Vibrant Spring Landscapes With Acrylic Markers: Exploring The Arrtx Landscape Palette

Hello and welcome to my channel, Voluptas Oculorum, it means pleasure of the eye. My name is Stephanie, I'm a Canadian living in the UK. And in the UK, spring has well and truly been in bloom for the past couple of weeks. And today we have a video all about acrylic markers. Now, people who know me know that I have typically been a watercolor focused artist and water-based media. But after one of my last videos, Artix reached out to me and asked me if I wanted to try this set of 90 landscape colors. Now, I do have a few Posca markers that I've got secondhand and I was never really able to get into using them. I found that the bullet tip kind of scratched the paper and made it pill. And also I just had a lot of problems with pooling of markers. I would prime them and then they would just kind of gush paint everywhere in an uncontrollable way. So I really didn't pursue practicing making art with acrylic markers for that reason. I just felt they were too messy. They were too much hassle. But I have seen quite a few videos about these markers and these ones don't require any pumping or priming. They don't seem to release their acrylic pigments all in one glorious gush onto the page when you least expect it. So I said, yes, I said, I would love to try them. So this set has been gifted to me kindly by Artix and I was delighted to receive them. So the first thing I'm doing is just reorganizing the colors and this is based purely on the color of the caps. I did do a little bit of fiddling with this after doing my swatching. So some of these tips are not reflective of the paint inside, but most of them were pretty close and I do love myself a well-ordered rainbow color. So let's get into some of the characteristics of these markers. They are cotton core, which means they have a cotton filament inside that absorbs the ink and distributes it a little bit more evenly as you're using the markers. That also means there's no activation required. You don't have to pump them or prime them. The ink is flowing through that cotton core. They are a single brush tip. So this is not a dual tip marker. There is just one tip. It is a brush tip and they are non-toxic, odorless, quick drying and pre-labeled. So alongside these markers, Artix also sent me some sketchbooks to test out. And I'm actually going to go more into depth about these sketchbooks in a different video, but I did want to point out that like the covers are so nice and they sparkle. But what I am going to do is use the sketchbook that they sent me, which is not for watercolors, just a regular sketchbook to swatch out the markers. I actually did this swatching twice. I've lost my first swatch sheet in the disorder that is my art office slash workspace. And then I found it again, hooray. So I'm going to show it to you, but in this part, I'm just going to swatch out the colors and show you what they look like. And I did draw the black line so that you could see the opacity of the markers while they are drying. I think that's really important. Although people go on about like, oh, whether acrylic markers are opaque or not. My understanding is that opacity is dictated by the pigment itself and not by the medium. At least that's how it is in watercolor. Some pigments just have a tendency to be more opaque than others and yellows and pinks and reds tend to be more transparent and then purples and blues and browns tend to be more opaque and that is kind of borne out in my swatches at least. So as far as the range of colors go, I think that they are really good for landscape. There's probably a few more pinks and purples than I would need, but I am more of a landscape artist and other people might be thinking about doing botanicals with these. I think there's a good range of greens and earth tones. So I'm really excited to get started with this set. So while we pan over these, which is just one layer of paint, you can clearly see which of these colors has more opacity than others. I think that this is helpful, but at the same time, I wasn't really thinking about opacity while I was working. I was more interested in the color range and whether I could find the right color for myself while I created an art piece. Now here's the swatch sheet I did before and this is where I did a range of strokes so that you could sort of see the opacity of the colors with different layers. So the first stroke has three layers, the second stroke has two layers and the third stroke has just one layer. I then went through and rated them based on how opaque they get after three layers. If you can see the line all the way through three layers, then I rated them as transparent. And if you can not see the line, then I rated them as opaque. So like I said before, the pinks and reds and yellows tend to be more transparent and that's true for most pigments across the art world. At least that's what I found. But then when you see the purples, you see them getting more opaque. The blues are quite opaque. So in this row, for example, even one stroke of the paint was completely opaque and covered up the black line in most cases. So that's just important information to know and I haven't seen anybody else rate them like that. So I thought that would be interesting to do. For my test piece, I am continuing my exploration of markers using this calendar as my inspiration. So if you haven't already seen the other images that I've created from this calendar using markers, I used alcohol markers to work on the first three months and I have two videos about that. One is kind of a review of Letraset Pro Markers that I received as part of a bundle and you can watch that there and it kind of does a really fast time-lapse version of drawing, much like what you're seeing here. And then I also have a real-time drawing with no commentary and no music, which is 45 minutes long and nobody wants to watch it and I completely understand why, but the very small subset of people really like watching real-time videos that don't have any commentary. So I went ahead and did that for you because it wasn't very much work. It's not gonna make me famous, but hopefully somebody enjoys it and enjoys the process. So I've put up those videos for you if you want to follow those links and check them out after this one. Okay, so as somebody who has never used acrylic markers to complete a painting before, I really didn't know what I was doing. So as you saw a couple of minutes ago, I used my swatch sheet to pick out the colors that I thought would work well for this piece. I think that's a good strategy because 90 is a lot and you don't wanna be kind of hunting and pecking while you are creating. So I did a little bit of work and sort of tried to match up the colors with what was in the calendar. That way I had a sort of limited or slightly limited palette to work with. I should mention this calendar is by a local UK artist named Angie Rook. I have mentioned that in my other videos, but I think it's important to continue mentioning it. She's a wonderful artist. I have never seen her work in person. I just have this calendar, but I do love the way she represents landscapes in my area. She practices out of Glastonbury, which is just a short 15 minute drive from where I live. So we share a lot of the same admiration for the landscapes of the Southwest in the UK. I was really experimenting a lot with these markers and I kind of took the same approach that I took with the alcohol markers, which is just working from light tones to dark tones. Now I know with acrylic markers, you can layer light on top of dark, but that's not the way I'm really used to working. So I did kind of start out with all of the lighter tones in the image, except for the foreground white flowers. I tried to leave those for last. TBD, if that was a good strategy or not, because in the end, I kind of wonder if it would have been good for me to paint everything all at once, but we'll get to that later. I was kind of testing as I went, like how do I blend these markers? And basically what I ended up doing was just blending them with my finger as soon as they were on the page. So you have a few precious seconds to blend these markers out while they are still somewhat wet, but they do dry very quickly. Like when they say they're quick drying, they are not lying. They dry fast. And I think that's a good thing, but it's also for me, because I'm used to working with watercolor and I'm used to being able to reactivate things and I have a lot of time to work with things because the water needs to dry. It was a very interesting shift in perspective for me. Not being able to get like really smooth gradients easily was a bit of a challenge for me. I'm sure there are strategies that you could engage, but I didn't because I was just creating and I was just kind of focused on doing the drawing itself. I was having a great time, so I wasn't concerned about it. But in that respect, I did end up going for more of a layered look, I would say, where there's not like really smooth blends between colors. It's more about just layering and layering until I get the sort of effect that I'm looking for. I have seen a lot of people say that they don't love these bright, vibrant greens that come with the sets. Personally, I have nothing against these types of greens. I think I've heard a lot of people say that those types of greens don't exist in nature, to which I say, I think you need to get your eyes checked because these colors definitely exist in nature. Everywhere I look in spring in the UK is a phthalo green. I'm sorry, I think that might just be a personal bias that people have against phthalo green. Anyways, I used it to, I think, good effect in my image as part of the shaded layers of the hills. And I really like a blue green. I really like a blue green. So I didn't have really any trouble finding the colors that I wanted. And I actually went for colors that might not typically be associated with landscapes like coral orange or bright purple, or I don't know, some apricot tones in the trees. Like the background trees you see, they're kind of these clumpy, they're spring trees, but they haven't gotten their leaves yet. So they still have quite a bit of their autumn or winter branch coloring. And so I just went wild with some pinks and apricots and yellows, trying to highlight those because even though my brain says trees are green, my eyes said, those trees are not green and we need to pay attention to that. I really had a lot of fun working with these markers. Like I just loved the way I was able to go over places over and over again. And every time I did it, it got a little bit more complex and visually interesting. At the end, I'm gonna show you some of the textures that I was able to achieve using these markers. But essentially, like I've seen people do very specific types of illustration with these. I've seen people do still lifes and fruit and food. And I've seen a lot of portraiture, but there aren't that many people that seem to be drawing landscapes with them. And I'm curious as to why, because they are really fun to draw with. Maybe there's just not that many landscape artists on my YouTube algorithm. I would love if YouTube, please, if you're listening, more landscapes for me, please. Thank you. Okay, so this is kind of the last layers I'm getting to. I think I've developed it fairly well to my satisfaction. And I started with the branches of the trees that were overlapping the scene. And then I went in with a very light yellow because the tree on the side, it struck me as like more of a limey kind of color. Now, these are meant to be blackthorn shrubs, which are very common in the UK in spring. You see them absolutely everywhere and they are gorgeous. When I started working on the white blobby leaf areas, on this side, I have to admit, I didn't do a great job. I don't know what it was, but I wasn't, I just like stopped using the marker effectively. I don't know. I just, I don't know what happened. My brain just sort of quit and decided that we were only gonna use the side of the marker and not the pointed brush tip. Maybe I was kind of like in a zone of some kind and I was just trying to lay down color. But what I realized is that after I put the white leaves or blossoms in, I couldn't reshape them because I would have had to get all the other background colors out and tried to color around the whiteness. And so I think it's just a mistake of layering. I think I probably should have started drawing everything all at once instead of waiting till the very end to put those white layers on. I'm not sure. I think I just need to learn more. But here we have our obligatory oohing and aahing. I will allow you a moment just to express your complete awe and admiration. All right, let's take a look at these textures. I really love the way the sky turned out and I also really love the way the shadows on the hillside turned out. I think I did a pretty good job considering this was my first time. So yes, I am the kind of person who pats myself on the back. Who else is gonna do it? There's nobody else here except my dog. If you're interested in testing these markers out, Artex is currently having a sale. It's a spring sale and I believe that things are up to 15% off. They're available both on their website and on Amazon. I have the links in the description below. If you are interested in seeing how Artex sketchbooks function, I will be testing those outside at a plein air event in Hester Coombe Gardens on Friday. So I'm going to be coming up with a video specifically about the sketchbooks at a later date and I will post it when it's ready. Hope you enjoyed this and see you in the next one.