Markers Guild: Hahnemühle Manga Illustration Paper

Prelude

I have compared 45 different papers for markers. I have not included papers that are not specified for markers by the company that produce them. It is not uncommon that an art store will market a paper as a marker-paper but if you look at the brands homepage they are not label as a marker paper. But with that said, a lot of other kinds of paper can work very well with markers, for example watercolor paper (even though they will “eat” the ink in the marker a lot faster than any other paper). I also tried some Japanese sumi-e paper with good and interesting result. I might write more about that in the future. For now, this is a marker paper review.

The theory and method for the somewhat thicker marker paper (110-120 g/m²)

I started with some small samples to se color saturation and value, bleeding and feathering.

I am a firm believer in working the paper as you normally would, to be able to fully understand the potential the paper has, so I decided to do a drawing on every paper.

I especially wanted to test the blending and layering abilities. With blending I mean that I work wheat in wheat, and with layering I let the ink dry before I put another layer on top.

Before I started my drawing I wrote down the name of the brand on the paper. I then covered the name so I wouldn't se which paper I was working on. I wanted it to be a blind test.

I have earlier tried to do the exact same drawing but found that this only works if you compare two or three of them. When you compare many items (as I have done earlier; I compared 30 markers, and now I compare a lot of papers) the chances are huge that the first couples of drawings are a less good than the following (because you are learning) and the last ones are pretty bad because it get so monotonous that it is very difficult to do a good job. At least that is true for me. I therefore chose to draw every drawing different but in the same manner and use the same subject (in this case, one girl stood model for all drawings). I also chose to use the same colors for the face and hair on every drawing.

Hahnemühle Manga Illustration paper 120 g

Hahnemühle

The well-known old German company Hanhemühle, has several “manga” paper. This one is available in A4 or A3 size, in packs of 30 sheets. They are acid free.

This is very smooth paper. The back and front seems to be the same, you can draw on either side.

This paper took a while to get used to for me. It works different than most paper I have used regularly. It is impossible to blend (in the way you can on most of the thinner marker paper). But if you switch to a layering method you suddenly realized that this is a very good paper.

The ink stays where you intend. That is very rare. I usually count on the ink floating out a little bit. I have learned to not only live with that, but also to use it to help me with my blending. On this paper I found I had to change my way of drawing. Since the colors stays exactly where you put it, it is easy to get sharp edges on this paper. However, the downside of that is that it isn’t forgiving. If you make a mistake, it is very difficult to remove the color. I guess I could summarize all I talk about as the ink quickly dries on this paper, making it difficult to blend, but if you instead use a layering technique the paper will be really good. All markers I have tried on this paper works very well.

Markers loose value when they dry, but that problems seem not to be true on this paper. The colors I laid down seem to keep the value. A strange thing is, that on the color samples I did, all color seemed much lighter than other average paper, but on the drawing I made, all the colors looked very dark (on this paper, compared to other papers).