 Hello there, it's Sandy Allknock and today I have a week-long fiesta beginning on water based markers. So I have a video coming out Tuesday and Friday this week so stay tuned for those. Subscribe if you have not and make sure you tap that bell so you get notified when I've got another video out. I'm going to be comparing crafty markers versus fine art markers. So we can look at the performance of them, what they look like, how they color, how they water out. So you can decide for yourself if it's worth it to you to get fancy markers or if you're totally fine with what you've got because I'm going to compare a bunch of brands. All of this is in advance of the travel sketches class that I just launched to show you some marker techniques in a mini-class, five lessons. We'll do five different national parks and I'll show you how to create all of this. There are some areas that can be stamped if you're a stamped watercolor kind of person but you can draw them and paint them if not. And there's also lots of drawing to do but they're very simple things and I'll walk you through all of it so please don't be stressed out. There's more information on the class in the doobly-doo so if you're interested in that right now great otherwise I will be talking about it more later on this week. But for now let's get started on a swatching fiesta. I'm going to focus the comparison on those two brands that are my new ones but I'll bring in some others that you might know of so you'll have some comparison to what you already have. Sketch marker aqua. There's 72 colors available and they sent me the 36 set that's their animal set. And I don't know what's in the other colors, I haven't researched all that but this is the 36 set. It comes with a carrying case, a color blending palette. You can scribble color on there and pick it up with your brush and paint with it. And then three trays of pens and the pens are in the order that I chose to put them in. They come in a different order and it comes with an aqua brush and they have a coloring book that goes with it. Now I'm just going to tell you that paper is terrible. I don't like this paper, it's coloring book paper, I don't like it for water based markers and I'll talk more about paper as we go and show you why because paper drives me nuts. I'm a paper snob. So it also has a tray at the bottom that has a palette in it so you can scribble marker color in there and mix some water and make up your own colors that way. Now the other set is the Albrecht Dora markers and I bought the full set of 30 because when you buy the full set they're $3.33 instead of $6 per pen. So artist grade anything is going to be more expensive but 333 is not that much more than $2.50 per pen which is what the sketch marker and Tombow and all the others are generally in that $2.50 to $2.75 range and I just decided to suck it up and get the full set because it was pretty. It's a beautiful rainbow. So I'm going to start with a four brand comparison on good cotton paper on Arches Cold Press. The size on the Tombow and the sketch marker are about the same, the Albrecht Dora is a little chunkier and the clean color is a brush nib and it does strange things because it's a plastic brush but the Tombow and sketch marker both seem to be I think felt but they color very differently and you'll see the comparison. There's bullet nibs on three of these and not on the Zig Clean color and they can write about the same size but your pressure will make a difference in how thick the line is. So I'm going to do the same test here on Arches and I'm going to do it in a minute on some cellulose paper just to get a comparison and show you why I recommend a cellulose rather than a good watercolor paper because you know me, I love good watercolor paper, love me some Arches and markers are just not at their best on this but I'm going to do the same exercises here applying a swash of color and you can see the difference in the nib. I mean just look at that. It's amazing and the writing nib it just really depends on how much pressure you put on. I can make this nib get really thin and light or I can press harder and get a thicker line. Same thing with this even though it's a chunkier nib and has the ability for the Albrecht Dora to get a darker thicker line I can also just use less pressure and lighten it up. So now I'm going to take a brush with just some clean water on it and do a swoosh over the color and just see what happens with each one of them and you'll notice that Tombow, Zig and Sketch marker all change color. We're going to talk about that a little bit more in this video too and the Albrecht Dora stays black which is one of the features of the Albrecht Dora markers. They don't change color. If you view some of these other brands you may have found that your marker just kind of went crazy when it hit water which sometimes drives me nuts. I'm learning to work with it instead of fighting it. But on each of these you can use the color that's already drawn on the paper and touch water to it to get a lighter hue or paint over top of a scribble and get a darker color. Now I'm going to test color blending with just the markers themselves because with some brands if you kind of color over the area where they cross you'll get a blend of color and it's not always great. The Zigs do this better than any other brand that I've found. They do it more cleanly and each of them does it kind of to their own extent. And on this paper it's really hard to get it to go really well. But it's possible to get a little bit more. The Sketch markers did that quite nicely and the Albrecht Dora's did it quite nicely as well. And I'm going to just do a swoosh of water across each one of these in addition to just see what that does to the blending. And I also want to see what it does to the outside edges of the color because I'm a real, I'm a lover of those edges. I love my edges when I'm doing my art and that's why I love good paper because good paper gives you good edges like this. But it doesn't always work for everything and water-based markers have their pros and cons when it comes to this paper. And after we dry all these, you'll be able to tell the difference between what's working and what's not. When it's wet, things may look like they're doing OK, but once they dry, you'll be able to tell for sure whether or not everything blended or not. And you'll also be able to see the edges. You'll be able to tell whether or not the edges faded off into the paper or were they weird. And here I can really see in a lot of these instances the actual shapes of the scribbles that I made. Because not all of this will melt out. It's just the craft markers have that as a thing they do. But look at the Albrecht Doors. The only place that I can see lines is where I scribbled those hash marks in the box. Everything else melted out to pure watercolor. And that's something that only those Albrecht Doors do. It's because they're artist grade. It's why they're so expensive because they melt out completely. But let's look at all four of these on Cellulose Paper. This is Canson XL. And it's the paper that I highly recommend for marker work. It's super cheap and it works great. And I only use markers generally to do sketching anyway. So using cheap paper is just fine. So I'm trying the blending test on each one of these just to see how the blend goes in trying to just do it with the markers themselves. And now I'm going to go through the same water tests that I did before. Now one of the other things about the craft grade markers versus the full artist grade markers is that craft grade markers are going to change in light. So if you make something and you leave it out in the light exposed to sunlight, it's going to fade sometimes quite rapidly. Like within days, sometimes within weeks or within months. So if you're looking for something that's going to last more, the artist grade are going to be lightfast. At least they say they're lightfast. I have not had time with these Albrecht Doors to do any real tests. I am going to send some swatches to my friend Lisa in Texas because she has lots more sunlight than I do right now. And I'm going to see if she can put it out in the light and tell me whether or not these hold up in that kind of testing. But here you can see the melting is a whole lot better. There's a few places you can still see some brush strokes underneath, but it's much more hidden on this paper. And you get some really interesting edges on the interior of these shapes, but the outside edges are all very hard edges. And look at the edges that we get on the good paper. That's one of the things I love. So I'm kind of torn between whether or not to use the good paper or use the cellulose paper because there's just aspects of both that I like. And you need to pick for yourself what's important to you. So let me swatch out the set for you with all of the capping and uncapping removed so it goes a little faster. This is the animal set. Remember, you can figure out what kind of animals you could color from this. I was expecting more grays and browns and it does have a good number of them. But there were some of those colors. I'm like, what animal would be red? I don't really know. Maybe a fish, but OK, it does have a reasonable selection. It does not have much in the way of greens. Just so you know, if you want greens, check some of the other sets and see what they have in those. But this set has some nice toned down colors. And I'll be stopping the swatching here to show you a little bit of that as we go. I wanted to at least show you the putting of water onto each of these swatches. And this is swatched on the Kansan XL on the cellulose paper. Each one of these lightens to a lesser or greater extent. And some of them change color entirely. Like look at these grays, they go kind of greeny blue. And it's really important when you're using water based markers to do this kind of swatching test and find out if those colors change on you. Some of these don't change at all. They're perfectly fine as is, but there's a few of them that are wacky and that might scare you because they do something crazy. Look at this dark chocolate. Look at that. It goes green. I'm using it for trees in the class that I mentioned earlier. So there's times when the change of color in crafty markers will completely throw you for a loop. And there's other times you can use it to your benefit. So it's important to know what those markers will do. So that you can use them appropriately when it comes time to actually using them. And you'll see dark chocolate in every single one of the videos in the class. The cool gray and the black. Look how blue both of those go. Holy cow, the black even goes kind of teal greenish in color, which can be really fun. But if you need a real black black, then the Albrecht door is going to be the one for you. My first full swatching of the Albrecht door markers was on arches because I was hoping that I could use these on my arches all the time. And I got a hard line, but I want to tell you why. It's because I did the scribbling the night before and then the next day I came back and did the water. I am used to being able to do that on the Kansan XL with my watercolor markers that I've always had because you can always reactivate that stuff. You can't fully reactivate when it's on the good paper. So the marker just sits in there. The color just gets stuck and it's it's just what happens. I will have a video on Friday where I'll show you a full piece that's done in the Albrecht door pens. I'll be doing a sketch from a trip that I took many years ago to a national park. So stay tuned for that so you can see that you can use it on the good paper. If you're going to take the class, though, I'm going to recommend that whatever brand you use, get the Kansan XL for the class, not just because it's a class and the paper is nice and cheap, but because you're going to have more flexibility with it with the good paper, you're going to have to work at it real quickly in order to make sure you don't get those hard lines. So these are the colors from the Albrecht door. Nothing changed color aside from changing to a tint. When you added a lot of water to it, none of them had that color shift to them. So even the black stays very, very, very black as opposed to turning into a weird blue thing. So there's that. I made a conversion chart for 18 colors. And this is going to be in the free pre-class lesson for the class, because these are the 18 colors that are in the class. These are the ones that I used for the samples. So I tried to find something that would match the aqua sketch marker colors because the aqua sketch markers are the ones they did the demos with. So that's the one at the top. There's some of these colors that came out just perfect and everybody has that color in their collection. Red Panda is not one of them. The top three kind of, as soon as you hit them with water, they kind of turn into a yellowish orange. But that 188 in the Albrechtor does not change color. Remember, we've talked about that stays the same and you're going to end up with this rusty color if you only use that. If you want it to be brighter, you can mix it with a yellow. And I'm going to put some notes on some of these colors that, you know, if you want to make something a little more yellow or a little more bright, here's what you add to it. So students can figure that out. But in general, in the class, if you use the markers that are on this chart, you're going to be OK if it's a duller color. That's probably the ones that have the biggest challenge because most of the crafty markers don't have. Kind of softer colors available in them. The Tombows and the Ziggs are generally fairly bright colors. So you might just use less, less color and more water and make it a softer color. And that will generally do you just fine. There's this violet. I thought I'd show you this example. The Tombow turns purple like that. This is a swoosh of two different colors, two different purples. And I'll show you that on a separate piece here just so you can get an idea of how you can mix that color. This is the 082, which is in that third column under the vivid pink. It's the third one down. If you mix it with a darker, bluish purple color, then you can turn the color of that pinkish purple into something richer. You don't have to, but this is just one way to do it. To mix them on paper, you can mix them on the drawing. You can add water to it. Lots of different ways to turn that 082 into something that's going to be darker and more purpley just by combining it with another marker that you have. It's one of the great things about water based markers is that they're really easy to mix up a new color. But as I said, the softer colors are going to be the harder ones like the dolphin. The colors that I put in here are more of a gray color because dolphin is a blue gray color. So your artwork may come out a little bit different than mine just because we have different sets of markers, and that is perfectly fine. The blacks, you can see the comparison here again as we have the different colors. Some of them turn more purpley. Some of them turn more blue. That top one, the aqua sketch marker just goes teal, just crazy teal. But don't worry, you don't have to go out and buy that Albrechtdor black marker because we're going to be doing some pin and ink work on top of the drawing that we do for the travel sketches. So if you've ever been interested in doing some drawing and wanted some guidance to do it, we're going to have the freedom to just do some scribbling with color in the markers and then go over it with pen and ink to refine it and to make it more of a drawing. And tomorrow in the second video in this series, you'll see a little bit about how that works. If you've not seen my wash and ink types of artwork before, that will hopefully give you some confidence that you can do it because I believe you can. And I also will have a video on Friday showing how to do the same kind of a thing but using the Albrechtdor markers. So tomorrow will be the Aqua sketch markers. So here we have that River Blue is another hard one to find something to go with, but it's a sky color or a water color. So you can use the 533. It's perfectly fine. The dark chocolate, again, is the one that turns kind of green. Nothing else will turn green. And there are some things that I just love about the fact that it turns green and you'll hear me just giggle in the class, which might be worth the cost of admission because it's so silly when I get just overexcited about such small things. So there's the conversion chart. And as I said, there's a link in the doobly-do for the class. If you want to go see more about it right now, you can also wait until tomorrow or Friday because I'll talk more about it and show you the sketchbook itself, which is really fun. And I will see you tomorrow for a special extra bonus video this week. Bye, guys.