Making a mark

 I borrowed a box of alcohol markers  from a friend a few weeks ago, to colour in some black & white picture cards for work. We don’t have a colour printer, and figured  black & white pictures would not be very appealing/ engaging for my students during my online teaching sessions! 

I had a lot of fun colouring lots of little pictures ( about 8 cards to an A4 page, which I then cut & laminated into individual cards). In fact I had so much fun I started looking online for some not too expensive / but not too crap quality markers for myself!

I have bought a range of different art & craft supplies from Riot Art over the years, and although there was only one online review for their markers, it was very positive - and they had a good sale on! I would have bought some from Daiso, because their markers have had great reviews;  but for some unknown reason they don’t have an online store in Australia. Officeworks had very little info - hard to tell what colours were in their sets, and really their website/ search is a bit rubbish. Cotton On/ Typo had some super bargains but lots of bad reviews for their markers. 

So I put in an order with Riot Art for a set of markers, plus a few extra individual colours ( I mean they were on sale for 99c and $1.99, so hard to resist!). Of course I had sent my order off just as there were huge delays with Australia Post - at one point I got a notification that my parcel had gone from Melb, to Qld, and was now sitting frustratingly only 20 minutes up the road at the Sommerton Road dept ( but outside of my then 5km limit!). 

It arrived eventually ( think it took 2 1/2 weeks!) and there was only 1 of the 99c single colours not in stock. 

I had fun trying out the colours, experimenting with layering and blending ( watched a lot of YouTube for research!)  and made a swatch/sample sheet of my colours. Then I remembered Monte Marte art supplies, and ordered a couple of extra colours to fill in the gaps - mainly greens, yellow, brown I think. The staff at  Moorabbin Art Shed were very helpful over the phone, and my order arrived in a few days.

I have been experimenting with different colours, and different papers too. First I found a photo I liked ( I have been admiring the neighbourhood flowers when out walking The Dog). After playing around with a free photo to sketch app, I printed the photo on regular copy paper & tried colouring it in.

Original photo

Photo sketch on copy paper

Photo sketch printed, then traced onto cheap sketchbook paper using the light box.

Today I found a photo, sketched a flower freehand from the photo, then coloured on water colour paper. Quite happy with the results, I will keep practicing, lots of fun so far!