The importance of working with markers

I think it was in early 2021. I was working remotely for a studio called Meister alongside Diego (Freyre), and I felt like I was walking a tightrope. I didn’t speak English very well (the studio is based in Portland), and I felt that my drawing and design skills weren’t good enough. So, as always, I asked Diego for advice and decided to add a new phase to my training: morning practice.

For almost a year, I woke up at 5 a.m. and studied for an hour every day. I rotated between pencil or pen drawing, sometimes digital studies, some theoretical reading, and most importantly marker studies. Diego himself recommended using markers, mainly as a way to think in shapes and to limit both tonal values and color ranges.

So I started buying the cheapest, most basic markers I could find, so I wouldn’t worry about using them up. And yes—I discovered that with markers I could cover more ground thanks to the variations in the nibs. They even forced me to skip sketching sometimes and paint directly, to think faster, or maybe to flow with accidents and mistakes, guiding those “errors” into an aesthetic decision.

After about five or six months, I started noticing a difference. I felt like my level was slowly improving at least I felt I was making better decisions and hesitating less when drawing. Every day, I was building a bit more confidence.

What did I study? Anything. Sometimes photos I took myself, photos by others, other people’s illustrations, random ideas, or I’d just put references aside and draw whatever came up in the moment. All of these were small studies, never final illustrations (now that I think about it, I probably should push myself to finish things, not just explore). Everything was like thumbnails or color notes nothing bigger than the palm of my hand.

Even during the very short time I studied at a classical academy (a bad experience), I tried to experiment by drawing live models with markers or highlighters.

To this day, I still use them, and I think they’re a very practical way to understand form, tonal value, and texture. I’m sharing a few explorations here. Some of these sketches later turned into final illustrations, but digitally. Because of moving around so much, I could only find a few of the original drawings x_x.