SCAD Sequential's Editor's Day has come and gone, preceeded by a week of preparations and followed by the rush of finishing my thesis before the finals crunch. This year, the Mini Comics Expo was on the same day as the last day of Editor's Day (it's actually a two day event- Friday and Saturday), so Heidi and myself had double the reason to get ready. We decided to attempt something we'd talked about often- a special edition cover for the Friendly Book of Monsters, a linoleum print on specialty paper.

It's been a few years since my last opportunity to create a traditional print, so while Heidi was excited at the thought, I had a little trepidation. I'd grown used to utilizing a well appointed print studio complete with presses, brayers, and a variety of inks, as well as the tools necessary for cleanup. I'd planned to keep it simple so that it would be executable from home, but I knew that a number of factors could go wrong.

In my quest to broaden my marker horizons, two frontiers remained- the foreign marker market and markers for grafitti artists.  With the exception of markers made for full size graffiti pieces, most graffiti markers are just alcohol based markers marketed at a different crowd.

I must admit, I don't know very much about graffiti art, nor graffiti artists, but from what I've read, it seems that there's quite a few graffiti artists who practice their craft in black, hard bound sketchbooks, called blackbooks.  For these artists, it's important to find a paper-safe material capable of emulating traditional graffiti techniques like blending and fading.  Alcohol based markers may serve this purpose well.

A blackbook graffiti artist may have different artistic needs than the average illustrator.  As an illustrator, I like Copic's Super Brush, and I rely on the ability to mimic watercolor affects, something a graffiti artist may not find desirable in an alcohol based marker.  Conversely, when I'm trying to cover a large area on paper (like when I'm putting down a color wash), I pull out my Copic wide markers, whereas a graffiti artist may use the chisel end and lay down a careful series of strokes.

Saturday, April 27 was the Sidewalk Arts Festival at Forsythe Park in Savannah, GA.  The park was pretty packed, crowds gathered to see sidewalk arts, listen to the band in the Amphitheatre, eat from the various stalls and booths set up in the park, and generally enjoy a beautiful day.

Heidi and I arrived at the park around 10:30, eager to participate in our first Sidewalk Arts Festival.  Both of us were absolute novices when it came to sidewalk art, though like most kids, we'd drawn on the pavement for fun years ago.

As a teenager interested in creating her own manga, a few words stood out to me as the keys to the mangaka's kingdom: Copic. G-pen. Deleter Neopiko. Years later, when I went to Japan as a SCAD student, I kept my eye out for Deleter products, to see if they could hold their own against the mythos in my mind.

On this blog, I probaby missed an opportunity to connect with an audience that shared a similar formative comic creating experience by neglecting to focus on Deleter products. This review of Deleter's Neopiko 2 is not a lackluster attempt to atone for that, but a marker review in it's own right. I didn't select Neopiko 2 markers as an attempt to recapture my early days of comic craft, but as a marker option that members of my audience may not be familiar with, that I, myself, was not familiar with.