Thursday, April 5, 2012

Hungarian Flowers

 
 
I love drawing flowers based on Hungarian folk art.  Pencil, watercolors, acrylics, I've tried them all with very different results but I always longed for deep, saturated colors that I couldn't achieve with the previous media.  I have wanted markers for this purpose for a long time but didn't want to invest just for experimenting. 
I finally took advantage of a 50% off coupon to buy a 24 set of Prismacolor Premier Double-Ended Art Markers.  It's definitely fun to use markers and it's taken me a bit to learn how the colors actually appear on paper.   And by the way, the photo's don't do it justice, the top pic is quite dark, the bottom quite light.  In reality the colors are somewhere in between.
I did this piece freehand, no pencil sketch or plan...just where the markers took me and I'm happy with the results but I'm not sure I love these markers.  For now they serve the purpose.   Some day when I make money with my art (!?) I would like to invest in something better.  Do you use markers?  Curious to hear feedback.

6 comments:

  1. Pretty!

    I used to use markers for architectural renderings. I used the colorless blender marker a lot as a "brush" to pick up colors I had mixed on wax paper, and would also use it directly after applying marker onto the paper to blend or mix with nearby colors.

    Although, the colorless blender is more useful when using "marker paper" because it says wet a little bit longer on the page.

    I stopped using markers when I got more into watercolor because it's harder to correct a mistake with markers and I fell in love with the softness of watercolor.

    I'm excited to see more of your experiments with them though!

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  2. I can just imagine this embroidered on a Hungarian folk dress - its really beautiful! Especially like that you did it free hand with markers and not pencil first - very brave and confident! I don't use markers - prefer colour pencil or watercolour or paint - althoguh I do use a fine marker for outlines sometimes. :)

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  3. This really is a lovely painting. Like Karen, I imagine it as embroidery on a folk dress.

    Thank you for visiting my Etegami blog. In Etegami, it's traditional to use sumi ink (india ink) for the outline and gansai water-soluble paints for coloring the inside, but really any tools will do-- including markers. Freehand is the rule, though. We never do a preliminary sketch. And Etegami, by its very nature, is impossible to "fix" once pen has been put to paper. But nothing is considered a failure. We must send off every etegami, no matter how we feel about it. (Etegami is a form of mail art.)

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  4. Oooh this is so colorful and crisp! The composition is great - especially since you did not plan or sketch ahead of time!

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