 Hi guys, welcome back to the average. Today we are testing out this tub of Molotow 20 markers. I'm really excited because I've tested these out before and I really like them but I was always hesitant to buy more because they are quite expensive but you know I thought I would just go for it this time and I do think that they are better than Posca's and I'm going to explain why. This video is brought to you by Squarespace from websites and online stores to marketing tools and analytics. Squarespace is the all-in-one platform to build your beautiful online presence and run your business. So I think they're better than Posca's because of this like colour range that they have. First of all they come in this really cool little tin um like this which I think could be quite irritating to open every single time so I'm just gonna keep them like that. They have a much wider range than Posca pens so they have like a lot of different ones and you can also buy empty ones and make your own colours which is really cool I think we're gonna try that one day but yeah they just come in a lot of different shades whereas Posca's kind of have the same old stuff and I might be wrong they might be bringing out different colours and stuff but I think they're just they're just really nice and they feel the same way as Posca's so why wouldn't I I mean obviously these are a lot smaller but they do have a really thin nib which is nice to work with especially if you're doing like little details I mean Posca's you can buy thin nibbed ones and yeah I just really like them so we're good today we're gonna test them out I'm gonna do some paintings with them like I did with my Posca's that I recently received because I really enjoyed doing that so we're gonna do some classic painting drawings and I hope that you guys will stick along for the ride. So like I said before this video is sponsored by Squarespace and it offers such a great range of website building tools for you. I use Squarespace to host my portfolio site and I really felt like it was useful to have something for people to go to to search for your name and to see your artwork. In the future I'm thinking about selling my comics using my own commerce website on Squarespace and I think that would be really handy I just took a template that I liked and I went with it and then I just uploaded a lot of images that I thought were interesting and then I went to the About Me page and I wrote a little bit of a description about myself and it was super straightforward and easy to use. Please head to the link in the description if you would like 10% off your first purchase of your website or domain, look down below for that link. First of all I started out by watercolouring some base colour down because I thought it would work better to have a colour behind the paints of the pens and yeah I was right with this I think it worked better to have instead of just blazing white an under colour layer so that's what I started out with and that's all the other media that I use in these images. So the first painting I did was Ophelia by John Waterhouse because I think this has such a real cool mood and I really wanted to emulate that somehow or just design it I always really like this image I think I've redrawn it before I think a lot of people like this image because it's just very mysterious and pretty and very serene but it's about Ophelia from Shakespeare's Hamlet and obviously she's about to take her own life because in the play she goes mad by the consequences of Hamlet's actions and that's pretty much the story behind this image so it is a fantastical image because obviously it's fiction so we can see that a lot of stuff is taken probably just made up in his mind and I really like this image it's really beautiful I don't know why because really the story behind it is quite sad even though it's made up the imagery doesn't seem sad it just seems very serene and calming but I really like the way that it looks it's very dark and this was hard to do because I thought what I could do is just do some colors instead of making it so dark but I think in the end I go in with a black pen and I think it helps it but I wanted to do stuff without any lines or black but in the end I think it worked out better to do that so these pens are really good because I'm basically layering and layering and layering them and they're working fine sometimes I get a little bit of flaking off the paper and that's fine because I think these pens are really supposed to be used for painting on like glass and plastic and things like that so when you use them on paper obviously they're not going to be so durable but they still work fine the same as Posca's really you have that issue with Posca's and I think if I just pressed a lot softer it was absolutely fine in areas where I was kind of pressing down hard that's when I noticed that there was some flaking of the paper but yeah I think I pretty much layer these pens over and over and over again and I really love that they're so opaque because I just felt like this is kind of a style for me because I really go for stuff when I paint I don't really like to do too much planning even though I found that I should do planning but sometimes it's just nice to be loose and go so that really works out with these pens because you can just go in over the top of any mistakes and just keep going and it really helps it's really nice to use these they're really smooth they're really juicy as well I found when I first started using this black pen this like there was a wave of like black ink or black paint rather coming out and so I had to like wipe off the excess a little bit but yeah as you can see they're super opaque and super nice I went in with a red pen on her lips and it was the first time I used it so it was like I said quite juicy so the red lips kind of turned into a big red smudge so I go back in and fix it in the end but I waited for it to dry a little bit first before going over with another pen so I decided that because I used the black for the lines around her I wanted to make the dark areas of painting even darker so the values would match because if you have the darkest area you need to match the darkest area in the painting as well because otherwise it doesn't make sense so I think this really rounded it off and I felt like I was doing too much to this piece because even though it's just a small kind of example of how these pens work I was going a bit overboard so in the end I just kind of stop and step away from him as you can see using the white over the black it's super opaque and it was so satisfying to do these little flowers over all this imagery and it just lay her down and be completely opaque I love it it's so nice so these pens they came with like a thin white and a thick white and a thin black and a thick black and I thought that was really handy I really didn't like some of the like this green very much but it was the only greens that I have so I'm not a huge fan of these greens but I think maybe because I wanted to emulate what the the picture was that maybe that's why but if I wanted that green in another situation then maybe it would work out so this next painting is by Edgar Degas and I really love his work I think he's actually probably my favorite artist of the moment like my taste changes and varies as I grow as an artist and my influences but this guy is really influencing me right now because he was a prominent impressionist and I really fell in love with his pieces because they just capture a moment and I really like the way that his paintings feel or the feeling that they give off this is a picture of like a ballet dancer and in the picture you can't really tell at first glance what it is in the background anyway you can tell it's a ballet dancer but as you look closely you can see it's probably the wings of a stage and people waiting behind the wings and then also the scenery painted on the wings and I just think it's so magnificent and you can see you can feel the painting because you can feel like maybe the way that the dancer is dancing like what she's feeling as everything melts away and she's just there by herself but there are things surrounding her and the light is brilliant I just love this painting so much and I really had fun with this one I felt a lot looser using the paints here just smudging where I could and I just love this painting and I think it really the pens really help for this because obviously just layering down paints like this and then smudging with my fingers was a really good way to suggest those paintbrush marks that Degas had used and I really like the way that this one turns out it's very different to the first one that is very careful and stylized whereas this one is just smudges and I don't know it still invokes an emotion and I really like it even though it is obviously a copy I think sometimes copying people's work is really good for your own development obviously don't be like I made this but I think it's really good because you actually you look at people's work in a way that you would not have looked before it just you definitely look deeper at techniques and things like that so I think that's really helpful okay so those are the final images I had a lot of fun doing them I think my favorite is actually this one and I just think that it kind of is more my style but I like this one a lot too and I had a lot of fun with these pens so I'm going to use them a lot in the future and I like combining mixed media so I'm gonna use a lot of watercolor and pencils with these when I use them next because I think that would be like a next cool step for the development of this kind of style so yeah I really enjoyed using these and that's it that's the video thanks again to Squarespace for sponsoring this video there's a link down in the description and yeah that's it see you next time guys bye