Let me introduce to you my new toy. This is a absolutely ginormous 360 pack of gel pens. Now 360 is a little misleading. It's actually just 180 and then there's a hundred and eighty refills but do you know what a hundred and eighty colours of pens is ridiculous and I cannot wait to get creative with these. All right, let's pop this sucker open and see what we're all about. Now. The colors are really strange There doesn't seem to be a rhyme or reason for the way they are Arranged in here. We do have numbered packets, so... How is this- Oh gosh. I'm afraid to take them out because it doesn't seem like they have names on them. They are just... They are as they are. No numbers no names. Oh my gosh, no brand nothing on the tops. It is just an unlabeled pen. So to swatch these I will have to make sure I keep these in exact order forever because I'm terrified that I'll never know which color is which! So, let's see. Let's get our refills out. Oh my goodness. It looks like someone had a little uh, explosion accident. Oh, no! Oh geez. Okay. Hold on. We might have an issue here. Here are all of our refills. I do wonder if I'll ever get around to using them. Only one way to find out. Let's swatch these bad boys and see what they're all about. Just like in our previous fineliner video I'm going to be swatching on three different colors of paper because I think these gel pens would look really nice on especially black. So what do ya'll say we'd get to swatching, Oh my goodness, 180 colors times three. Buckle in here we go! [Music] I have found the culprit to the busted pen. This one is looking a little rough. As you can see it is leaking on me and it's not writing so I'm going to use the extra refill. I wonder if this is why they don't have these pens in like a nice rainbow order so that if there are very different colors in each row you are able to tell which is which, because like I said, these are not labeled! The Pens aren't labeled. The refills aren't labeled. They're just by row. So this is row 8. Hopefully I can find the right color. Okay, so I'm just going to unscrew the tip. I'm glad we could experience changing a refill. I guess that's kind of cool. So here's our our busted old one. Did I even get the right color? I'm kind of... concerned. Alright, so I'm going to take this little plastic nubbin off, insert our refill into the pen. Okay, and... then we will put the tip back on. Yay, it works! Okay the swatching continues! [Music] So there is all 180 of our colors swatched and that took just a little bit longer than I would like to admit. Holy cow. But so watching your art supplies is so worth it. Especially if you're going to work from maybe white paper to brown paper to black paper. Overall with our brown paper I think all of them pretty much work. I think if you really want to have this Brown rustic look to your illustration you pretty much can't go wrong with any of these pens. I think the most interesting part about this is especially the black versus white, especially like I said some of the colors just didn't show up. That being said we do have a lot of really fun pastel colors to work with with our black paper. So not all is lost. I'm definitely going to be doing an illustration on the black paper. And of course with the white paper, it seems like everything worked well. So let's get to it. We're going to be creating an illustration with all three colors of paper. However before I got creative I knew that I was going to have to solve this whole unlabeled pen thing because if I was going to enjoy my creative process I was going to have to eliminate the whole worrying about which pen was which or keeping them in order So what I did was I wrote 1 through 180 on washi tape, cut them up, stuck them on the tops of each pen and then also labeled the color sheets so that I knew which color was what! And solved! This worked perfectly, would recommend, and now we sketch. But Before we jump into it I want to thank the sponsor of this video, Skillshare. You must have heard of Skillshare by now. The online learning community, you know the one with thousands of classes covering any creative skill taught by artistic individuals such as yourself. Covering any passion from character design, painting, baking, you name it. And thankfully Victo Ngai's Masterclass on color really helped. She talks about value, contrast, accents, and how color plays just as much of a role in your art as the subject or the composition. I was able to pick some nice color palettes in this video because I focused on a palette and took inspiration from that to create my drawings. If you struggle with color and Victo's class is a great place to start and you check it out with how affordable and annual subscription is at less than $10 a month and the first 1000 of you to click the link in the description can get a two month free Premium Membership! Let's get to choosing some colors and creating some art. So to start off let's actually just jump into a basic standard white paper illustration and then we can move on to our brown and black paper. There are so many colors to choose from I feel like I could get inspiration from anything and to use Victo's advice to steal a color palette, I thought it'd be really interesting to actually use a color palette generator and overall just trying to have fun with these colors. It is Mermay as you guys probably have seen. Though I'm not really into mermaids I do end up doodling them because I see them so much around this time of year. I actually thought it would be a lot of fun to play around with something that was transparent so maybe we can play around with our mermaid having some sort of transparency with her fins or her tail. I think first and foremost I really want to focus on finding a really good inspiring color palette, of course, because my focus is going to be on color. We have so many colors to work with I want to make sure we get a really nice color palette. If I don't use my poop greens now, when will I be able to use them? For some reason I want to make her hair look like an actual plan to growing off of her head. I think that would look really cool. I like the colors, the blue, the green, the earthy pink's. I'm gonna go with this one. I really like the idea. When I think of her hair that's the most fun part for me. So let's go with that. [Music] So going into our first illustration this was definitely a sort of test run for using these pens for an illustration because aside from swatching them I honestly don't have a lot of experience with gel pens except for using them for details, for stars, for shines, in the occasional watercolor illustration. Though I will say there was quite a gel pen fad when I was a kid, and I definitely didn't get into it as much as a lot of people. I did have a few gel pens, but I was pretty excited but also it's kind of hard to not get excited when you see a set of 100 and ding-ding 80 colors! I mean what to the heck! I will also say going into this I did buy quite a cheap pack off of Amazon because I didn't want to look for the most expensive gel pens out there. I was just looking for something to dabble in and play around with so I knew these pens weren't going to be perfect. I knew they were going to have some issues with writing, But I think for what I'm using them for which is just playing around with color, experimenting, trying new things. They got the job done. Okay, so let's talk about this art. First off I will say our first color palette isn't the most brightest. It's not the most colorful. It's not the most vivid but gosh darnit. Do I not love me a poop green color. There are quite a variety of greens, which I knew was going to be perfect If I was going to be limiting my color palette in this illustration. It's good to have a variety of darks, lights, middle tones, and also have a complement. So I did kind of focus on our pinkish purplish color and again, there was definitely a lot of variety when it came to darks, lights, and middle colors for that. I also found out while working on this piece that gel pens can actually layer somewhat decently. They do have a tendency to sort of reactivate the color that's under them. So they aren't the best for layering, But if you do it lightly if you do it quickly and you make as few strokes as possible you can definitely get some layering in there which really helped with blending some of these colors together so that they weren't super different. So if I were to put a purple down on the white paper, it would look very purple but if I that really light pink down in the purple on top you would get this really nice pinkish purple color. So that definitely helped when shading parts of this illustration. Though, like I said, the Pens didn't layer the best they reactivated which picked up the color and made them really hard to spread So I was hesitant to layer them. I did it as little as possible but there were some times and I just felt like it was really necessary if I wanted the whole piece to feel just a little bit more cohesive when it came to shading and keeping all the colors somewhat related to each other. It's definitely one of those suffering for the Arts and moments. You want your piece to be cohesive, You want it to look its best, and you know if you take the easier quicker less struggle of a route, sure you would be saving a lot of time But at what cost? The result just wouldn't be is worth it. Speaking of worth it, going into these illustrations I was thinking about doing these lineless, which meant I wasn't going to give them a line art. But despite limiting the color palette I did just feel like they could really use the line work to bring everything together and bring that really dark dark that separated some of these colors that weren't super different. So like I'm always saying I wanted to line art with a color, So I took the darkest color of each part the dark green the dark red the dark pink and lined it and it gave it that really soft line art feel and I absolutely love the result of this first mermaid! Oh and one last thing: Fish boobs sensors. [Music] Moving on to our brown paper I was originally thinking about using the neon colors because they were really light on the brown paper but I'm actually thinking that maybe using the really dark colors is going to be best for our middle toned brown paper especially because we can't even use those on the black paper. All right, so it seems like we've got a lot of purples and I don't know what I started sketching. I don't know why I just started making just a circ- Just a purple circle. Okay, you know what? I'm already kind of getting inspiration from these jagged shapes on this fish. I'm thinking we should do, because we've got a lot of purples and blues, we can do octopussy evil mermaid. Should we make it a man? Oh my gosh. Okay. So I started drawing this because I was going to make it an octopus, But then it just made me think what if I drew this as it feels just legs. That is so goofy. It's like really big poofy pants, and I kind of love it. I said I wanted to sketch with the color pens so that I could go ahead and start planning out the colors, yet all I'm doing is just sketching like normal, but using a colored pen. I don't really know what's happening here, but I kind of love it already and boy was this short sketching session? I feel like I already have a really good fun- Oh my gosh. I didn't even put different colors in. So we could have a more flowing Pose, I suppose. I sup'pose'. Get it? Oh my gosh, why? A hat could be fun and the Hat definitely could be like- Oh my gosh But wait. What if the Hat was actually... like some sort of animal that like latches on to you so it's got eyes and maybe even fins coming off? Oh! I think this is a start for our color palette. So let's get into it. [Music] So if you couldn't tell from our original color palette for this illustration piece, I did want to use a nice teal color and I also wanted to use our nice dark purples because that was the best color that really stood out on our brown paper. Originally, I did want to use those neon bright pastel colors but then I just thought as far as the black paper goes I think it's going to be best to save those colors for that paper and then use the really darker more vibrant colors that I didn't use on the white paper for our brown paper. That being said, although purple was our original main color for this illustration I was really drawn to that bright light teal color and I did think it would be a lot better looking to have a lighter color on this mid colored paper, but the reason why I decided not to use the teal as our main color is because The purple pen just seemed to work a lot better on this paper than the teal. The teal was very streaky, it didn't seem to want to put down a solid color, and I think as I slowly worked on our third and final piece I realized that these gel pens would probably work on a paper with a little bit more tooth or a little bit more texture to them. I think the rolling ball part on the Pens just really needed something to grab onto and to lay down the ink and with a smoother paper, which definitely our black and brown paper was a lot more smoother than our white paper. I think the Pens and of course it did depend on which pen. Some pens worked really well. Some didn't work so well. But basically I think all pens worked a lot better if they were on paper that had a little bit more texture and these papers did not have texture. And unfortunately, that is something that I learned slowly over time. It wasn't a realization that I came to very quickly. So basically our teal pen had a lot more problems laying down a solid color of ink, but thankfully our purples had a lot better of a time so that is why I chose to go with purple as our main color and then later on I do use that teal as a sort of accent because I do think that that really nice green minty teal complements and goes really well with the purple. So lesson that definitely learned the next time I use these gel pens, which I think it would be fun to do a video where I used all 180 colors in one single illustration, I will definitely be using a piece of paper with a little bit more texture so that the pens work a lot better. That being said, I do really like this illustration. I think all of these started off really rough and I was questioning if they were even turning out, but as I work on them as I add details and line art they definitely start to come together, which is such a great feeling. I decided to go with the pose that was a little bit more flowy just a little bit more energetic than our standing still octopus character. Again, I went through with a layering our pens to create shadows instead of just putting down to one color. You can definitely tell the difference in color. The secondary color I use for tentacles just behind the lightest ones, I used to also shade the lightest tentacles which is so crazy. It created almost a completely different color by layering them. So again, it's one of those things where you suffer through layering a different color but the result is that you come up with yet another color to add to your 180 colors and it just creates this extra layer using the shadows. But also using a color that already exists and makes a very cohesive illustration. I definitely think our teal details of the seaweed and fish around our character really adds lovely color to this piece. I think the purple and teal just look so good together and overall I'm really happy with how this guy turned out! [Music] And last but not least we have our black paper and I'll be honest, little scared to sketch our black paper. So let's just see... Let's just draw a fish. Let's see what happens. Okay, I'm actually surprised at how well that pink went. So I do not think about a mermaid that lives... deep in the ocean. Obviously the pitch blackness. I think it's just going to take a little bit of patience and layering to get some coverage. I definitely think that the pastel colors are going to be more my speed. I'm just not really into neon colors, but maybe one day I'll do a neon color challenge or something. Imagine that we can see through... her tail. Oh gosh. I didn't leave enough room for feet. Imagine that's her foot. You know, that actually doesn't look so bad. Okay, definitely going to have to pay attention to how long her tail is compared to her body, but we will figure that out. Okay, I really like her original sketch. I seem to be doing really good with our first sketches end up pretty good. I just need to make sure that her tail and legs end up in good positions. Other than that, I definitely like the concept so let's go with it! [Music] Going into our third and final illustration, It was definitely a roller coaster of emotions as I worked on it. I went from really happy with the sketch, being super scared about the streaky application of the pens but then in the end of being so so happy with the results. This illustration turned out so funky, so fresh, and even though I'm not super into neon bright colors this one turned out so much fun. Okay. So as I already mentioned these pens I think needed a paper with a lot more tooth and like I mentioned this black paper is very smooth and I definitely had a lot of a better time with some of the pens than others. As you can see, our skin tone did not want to go down very well. It was super streaky. And obviously this had me very worried because this could be the best looking illustration I've ever made but the application of pen is super streaky it's just not going to look good. I tried applying some of the pen with a circular motion, Small circles usually make things a little bit easier with a lot of art supplies. However, really it just came down to each individual pen and how well or how juicy it was. And unfortunately the skin tone just wasn't the juiciest though near the end I do go back over it with small circles and a second application of ink definitely helped the skin tone. It's not perfect by any means. This whole illustration is very streaky, But if you can look past that, I think this one turned out really fun. So the biggest thing I was excited about with this illustration was definitely the sort of transparency effect I was going with with the mermaid tail. I had all these different pinks and purples picked out thankfully with our pastel pack we had so many Purple's so many pinks and I had them all planned out on what was going to be her leg color, the back leg color, the mermaid tail over the black, the mermaid tail over the blue circle behind her, and overall I was excited but very scared because working on black paper is just not something I do often. In fact I think I've only done it a very few handfuls of times. Not even a handful. Like a quarter handful. I will also say the white pen did not work well. Again, this is probably just because the pens were cheap, but that's fine. I think despite that everything turned out pretty good. This illustration out of the three pieces definitely took the most time mainly because I was working on black paper and because the pens weren't the most opaque they could be. I definitely had to go over every single part of this illustration twice, but also do it very slowly and carefully so I didn't reactivate each layer of ink. So even though this is a very simple minimal shaded just a lot of blocks of color illustration, it just took the longest because of how many layers I had to do and how careful I had to be. But like I said the results ended up so great. I absolutely love how bright and vibrant this piece is. The transparent effect is so cool. And even with a line art I didn't use black. So you would think using a black paper I would use black and it would kind of bring everything together, But in the end I did decide to use the very dark purple and that just made everything so much more colorful. And overall this piece is just way different than what I normally create, but hey, that is the whole point of me trying out different art supplies. To get out of my comfort zone, try different things, stop using Dookie green and basically, have fun experimenting. And let me tell you guys I had a lot of fun with these three pieces! [Music] Once again thank you so much to Skillshare for sponsoring this video and don't forget to get your free trial using the link in the description! And I will see you guys in the next video! Stay Golden! Bye! [Music]
