color and you choose what kind of nib and you buy two halves of a marker and then you get these connectors in between them to put them together. I'll show you that in a minute. And you can either get one marker that's the same color on both ends with a chisel nib on one and a brush on the other, or you can do what I did, which is get all brush nibs. So each pen of mine has two colors and I'll talk a little bit about some potential issues that could be the value of the ink that's in these, each one of these pens, when you've got two of them together as the equivalent of two Copics, when you're talking about the amount of ink, the refills are a cartridge refill. I haven't had to put any cartridges in, so I don't know that process at this point. You'll probably Google for that. And here's how the markers go together. Well, they come separately as you saw them in the box. Yours will come a little less perfectly arranged in rainbow or like mine did. Just put the thing in little connector and screw it on and you're done. The numbers are on the end of the marker. And if you like calling them by their name or color name, that's on the label on the side. So for those of you who like to do things that way, and the only issue I really had with these in actually using them, while I was doing the hex chart and the drawing that you're going to see is they roll and my desk does not have a lip on the edge. So I was chasing pens around here and there, but that's, that's kind of a me issue, maybe not a you issue. The Olo numbering system, if you are familiar with Copics, it's basically the same ish kind of thing. Let me explain that. Each of the 128 colors has a color family and that's the letter. And there's either one or two letters. They have different designations of letters than Copic does. So if you're switching, then you'll have some, some brain jumping to do, but the numbers still work the same. They just put a dot in between them. So the first digit is the saturation level, the amount of intensity or desaturated grayishness of the color. The second number is the light to dark. So the lower numbers are lighter. And as you get higher numbers, you get darker colors. And this one is a Y2 compared to the Y1. So it's less saturated, but the zero makes it a lighter color than the first one because it's a zero. That's a lighter number. The three is a darker number. It's got a deeper value than the first ones. If we switch over here to the Y8s, these are desaturated colors. They're very grayed out kinds of yellows. And they have a six and a seven as the last number. So they're much darker than the other colors. And you can see that play out a little bit differently in each of the color family. So this is the R zeros on the left and the R ones on the right. And they go from lighter to darker. That number on the right hand side is the one that keeps getting darker as the number rises. So if you're looking for a trio, then look for something with the letter and the first number being the same or similar. You can, you know, you can use the R zeros with the R ones and that sort of thing. But the second number is the one that'll tell you whether you have a light, a medium or a dark. And one of the things that people always get stressed out over is do I have to have all three? No, you don't. You can blend with two colors. You can also blend with mixed colors. I'm going to show you how to use some other colors that are not in the collection if you don't have a particular marker. So coloring a hex chart, you see all the ones there that are available now. If you have any of those sets of markers, you may choose to buy this even before you invest in the markers, because this will help you to actually make some decisions on what you want to purchase. You're not just looking at the colors on a screen. You're looking at the visual organization of the colors. I'm trying to put like colors next to like colors so that you can see right here, the O's and the O R's are both browns. They're in the Brown family, but you can't see them next to each other on the screen to be able to compare which one is really similar to which other one. So the chart that you'll get a blank one so you can color in yourself as you increase your collection, but you'll also get a colored one so that you can see which ones are nearly identical and then just not by those save you some money so you can buy different colors. But you'll also be able to tell whether you've got a light, a medium or a dark in each one of them. And when you're coloring a dark color on a hex chart, I recommend either printing the hex chart out on a piece of acetate and lay it over top because then you'll be able to see the numbers or just write the number on top of the Copic ink with a white pen. And then you'll be able to see them. That's what I'm going to do for mine. And you will also get in the chart that has color in it that you get when you purchase the hex charts, they all come with the numbers on the dark ones in white ink so that you can actually see them. Now, there's a few interesting things as we get over here to the neutrals, all of these grays in this left hand corner. And I wanted to talk specifically about that. They have there's something unique in Olo in their color collection. That they have three blacks, they have one that's a K and they have one that's a BK and they have one that's an RK. They the K is, I guess, like the most neutral, most in the middle kind of one. And there is actually a difference in the BK. It's a little bluer, it's a little cooler. And the RK is much redder. You can definitely see the difference when you're coloring with it. I don't know how much you can see on the screen, but there's definitely a difference between the three. It's not like the Copic 100 versus 110, which I visually can't tell any difference between. I don't really know why they have them, but maybe I'm just color blind on that particular kind of thing. But they do have a collection of cool grays and warm grays. They just do every other one. And I don't know if they have plans to fill in the ones in between. But I wanted to show you also these red grays. They're a much redder, warmer kind of gray, almost a brown. And they just have a few of those as well. I considered putting them in the brown section, but for comparison to the other grays, I figured they'll just sit here. And note, there's an 071 right there. I'm coloring that 071. Always look on your hex chart in weird places because I put colors where they visually make sense. And that one looked much more like the warm grays and the red gray than it did look like a brown. So this is just the piling up of the colors. So you can see how many are in each color group. The YGs and the Gs are seriously short of colors. There's just not a lot there. There's not a lot of variety in hue or in saturation. But there's plenty of BGs, plenty of Bs, plenty of blues. And I am sad that the yellows and the yellow oranges are limited, just not all that many of them. And pink lovers, I have to say, you only have four colors. Sorry about that. But you do have some beautiful purples, lots of purples. And then the O's and the ORs are where they went heavy. So if you are someone who does faces, portraits, animals, that kind of thing, great collection of those. And then the BVs, there's lots of blue violets as well. I'm drawing some Holly today because of something I saw on Sir David Attenborough's Facebook page. He said that Holly is the only plant that can, in a targeted way, change its DNA in part of the plant due to outside circumstances. What that means is Holly normally has smooth leaves until a deer or something comes by and starts nibbling on the bottom of it. And then it changes the shape, changes the DNA of the leaves to make them all jaggedy and pointy. So the animals don't want to eat it. Is that not amazing? I had no idea that was a thing. So I took a picture of some of the Holly and decided that I would draw it today. I know it's post Christmas, but whatever. It's still a plant and it's still a great object lesson for what I wanted to show you. Because sometimes you don't have a color that's what you need to color something with. And you need some alternates. And that's when color mixing comes in. Layering or glazing colors over top of each other. So I've put down the lightest color in each one of these because my photo had no whites in it whatsoever. So I colored a really soft cool pink because that's the color of the highlights. But I wanted to use a dark color. And if you don't have a dark red to go with it, then what you need to do is find either a complementary color to red, which would be a green, or find an analogous to a complement. And in this particular collection, remember I said that the greens are kind of short of colors. And there's just not a lot of options. So I'm using an analogous to a complement. The complement of red would be green. So instead, since I don't have a lot of choices in the greens, I used a blue green. Blue green is next to green on the color wheel. So it makes a reasonable alternate. So really depends on what kinds of colors you have in your collection and what kind of color you want as your result. Test them out on some scratch paper and see which one is going to give you the kind of tone you're looking for. Here I wanted those dark berries that are in behind the front berries. I needed that to just be a dark color to push it to the back of the drawing. And leave that red in the front being that nice bright in the sunlight kind of red color. You can see how nicely that worked. Now one thing that did not work nicely, I'll show you a solution for it, is that I just put a little curve line at the bottom to make a shadow for each of my berries. I did not actually do that right. I would not recommend doing that because you need to do some blending if you can before you add the red color on top. But there is a solution if you forget because I have forgotten many a time and figured it would be more helpful to show you how to fix that rather than only showing you the right way to do it in the first place. Because we all have those moments when we have a little brain fart that changes things and just don't quite follow all the steps we intended to. Now I decided first I wanted to work on those highlights. So I tried out the zero marker. They call theirs a Z-E-R-O. So they don't get confused by just seeing a round circle on the end of the marker name. And what I found which was kind of weirdly interesting I guess, was that it changed that highlight to being more of an orangey type of highlight. So I went back in and threw a bit more of my pink inside that to try to pink it up a little bit. Now here's where I'm fixing the blending. I'm using a lighter blue-green color to blend some of the dark blue-green that was underneath of that. And when you go over top of a color like this you've got really rich red underneath of it. You often don't have to re-blend with the red on top. But if you need to you can go back and forth a few times to try to smooth that out some. But it's a little easier if you do that step first rather than later. I'm using a very dark green in order to put the shadows in these very very deep crevices where the berries aren't really separated. So you can see the difference that good contrast can make when you're doing your artwork. I'm a big fan of contrast because it really gives that illusion of depth. I'm using the red grays on the stem in addition to a bit of purple because I saw some purple in the photo of that that stem kind of a bluish purple color. And then through a bit of the red over top of it as well just to pull it back into the colorway for the rest of the drawing. Now I'm going to do the other berries. I'll do this a little faster this time. And I'm going to use two different blue greens. So this time I'm going to do that softer blending to soften up that outside edge first. And then when I go over it with the red it's a lot less troublesome to start fussing around with. So I would recommend trying to remember to do that step early on rather than later in the process because it's just a little bit easier to do that. As I finish up the berries fixing up the highlights and the shadows on them I realized I had not told you something interesting. I also found out about Holly which is that the berries are called Drupes D-R-U-P-E-S. I did not know that. Learning science is fun. Now let's talk about analogous color mixing because in a collection of markers like the Olos there's not a lot of green options and none of them really seem to work very well for the Holly leaves that I had in the picture that I'm working from. So I began with one of the dark greens and just put it a little touch of it in the areas where there is very very dark green but I had to start figuring out how to blend that with whatever else I was going to be creating. So I had to look for a color that was maybe blendable something near it in value but it was a really desaturated kind of color so this was going to get out of control quickly if I ended up going like full guns with this green because that's not a Holly color. So I only put a little bit of it in so that I could start building up other colors and layering other things in there but I wanted to get enough of these sort of darker mid tones in there before I started my my glazing with other colors so just put some general outlines in there and then tried another one of the greens so like I said none of these greens were the right green for this so you have to then be willing to make up something else but what this does mean if you can start to practice mixing your colors this way you don't have to own all the markers in a collection or you don't have to use a marker collection that has all the colors you need because you can mix them and by glazing them this way just a thin layer of transparent color one color over another glazing is a term that's used primarily in things like watercolor but this is glazing this is the same thing so now I switched over to a different kind of green because the light the way that it was hitting in the picture I had a different kind of green I could work with I could put a little bit more of an olive green feeling here so I went for some of the yellow greens but I still needed to have some of those highlights be a light bluish color because that's what was in the picture I was trying to assess what that color was there was no white highlight so I started switching to lighter blue greens and blues and just layering them over top of each other until I started getting the feel of the color that I was looking for and sometimes you'll have to go back in with a color you had used earlier and add more of it or use some of the zero marker and to try to lift some color out and here I wanted to use also some pink which will tie it in with the berries because this is one of the pinks that I used and I'm using that for all the pock marks that are on the leaf itself because there's little I don't know if they're the plant had a disease or if it was just you know bugs whatever it was had some darker color on it and then went over those with some of the other color it ends up feeling like a brown because the various colors mixed together to make something that approximated kind of brown spots on it I almost got out the colored pencils to work on the veins in this because the photograph had beautiful vein work in there for each one of these leaves but I decided I would just do a quick indication of it with the markers because this video is already long enough so if you're interested in getting a hex chart for your brand of marker whatever brand that is that you use then head over to the link in the doobly do and you can see all the charts that are there and pick one up you could also take the copic jump start class whether or not you're using copics you will learn a ton about how to blend you'll learn about color theory there's just a lot of technique stuff there's a whole bunch of great information in there that works for all alcohol markers you'll just need to translate colors when I give a copic number just go see if you can figure out what color that would be in your brand of marker so check out the photo on my blog if you'd like to try drawing some holly and I will see you guys again next time so subscribe if you haven't make sure you turn notifications on so you know when I've got a new video coming up and I'll see you later go out there and create something every day bye