Paletteful Packs – April 2022 

What I did, was I quickly swatched all the markers on a printer paper and I instantly changed my mind about the markers. I loved the colours and I loved how opaque they were. I did get excited about working with them and I even thought of getting the YONO pastel set to accompany the two pastel-ish colours of POSCA markers I got in the pack, as well as the basic YONO set.

When I was done with the Poppies painting I could finally begin more thorough testing of the supplies from the Pack.

YONO Markers

The initial tests on white printer paper were very promising. The colours looked rich and the paint was opaque. When I started layering the paint I noticed the white marker wasn’t as opaque as I expected it to be and it was picking up colours from underneath a bit, so that’s a thing to keep in mind if you plan to draw something multilayered with these markers. The rest of the markers don’t really smear the lower layers as much. All of them slightly lifted on both paper and plastic palette until several minutes after laying down the colour so I suppose they need some time to fully dry.

During the second, more thorough test on white paper, the YONO markers didn’t perform that well. In fact, they behaved very inconsistently. On just the paper all markers except Green and Blue looked rather opaque. But when I put them over a pencil to check if they’d cover the letters – It was clear that some markers weren’t as opaque as they initially seemed: Yellow and Green didn’t cover the pencil at all, Blue and White were somewhat opaque and Red and Black were fully opaque. But pencil is a specific tool and not all art supplies work well with it so I continued testing the markers, this time on provided Marabu black paper.

On this paper, the inconsistencies were similar, with exceptions – the yellow marker left the “transparent” group and joined the “somewhat opaque” one and white actually looked pretty opaque. The green marker looked horrible on both papers, it was transparent, chalky and streaky and I’m very happy I didn’t need it for either of my artworks this month.

A thing to note here is that all the colours were more opaque on a layer of markers underneath rather than directly on paper. I assume it might have had something to do with the paper’s soaking the water very fast but I’ll say more about it later.

Because the black paper was going to be my main artwork’s surface, I tried to blend and layer the markers on it. This test made me realize the best way to blend and dilute the paint markers is to lay down a swatch on a plastic palette, add water to it (and/or another colour) and just then put the diluted paint on paper (or your art surface) with a brush, rather than first put it on paper and then try to smudge it – the paints dry INCREDIBLY fast. This (taking the paint from palette to paper with a brush) was actually the technique I used for both my artworks this month 🙂

A very important thing to know if you’re going to dilute the markers with water, is that they are very chalky and so even if they don’t look like a light colour on a brush, they might be much lighter than your dark surface so I recommend adding them very cautiously with thin layers if you need a smooth gradient from black/dark colour.

I didn’t experience any major issues while working on my artwork except for the problems with the white marker. The white YONO marker at some point started to dry out and was giving me less and less paint and eventually dried completely. I was a bit disappointed with it and started considering my other options to finish the drawing, but then I got the idea of fixing the marker by cleaning the tip from the paint by rinsing it. I took the nib out of the marker and washed it thoroughly to rinse any leftover paint and it helped a lot. Unfortunately, the same problem kept occurring and I’m afraid after all the marker went through, it may be completely unusable soon. I do hope It was just one incident and it doesn’t happen more often with these markers. All my other YONOs worked pretty well and although the black one at some point started having the same issues, they never got as bad as the white marker’s case.

POSCA markers

The POSCA markers actually behaved very similarly to the YONO markers I just talked about. There were 2 differences: both the POSCA markers were very opaque and there was no streakiness or inconsistency here. Additionally, they didn’t lift at all, even a moment after putting them down on paper, so it seems like they dry a bit faster than the YONOs.

The paper (Marabu Black Pad 250)

The first thing I’ve noticed about the paper is that it’s not deep black – it’s more of a dark grey colour rather than black. It also has some off-white dots and paper filaments visible and at first I didn’t like it at all. Even though the surface is quite smooth, and it’s a feature I like in paper, I was underwhelmed when I first saw the paper.

The sheets are quite thick and as I mentioned, the surface is very smooth, these are both very welcome features but afaik, smooth paper is not ideal when working with colour pencils so you may want to know about it.

Water soaks in the paper instantly so at first I thought it wouldn’t handle wet media very well, but honestly, it performed great, I loved to work on it. Even after using markers normally or diluting them with water, the paper didn’t bend or wrinkle at all! The only moment when it started bending very slightly was after I finished the painting and sprayed it with varnish and it was the 3rd, thick layer that started affecting it. It still was a very slight bend that went back to normal after the paper has dried. You do have to be careful though when you lay down the first layers of markers because they may scar or even tear the surface of the paper.

I actually loved the paper a lot and after my initial disappointment with it I didn’t expect to have such positive experiences with it. I definitely will use it in the future.