I am always on the hunt for a medium as underpainting for my coloured pencil portraits. After my disappointment with Art-n-Fly markers, I wanted to try a set of water-based markers instead. Here is my honest review of the Ohuhu dual tip brush pens skin tone markers.
Ohuhu Dual Tip Brush Pens Skin Tone Markers
I like that Ohuhu markers always include a good quality swatch card, so you get fairly accurate shade swatches. However, the shades in the coloured printout don’t completely match the actual swatches. The colour indicators on the marker caps don’t match the actual shades either, which can also vary depending on the type of paper you use.
Fine Tip is Really Fine
Each brush pen has two nibs–one brush and one fine. The fine side is 0.4mm, which is great for details.
Paper Matters!
Paper makes a huge difference with Ohuhu water-based skin tone markers. I have tested them on Bristol smooth paper, watercolour paper, marker paper and mixed media paper. You will need heavyweight paper (at least 140lb) for these.
I had used a lightweight watercolour paper (80 lb) and pilling was quite bad.
The Best Way To Use Them: Wet On Wet
With water-based markers, you cannot use them the same way like alcohol markers.
I scribbled with the brush pens on a palette, followed by dipping a water brush to blend and paint the colours onto the paper. For best results, wet the paper right before painting the colours.
If you use the markers directly on paper and go over a couple of times, the paper will pill. Unlike alcohol markers, you cannot blend the colours on the paper.
Colour Selection
The 36 set has decent selections of skin tones, though some are almost identical when painted from the water brush. Also, the shades are more yellow leaning than neutral. There are very few light shades but you can add more water to dilute the intensity of the shades.
Underpainting
I added in the details with Prismacolor Premier coloured pencils to finish the portrait of Marilyn Monroe. This was one of my favourite images of her, as photographed by Milton Greene.
I added a couple of layers of coloured pencils on the portrait, but the paper could not take in much more. The markers did serve their purpose as underpainting, though.
Summary
Overall, these markers work quite well. However, I think the colour selection could be a bit better and include more neutral tones. For the price I don’t think you can ask for better.
If you want the ease of use, go for Ohuhu alcohol markers instead.
