 Hi there, it's Sandy. And today I'm going to give you a first look at my unboxing of Sketch Markers. It's a Slovenian brand of alcohol markers. They reached out to me and asked if they could send me some markers for a review. And I said, sure, okay, why not? And I got my Christmas PJs on because it felt like Christmas in the studio by the size of the box. And you can see they sent some other goodies too. The set of markers that they sent, by the way, has some issues with it. I'll talk about those, but they also sent me a pack of 36 markers that don't have the same issues. So I'm gonna not include those other markers in this review because I already filmed this and I wanna get this up and it's already a really long video. So we're gonna set the other set of markers aside and I'll talk about those another time. Okay, this is the 48 set. And it comes with stickers you can put on things, as well as a little booklet that would contain if you wanna swatch them out in it, all 448 of their colors. And this is what the markers look like. They are a round body marker, but they have little wings. I don't know if that's what you call them on each cap. So as long as one or the other cap is on, they won't roll off your desk and then your dog won't want to go eat them. I'm just gonna put that out there for anybody else who has dogs who like to eat pens. They have markings on two sides of them. One is the chisel nib, the other is the brush nib. You could also get them in a bullet and chisel combination. And on these, the gray line is where the chisel nib is. It's the opposite of Copic. They have a stick-on label and they have the names and numbers of the colors on the top. Their numbering system I don't know yet. I'm just gonna tell you, I have no idea how they calculate their numbers or anything and that will again be for a later video. You'll hear more about that. The first thing I did after opening the markers was to open one of the pads so I could have something to swatch on. So I wanted to see how these were. A good friend who I've known since forever ago in Copic days, said that she's had a set of these markers and that the Japanese nibs and Japanese inks are fabulous. She's been super satisfied with them and I was really curious. And I just decided I'd swatch out both ends of a couple of these pens and then I got it in my head to see if I could guess in my pea brain what color Copics would match it. So we could kind of see what the strokes look like and any differences between them. And that is a BG15. How close is that? Do I have my act together or what? And this is a YR24. Ba-da-boom, ba-da-bing. I know my colors. So let's look at the other things that were in the box. They sent a small pad of Bristol. It's a very heavy, heavy paper. Super thick. And then they also sent a sketchbook and it's very standard sketchbook paper from what I can tell. I have plenty of other marker sketchbooks with this paper in it. They also sent an illustration pad which is kind of halfway between those two. Not a marker paper, but it's not that heavy Bristol. So it's a little bit in between. They also sent this pack of liner markers. And I don't know if there's a bigger range of number sizes. This is a 005 to a 0.7. And what I decided to do was use one of these and start making a grid so I could swatch these 48 colors. So they have a nice metal tip on the front of them. And I started using my little T-square to make a simple grid. I didn't want to get fancy and do anything crazy with it. I just wanted to get the colors on a piece of paper because I needed to see that in order to decide what I was gonna draw for test samples because I never just gauge anything by swatches. I may swatch, but I don't make judgments just by swatching. But what I realized is that markers come in crazy order. And I have heard this from others too that the markers are in wacko order in the containers, whether it's in the wallets or in these acrylic cases. So yeah, I decided I would reorder them before I started doing my chart. You'll also notice that some of these have the number rubbed off on the top. And that is what my issue was with this particular set of markers. They have told me that both the company, the manufacturer in Slovenia and the US distributor have said, nothing else has ever happened to any other shipment of markers, but everything that came in this one shipment must have gotten squished or so. I don't know what happened along in shipping, but the top of the box rubbed on these letters. They have assured me that they have not had returns for these because of this issue. And my friend who has these markers and has had them for a year and a half, said she has never had this issue with any of the tips of the markers. So I'm gonna try to trust them on that. And that was why they sent me a second pack of markers so I could see that their markers don't come like this normally. And I do believe them because the wallet did not have this issue. So back to what I'm doing here is arranging them, trying to do the yellows with the yellows and the blues with the blues and the reds with the reds. I kept changing my mind because I couldn't really gauge where each one should be. I was trying to figure out a few things, one of which was you see me peeling off and sticking back on those labels. Since some of mine have the number coming off the end, I knew I was gonna need those labels if they kept rubbing off. I didn't know if that would. So I was carefully peeling them away. So be careful when you get yours out of your pack in case any of those labels do slip off. All right, I am relatively satisfied here-ish with the order. I kept moving them and then switching them around. Okay, right when I think I'm good with it and I was like, no, gonna have to move all the grays to the other side. And you know what I realized at this moment? This was when I realized the low digits like the SG-1 and SG-2 and SG-3, those are the darker colors. And the ones with an eight and a nine in them are the lighter colors. The whole thinking is gonna have to turn upside down if you use these, if you're used to Copics. If you're not used to Copics, this is gonna be no big deal for you. So just gonna put that out there. And as I said, I don't know anything about their numbering system, but I have been told there is a full set of these as a loner coming to me so that I can make a hex chart for these. I'm gonna tell you these are not my first choice in terms of alcohol markers personally. I'm not gonna be switching to these, but what I'm really curious to see is a comparison of the colors. And I wanna find out if there's some of these that fill in the gaps that I felt have been missing in the Copic collection. So I am really excited to start digging in during my sabbatical to that whole collection and see how all this plays out. And I also would like to be able to come up with some recommendations for you if you're interested in buying them. Right now I have no idea. I can tell you don't get this pop set unless you just wanna do flat color. This has a really great and broad selection of all the colors. It has a little bit of everything, but it doesn't have really good deep blending types of things. So I had some struggles with my blending, particularly with this set. I'm really good at making up blending. I can use all kinds of markers together. And I struggled with this just because there weren't great blending colors. But again, that's my fault because I chose this set. I wanted a 48 set because I wanted the broadest view of what their colors were like. I wanted to get a feel for whether they were grayed out kind of desaturated colors or were they really hot bright colors? And how were they gonna play out on the page? So this color collection did give me a good view of that, but it didn't give me a good view of blending. But you will see I did accomplish some of what I'm known for, which is massive layers and creating some realism. I got out the sketchbook and I decided I wanted to try to create a fall scene because it's fall while I'm filming this. And I thought it would be nice to make some trees. Now, there is not a really nice bright equivalent of my favorite yellow in this particular set. I was struggling with that because I wanted really bright yellow trees because that's what we have out my window. And I love that color. However, I had to settle for others and started building my layers. One of the things that I realized quickly on this is that the marker paper and having just a big swash of flat color is very different than using it in context in a drawing. And that's one of the reasons why I tell people not to just rely on the swatches. Because if you're just looking at the swatch, you might think that, you know, color X and color Y are gonna look great together. There are some colors in here that I thought were going to blend that didn't because when you use them in real life together, when you're trying to layer them over top of each other, the colors do some funky things. There were some colors here that got muddier than they should have, necessarily from my brain's thinking, looking at that swatch. I'm curious to see whether that's gonna flow out over the entire collection. I have no idea right now. But for the most part, I was really pleased with the nibs on these. They feel very much like the alcohol ink markers that I use now, all the Copics. And they also are going to work really well with Copics. Any alcohol markers are gonna work great together. As long as you're using great colors to go together. If you're using crappy colors that don't go together, you're gonna have trouble in any case. But you can always use any brand of alcohol markers together in one drawing. So if you have a color in one collection that you like more than another, feel free to use them together. The difference is gonna be in the kinds of colors each company has, where they're made, how light fast they are, and whether they get muddy or not. I had a lot of mud troubles with these. But again, I'm making up colors because there are intern colors that I don't have. And I am really excited to see what it's gonna be like when I have the full set to be able to really play with it and see what I can do and how far I can push it. Now this paper was really cool. The marker did not go through. There's one little dot that sunk through the paper, but that was pretty nice that the paper survived all of those layers. So let's do a first blending test. And this is where I'll kind of get into a little more of the blending issues that I had with it because of the colors that were in this particular set. I'm gonna guess that there's gonna be way better colors when I have the full set. And there were these colors that have Vs in them. So they're calling them violets. I would call them red violets. Nonetheless, get my own brain out of my own way. And what I found was that light pink color that I started with and then the mid-tone color should have blended by the looks of the swatches, but they didn't. The reddishness of the darker color doesn't really look that different when you're looking at the swatches, but boy, when you're trying to blend them, it did. And I struggled with that. I also had a really big gap between this orangey yellow and the really bright, simple yellow, the light one. So I couldn't soften the darker yellow. I couldn't soften that edge. So I had to use some tip to tip, which is not the end of the world either. But I don't know what the cause of that was, whether it was just too big a gap in colors or whatnot. But finished off my little snail. And this was just a quick test to see what it's like to do one large area with just a blend in it. And look at that marker paper, man. That stuff didn't bleed through at all. So that was pretty nice. I mean, it bleeds through the paper, but just ghosting as opposed to dirtying up the next sheet. Okay, card making test. I know lots of you are card makers. So let's try a stamped image on Nina. Because this is what I normally use. I felt much better here because the marker papers are not something I'm used to blending on. And I don't tend to find that they get really smooth blends anyway. So I wanted to see if I was pushing those papers to do something that they aren't able to do. There were some browns in this that I figured I could use for blending. And I picked out some coordinating Copic colors so I could do this sketch marker test on the left. And I'll do the Copics on the right and just compare how they do. And for the most part, the only big difference I saw between them is when I started putting in the lighter colors on top of the darker colors, they did this thing that I've talked about in a lot of my videos before, they eat away at the darker colors. In my brain, whether or not this is correct, in my brain, the lighter colors would have more of whatever makes colorless blender. And so it erases whatever was there. And I found that these sketch markers did it more. Now that is possibly because these are brand new markers. And my other markers are not brand new. They are juiced up, but they're not super brand new. So maybe that's part of it. Again, until I do more real world testing, I don't know if that's a general issue that I'll have going forward with these markers or if it's just, you know, this one particular thing. I did not spend like a ridiculous amounts of time in order to get this out to you. I wanted to give you this first look. So just know these are really preliminary opinions. I reserve the right to change my mind because that's what we get to do in this world. We get to change our mind. So you can see the difference is not great between the two. There's not a vast difference between them. And I'm gonna give a preliminary blessing to these right now for those especially who have wanted to get into alcohol, ink coloring, and you just couldn't figure out how you could budget for that. These are a couple of bucks cheaper than Copics. And one of the things that they have sacrificed has not the nibs. The nibs are good. They have apparently not sacrificed on the inks. These are Japanese inks as well, but they have sacrificed on the body of the pens. And if you're gonna sacrifice on anything, then that's the place to go. So don't hold the body of the pen responsible for your opinion of them either. And I'll talk a little bit more about that too, but let me get to this anime drawing. I'm not an anime artist. That's not my shtick. I'm considering doing an anime class though. I have lots of young students who keep asking, would you show us how to do that? So I did an anime drawing, which you can now download from my art classes site. I put a free download there. And there's a link on my blog as well as over on, in the, it's in the color charts section. I need to find a better name for that on my site. But anyway, this drawing is available for you to color it as well. I ended up drawing it in Copic multiliners. And as soon as I explain this masking, I'll tell you why. The masking, I'm using Eclipse tape and just tracing over top of it, because you can see through Eclipse tape to cover the eyes. Because since I didn't have a huge array of colors, I wanted to test and see if my Copic airbrush would work with this. I didn't want to use Copic markers. I could have jumped in here with some Copic colors, but I decided I would try to see if these markers would also accommodate my Copic airbrush. And if you push it all the way through like this, it doesn't snap in like into place the way a Copic would, but it does work. The angle is gonna be a little different. So if you're an airbrush user, just know you might need to kind of adjust and get used to turning it a different direction. But it seemed to work pretty well here. And I airbrushed over, you know, I masked the eyes, I airbrushed over some of the hair because I'm gonna be able to cover that up with the hair color. So I wasn't too worried about that. Okay, back to the reason why I drew this in my Copic multi-liners. I drew it the first time, because this is the second time I did it, the first time I drew it, I did it in their liner pens. And they worked great when I did one stroke lines. As soon as I did two strokes or three strokes or tried to fix a line or did the thick areas around the eyes, that sort of thing, as soon as I touched those with the markers, it dragged black color. And I was really bummed about that. It could be that you just need to wait longer for those pens to dry. I don't know that yet. Again, haven't done massive testing, but the pens operate fine. They draw really well. I just don't know about that ink and how long it takes to dry. So that's why I decided for these, I would do this in my Copic multi-liners, because I know I can trust them to dry quickly. And I needed to get this project done so I could get the video finished. All right, back to crazy airbrushing. I decided to put darker color in there so I can have a little more dimension around her face. And I knew that this was not really even, but I wasn't super worried about it, because this is just a quick test. I really wanted to test out the airbrush factor, and I wanted to play with those pinks. See on the right-hand side of that chart, over on the right-hand side of the screen, there's a pink and a darker pink and a purple and then the bluish purple. Those are the colors I'll use for the hair. The top two colors are the ones that I thought on the snail were gonna work fine. They didn't work fine, and they didn't work fine here either. But there's another thing that is not working fine for me, which is I am trying to soften the edge of those shadows. I had been looking at anime art just to kind of get some stylistic ideas, and I didn't like the really crisp shadows. They do a lot of crisp shadows in anime, and I tried to soften it. But what happened was when I went over the airbrushing with the sketch marker, it erased enough color that I then had to go in and just fill in the whole section because I got weird white lines on the outside of it. It was like it bleached it out or something. And you can't really see it as I'm kind of going here in fast motion, but you'll notice in a second when I pointed out to you exactly the issue that I'm talking about because down in the bottom under her neck, there is a white line. And that's what this did. It just erased that. Now, sometimes Copic marker will do that too, but I didn't have alternate colors. Usually I'll use a darker color than that when I'm trying to draw over top of airbrushing and I didn't have an option. So in this particular case, I just decided to mask out the chin in the same fashion I did before tracing it onto the eclipse tape and then airbrushing it. So a little darker neck, so what? No big deal, right? So next up, I decided to use pinks and greens for this. I wanted to test out the greens because there's at least a reasonable collection of them in the pop art style set and started with the light green, moving into the darker shadows at the top and then starting in with greens coming down that would be lighter and lighter. And there were some things again that I noticed here, the lighter colors did eat away at the darker colors in the same kind of a way as previous. So that may be an indication or it just might be that I don't have the right colors that I'm using here. I don't really know that. And not gonna make any major judgments on that. It's just something I'm gonna be keeping an eye out on. And next I decided I would use some grays and see how it worked to shadow her eyes with grays. And that came out much better. I started getting a really nice dimension across the eyes with that and then also added grays into the whites of her eyes because if you look at your eyes or someone else's eyes, notice they are not white just like their teeth are not white white. There's very few things in this world that are white white and putting color in them is just fine makes them look much more natural. So now we move on to her sleeve. I'm gonna use the same greens. And again, I'm gonna push it to try to see if this whole idea of the lighter colors eating away at the darker colors is really a factor. And here I've got a nice big area to do that in. And my shadow color is almost gone. So I had to go back in and add another layer. If you get these and that's an ongoing issue then just layer on more color or start with darker colors. And that's a solution for that. Every marker brand is gonna have its own set of issues. I'm not really saying that this is a deal breaker necessarily, it's just not something I'm used to. And if I were to advise you on getting something I want you to know maybe some things that you can do to accommodate some of the factors that are in the product because I don't like to recommend things that you think are gonna act one way and then they don't. So here's where I went with the pinks. The first time I did this, I tried doing blended hair. I tried blending that pink that's on the top and the secondary one. The second color is really red when you put it over top of this pink. And you'll see that in just a minute. So I'm putting in the darker color what I was considering was gonna be my dark for this because I wanted that flavor of that bright pink because I wanted to see how long it would last. A lot of alcohol inks will dye down. They dry and they turn a little softer and I wanted to see if I could retain that real flavor of pink hair. But here's where I'm putting in that second color that second pink and look how red it is compared to the first pink that the difference is vast. And when I tried to blend them that didn't work very well but I grabbed my airbrush and I just airbrushed over the whites instead of trying to blend everything. And I did the same thing with her hair on the other side as well. Finishing that off with airbrushing too. Then I wanted to push some color back. And here's where my knowledge of color theory is helpful for me with this set of pens. So to push it back, I used another V. This is a V3 one. They're including their warm and their cool purples in one color name. I'm really curious to see the whole thing. I wanna see how, if I can figure out how the brain works of the person who named them and numbered them. But I'm pushing the color back with this darker bluish color but the bluish color doesn't really work with the pink. I want the hair to still feel pink. I don't want it to feel blue. So I went over it again with that dark purple color to try to pull that back into a color that feels more like the rest of the hair. And that worked pretty well to do that. It started getting a little bit muddy. And again, these are not the greatest blending colors in this set. So I'm not sure if muddy is overall gonna be my feeling about these colors, this whole brand, or whether it's just this set. Or maybe I'm just a complete color nerd and it's not an issue at all. It's hard to say. You would think that 24 minutes into a video, I might be able to cobble together some advice for you if you wanna buy some of these sketch markers. And I really don't have any I can offer at this point. I only have looked at one set and the set of loner markers, which will be the full set, is not here. It will arrive in a few weeks. And then I'll need some time to process through that and test colors and do comparisons and all that kind of stuff. So put your patient pants on for that one. That'll be a while. However, I would like to share some definitive things I can say and I wanna share some general advice on buying alcohol ink markers. Cause I know Santa wants your list and maybe some of that general advice will help. So first off is the definitive things. Number one is I will not be getting rid of my Copic markers and switching to sketch markers. I'm just not. I'm not a brand ambassador for either company. So this is my own opinion, my own choice that I'm gonna stick with my Copics. I know them, I love them, I trust them. They have been very consistent throughout all of these decades that I've been using them. The markers are built like little tanks. They work really well. I only had one that developed a leak and that was cause I stepped on it. Okay, well, I had another that my dog ate. But aside from that, there were no marker fails in my personal history and the inks are super consistent. I always get the same color every single time and I know I trust it. The nibs are great and can be replaced just like the ink inside. Now the sketch markers, you can also replace the nibs and replace the ink. So those two parts are the same. The difference between them is the marker bodies. The Copic ones I said are made like little tanks and I don't feel the same about the sketch marker bodies. There's a good reason for that though and the company will be the first one to tell you that. They were trying to bring the price down and to bring the price down, they actually had to sacrifice something. They chose as a bunch of companies don't choose. They chose not to sacrifice the nibs. They're still using really good Japanese nibs and they're not sacrificing the inks. The inks are good. So from an artistic perspective, you're getting the good value there. The place where they cut the cost was on the pen bodies. They're smaller than Copic sketch pens and that means they're probably going to need re-inked more often. I couldn't find an ounce number for the sketch markers. So I don't know ounce for ounce how they do compare and I'm sure someone will find that out and get that information to me at some point but I just from the size of them, I believe that you'll probably need to re-ink them more often which is not a huge deal and depending on how much you color that might not be a problem at all. The ink on the outside of the pens as we've already talked about had scratched off on the top just from a shipping incident and some of the sticky labels on the side came off. Those may not be deal breakers for you either. Maybe you're not into the cosmetic and maybe having a cap on one side that has the name on it and the other one doesn't is not a big deal for you. Maybe you'd rather save that money and you're still getting a good nib and a good ink to go inside of it. So for some people, this is gonna be a great purchase and for other people, I don't want you to be disappointed. I want you to honestly know what you're getting if you purchase these markers. Okay, now for my advice for anybody buying any alcohol markers because I can't give you advice on specific colors here but I always say, find what you want to color the most first. Figure out what that is. If it's flowers, then go get yourself some pinks, maybe some yellows and some greens for the leaves and just get yourself a selection in those. Try to go for, if you can, a range of like five going from the very lightest to the very darkest. So pinks from very pale pink to a very deep pink and go for yellows going from a very pale yellow to a rich Y17 kind of a yellow. Go for greens that go from light to dark. So then you have some potential ranges in between all of those. You may not need all of them but you can do dark pink flowers and light pink flowers and then you can do light pink flowers that have deep shadows. So think about the kinds of things you want to color and focus on those colors first. Don't worry about buying all the pens because it's gonna take you time to get used to coloring anyway. So just start with what you really need and then expand from there as you start getting more confident in your coloring. So that is my advice. I'm gonna just leave it to you about what kind of colors you want right now. If you need them right now or do you want to wait a little while longer until I get some charts out there and can kind of give you some better advice. All right, that is it from me. I will see you again very soon. You know me, I'm gonna come out with a video in a couple of days because that's how I roll. See you guys later. Bye-bye.