Chameleon Pen Product Test
After a successful Kickstarter campaign, Chameleon Pens — markers that can adjust the value as you color — are now out in the world. I received my shipment of flesh-tones, along with a cornflower blue and a cool gray that I ordered. These are pretty neat tools. There are a lot of rules to avoid poisoning your inks or damaging the tips, but if you do it right, it can create some really neat drawings, especially with skin-tones. I draw a lot of faces, which have a whole range of shadows. It’s going to take some practice to nail it because you have to get used to how fast they change value in relation to how long you hold the solution over the ink. To create a complicated range of facial landscapes like I do, you must constantly dip back into the solution. Here are my first two Chameleon creations. (Only the skin is Chameleon. The rest is Copic grays and Prismacolor.)
The gray marker arrived broken (one cap doesn’t come off because the inner plastic piece is detached), but I’ve been using a new set of gray Copic Sketch markers for various values of gray anyway, so I’m not too broken up about that. The Paloma Faith (1) drawing uses Light Peach (NU2). The Amara Karan (2) uses Caramel (NU4) for a base and Burnt Umber (BR4) on top. These three colors are very good. The other two are so light that I kind of wondered why it’s even worth having a gradient on it, but I decided to try out the Sand (NU0) and Nude (NU00) to see what I could get out of it. As a result, below are a few steps of the Daniel Radcliffe portrait I did for my review of A Young Doctor’s Notebook.
So it’s actually pretty good with the Sand skin-tone. He doesn’t start to look like Daniel Radcliffe until the color is added. Anyway, I’ve gone ahead and ordered another 20 colors from Chameleon because it’s frustrating having the freedom of the flesh-tones but not with the rest of the colors. And I keep having these dreams that I’m in the craft store, looking for markers. Yeah, I’m weird.
