Ohuhu's 5th anniversary // Trying a new technique 🌜☄️

Heyyy guys! Hope you're doing well! 🌈✨

I wanted to share with you some new art I just finished to post on Tuesday :D Ohuhu reached out a month ago to collaborate for their 5th year anniversary and ask me to do a post using their markers. Of course I said yes because I've been enjoying their markers  lot and they are no doubt the best Copic alternative out there. They also were kind enough to send me their pastel colors set to try out.

The postal service here in my country has been on strike for the first time in years 😅 so I was pretty sure I wasn't going to get them in time for the anniversary, but I did ! I got these on Friday

They are really nice, colors aren't as pastel as the caps make you think, but they are a nice addition to my older set, which has too many vibrant colors. Here're the swatches:

They said the theme for the anniversary is not only the 5 years of the brand but also the 5 years you've been drawing, so their proposal was to re-draw something I did on 2016. I chose this mermaid here, cuz it was the very first thing I painted when I got my hands on my very first set of alcohol markers back in 2016.

And this was the sketch of my new idea

I wanted to print it out in a veryy low opacity and ink it traditionally but then something crazy occurred to me. I decided to make the lineart digitally with Procreate and print it on a nice paper so it's ready to be colored with markers. 

Not gonna lie, I felt weird at the beginning, like I was cheating or something haha but I put those silly thoughts aside and embraced the experiment. I know many comic artists work this way, back and forth between traditional and digital!

First I printed it very small and did a quick color study:

And then the bigger drawing looked like this, I used Fabriano mixed media A4 paper

It was lacking a little bit of crisp, specially on the faces, I was hoping it wouldn't be so noticeable that it wasn't real ink but yeah, it showed. I started painting and decided to add some textures and use real ink on later steps !

Final result:

I used colored pencils to add some textures/noise and then Kuretake white ink for highlights. I went over the faces with a 0.05 fineliner and gave some of the edges that crisp that were lacking. And that's it ! Colors look a bit saturated and ugly because I didn't do any proper color editing, I normally do that on the final photo I post (which haven't take yet :P)

I don't hate the final result but it's not my favorite thing either, not sure if I'll repeat this process some day but it was cool to try. Let me know what you guys think!! I recorded the whole thing as well, so I'll make a video some day when I finish the 98476332 videos I have pending.

Will post this drawing as a coloring page for you on another post too :) ❤️

Love,

Gret