A Highlighter Self-Portrait

This is high up there on my least favorite self-portraits list. I was about to post this on my Instagram account. After my phone died in the middle of writing my caption, I didn't have the energy to do the whole social media thing. I'm resorting to writing on my website because why not? I don't want to be so timid sharing my art and ideas. At the same time, things have changed quite drastically since I was doing my palette journey project and posting my digital art milestones. It's not the same environment thanks to AI slop and social media replacing mainstream news sources.

In my color explorations, I've always played around with different materials like markers and pens to layer color and expand a limited palette. Lately, I've been playing with different markers and trying to come up with a strategy for using a CMY palette.

The challenge with markers is you can't control the saturation as easily. So what if the colors are less saturated? Here is where highlighters come into play. I bought some CMY equivalents in Zebra Mildliners. Pink, Yellow, Blue (traditional flourescent highlighters), and a couple of darker versions Fuschia and Cyan. The curious thing about these colors is flourescent colors tend to act a little wacky. They almost lighten colors instead of acting subtractive and darkening the mixtures as more color is layered. They're also very hard to clock in terms of value so managing the whole value range of this drawing was confusing.

I found out while doing some swatches that mildliners are water soluble. I'll play around with that more when I sketch with them. Other markers I've been trying out are Tombow brush pens, Sign Pens, and Royal Talens Pantone Markers (got them on clearance!).

I'm hoping these little experiments will get some gears moving in my brain. Until then, I'll be drawing random fanart and bad self-portraits.