 Hi there, my name is Sandy Olnok. Welcome to my YouTube channel where I normally share art tutorials. I'm not going to do that today though, because I want to talk about art supplies and one in particular. But before we get to that, I want to talk about something non-controversial in the world of shopping for things. Say shampoo. Let's use that as an example. Picture your favorite shampoo bottle, whatever it is, whatever brand it is. When you squeeze out a little tiny bit on your hand and you ladder up your hair, it gets so nice and foamy and it smells really good. And then when you get out of the shower and you do your hair, boy, your hair looks so healthy and shiny. You look marvelous today. So you've got this great shampoo, but one day you go into the dollar store where you walk by the health and beauty aisle. And one of the things you see there is a bottle that looks just like your shampoo bottle. And you start thinking, hmm, my shampoo bottle cost me $10. This one is $1. How bad could it be for a dollar, right? Your expectations are low. But when you get it home, you get in the shower and you flip that little top up on the plastic top, it breaks off. And you're like, well, okay, I paid a dollar for it. How much did I expect? I'll just turn the bottle over and pour some in my hand and the whole cap pops off, which was kind of fortunate because now you need a lot more of this shampoo because it's practically water. It's not that nice thick shampoo. So you'd put some in your hair and as you're lathering, you realize it smells kind of funky. There's just something a little off about it, but okay, it was still only a dollar. When you get out of the shower and you're doing your hair, you realize you don't look so fabulous anymore. That same experience happens with a lot of the things that we buy in life. You buy something cheap and you know you're going to get cheaper quality. And there are times when cheaper quality is just fine with you. But in art supplies, I would posit that when it's cheap quality, you actually end up not being able to make the art that you want. It becomes harder when you're using cheap art supplies. But let's go back to the shampoo example for a moment. How do they get that $10 bottle of high quality shampoo that you love or a dollar? How does that happen? Well, there's a lot of different things companies can sacrifice when they're making something. And I'm just going to talk about three of them. The first one, of course, is obvious. It's the materials they're making it from. They use cheap plastic on that shampoo bottle so it broke right away. And then when it comes to the shampoo inside, you know, maybe they made the shampoo out of, I don't know, nuclear waste. And so you just put shampoo made of nuclear waste on your head. But they're working in a country that doesn't enforce any health or safety laws. They don't have to put on the bottle that everything is made from nuclear waste. They get to write on the bottle that it's made out of the same things that your shampoo was made out of. Because there's no laws that make them do anything honestly. So they can save money on materials, but they can also save money on R&D. And a lot of times companies will, instead of hiring an expert in shampoo or in plastics or packaging, they'll just go buy a sample of somebody else's existing product replicating what they see in the product itself or through espionage. They get into the computers of the person that they want to steal it from and they find out how it's made and they just make a replica of it. That's called intellectual property theft. When you invent something, you own the rights to that. And there are countries that don't respect intellectual property laws. The third area where companies can save a whole lot of money is on labor. As you know, when you have a job, you expect a decent wage and you expect somebody to maybe give you health care benefits or a 40-hour work week and have decent working conditions, all different kinds of things. Well, there are some places where people don't get to expect those things. They get paid a pittance for wages or they have to work 16-hour days or they have to live on site in the factory. There's countries where you can employ children to work in factories for those same long hours and those same tiny wages. And there are countries where they don't enforce any laws about that. Same thing happens in all industries, including art supplies. Imagine an item, say a stamp set, that would normally retail in the $18 to $20 range somewhere up there. Everybody sells it for $18 to $20. But then you find it on a website for $2. Imagine what they might have had to do to get it down to $2. They had to hire children to make it so that they could pay them a penny an hour. They might have decided to make it out of really cheap material times. They just steal the technology. When it's a stamp set, they will just rip off your favorite stamp manufacturer and remake those stamps and sell them to you really cheap and steal intellectual property from people who are doing great creative work and bringing us great products. So be careful when you're shopping. If it's a deal that's too good to be true, it probably is. All right, after that ginormous windup, let's get to talking about alcohol markers, shall we? Because I know that's what you came for. A number of years ago, Copic Blinked. What I mean by that is they changed some things at the company. They had been stable for a really long time. They had different changes that happened at the company and I'm not privy to any insider information. I can just tell you what I saw from the outside. They changed their distribution system. They changed their pricing. They made up for a number of years of not having increased any prices for a very long time and I kept saying back then, it's coming. They're going to have to increase their prices at some point. And then when they finally caught up to what the market rate should have been, it's scared everybody. They also changed their refill bottles into a bottle that's hard to operate and it's more expensive and that freaked everybody out. Everybody smelled blood in the water and now we are a wash in alcohol markers. It seems like everybody's releasing their own line. There are two brands that I've recommended here before and I still recommend them. One is Olo markers and these come in half marker segments. Each one of these is the equivalent of a full Copic, but you can mix and match them. Olo just needs some more colors to make me happy because they're really inexpensive and they work very well. The other one is sketch markers. These have a much broader selection of colors if that's what you're after and I have done a full video on comparing these markers so I will link you to that in the doobly-doo, but for now let's get back to the subject at hand, shall we? Now I tried these Ohuhu markers when they first came out back in the day and I didn't like them then and I don't like them now. There's a lot of things that are subjective about my likes and dislikes and you're welcome to disagree with that entirely. I don't like these nibs. The nibs are really hard and that means I can't get a good flicking motion with them like I do with a softer Japanese nib. These just don't have that same feel to me and I find it more difficult to get a blend going. I also didn't like their color range. They seem to be a little bit flatter, a little bit duller in colors, not just desaturated, but just weaker overall and they also fade way faster than other brands that I've tried in alcohol markers and your artwork just washes out and I kind of don't like that when I'm creating artwork. I want something that's going to stick around for a while. Another problem I have with these markers is that they are so darn cheap. High-end alcohol markers, Copics are what, eight or nine dollars and then you go down to mid-range. Olos and sketch markers are in the four or five dollars or so and then these are 73 cents. When you buy a 320 pack, that's crazy. How do you get that to 73 cents less than the dollar store for a pen? Is there nuclear waste in here? Are they hiring six-year-olds to make their pens for them? I don't know. I do know that this same body of marker, this same pen is being sold under dozens of brand names that sound very American in their brand names, but they're the same pen. Look at that little curvy thing at the top there, that little dude. Watch out for anything that's got that top on it because it's probably manufactured in the same place as these are. So just be aware of that, but if that doesn't matter to you, you might still have a problem with Ohuhu markers because of finding blending groups. Why is it so hard to find a blending group among these pens? What is the deal? I want to let you know that it's not you, it's the pens, and there's two reasons for it. One is because they sacrificed on the R&D and didn't hire any color experts to name and number their system. It makes zero sense. I examined the Honolulu set up one side and down the other and tried to figure out if there's any commonality and why they would have numbered this one this way and numbered that one that way and it just does not jive. It could be a language barrier. I'm not really sure. Maybe it is, but it they could have also just hired five different people and handed them each 20 pens and said go, go name these and they just did it that way. All kinds of numbers, things that are crazy, but even if you don't pay attention to the numbers and you just look at the letter, you know, every marker has a letter in the family name like ours for red, right? You would expect all the red markers to be red. No, half the red markers are purples and then there are some true blues in the red markers and then they have red violets and they have purples. Why do they have two names for those I don't know, but then they also have red purples. They have two red purples and then they have green yellows which is the majority of their yellow green colors and then they have two YGs. Why did they just have two? Two. They couldn't just make those GYs and match everything. Just crazy. And for a full on nerd out, look at the grays. They have CGs which I think of as cool grays and they have CG twos with Roman numeral CG two, not CG one and CG two, but CG and CG twos and some of them are labeled full grays, but some of them are labeled neutral grays and then they also have ends which are neutral grays. Why do they have both? I don't understand any of their numbering system and so if you're trying to use the numbering systems, just give up on that because it's useless. The second reason that it might be difficult to find blending groups among Ohuhu markers is because the cap colors do not match the ink colors. In some cases they're lighter, some cases they're darker, it's nuts. How are you supposed to look across the bag of markers and find the color that's going to go with what you're needing to draw? I don't really know. With these kind of crazy factors working against you, it's no wonder you're having trouble finding blending groups to use for your Ohuhu markers. It's also probably the reason why my number one request for a new hex chart for years now has been for Ohuhu markers because everybody has the same problem with them. I don't know why they keep getting recommended if everybody has this struggle with them, but I digress. In the past couple weeks I've had a drastic increase in the number of people requesting a hex chart and a lot of them have said things like I just bought them or I'm just switching from Copics to these and I think a lot of that recency is because of a viral video here on YouTube in which some tests were done in which Ohuhu came out on top in a bunch of them and I disagree with some of the ways that the testing was done, but I also know there were things that were avoided in that video and that's why I brought you some of those here in this video. So at least you have full information about the product you're buying, but I also wanted to do you a solid because there are a lot of you who in good faith went and bought these markers thinking they're the best thing and then you discovered you really need help. So I'm going to provide you with some help. I bought the Honolulu set. It's 320 of Ohuhu's markers. It's not their full line. I'm not going to be investing in their full line. I'm not doing videos with their markers. As a matter of fact, as soon as I get done shooting this video, I'm on my way to our local homeless shelter where they accept families and I'm going to drop these and a whole bunch of paper off for the kids there in hopes that maybe there's somebody who's going to be an artist when they grow up or maybe it discovered and carried their whole family out of poverty. But I did make a hex chart for just the Honolulu set. I feel a bit awkward making any money on a product I don't recommend even if I'm making it off of my labor in putting a chart together. So I am going to be donating the profits from these hex charts to Human Rights Watch. So if you want to get a hex chart, there's a link in the doobly-do. And if you're someone who uses any of my hex charts, whether they are alcohol markers or pencils, then feel free to look into the hex chart class. In that class, you don't learn how to make a hex chart because that is trademarked and copyrighted. But you do learn how to use a hex chart in order to make your color choices. So we go through the color wheel and lots of color ways and how you can apply the hex chart to make better decisions on your colors when you're doing your artwork. That's it for me. I hope you learned something in this video. If you did, click the like button, subscribe if you haven't. And I will see you on Saturday when I bring you a rather crazy alcohol marker project that you're not going to want to miss. I'll see you then. Ta ta.