WOYWW# 116- Inkpads & Promarkers

This week I had a play with some inkpads!
Being fairly new to Promarkers, I have picked up some of the basic rules about which inks to use with them- definitely not Staz-on, and that pretty much everyone recommends Memento.So I was browsing the net, as you do, and found that actually quite a few people were also recommending that you could use a number of other ink pads with them, and then someone else would say no you can't! So I decided I would try out any of the pads they said you could use, which I own.
These are the results:

Memento (left) Archival (centre) and Adirondack Dye (right)

The Memento, on the left, obviously works well- the image stays nice and crisp. The Archival, in the centre, shows clear blurring of the image (Ignore the slightly wonky stamping here).  The third one, Adirondack Dye, Pitch Black, actually gave me a real surprise- no blurring of the image when I coloured over it, even when I used the blender pen, and a nice strong, crisp black image.

Versafine (left) & Impress (right)

    
  These two inkpads are recommended by a number of people, but I got a very poor result from both.On the right the Versafine shows clear blurring of the inked image, yet a lot of people said this works fine for them,but it is possible that this one works if you are colouring inside an outline image rather than colouring over the top of the ink. The Impress image, (this was the only colour I have in Impress pads, they were on sale somewhere, lol) really doesn't work at all, although I did get some interesting colours from where the ink blended with my Promarkers, even if that wasn't the intended result! Again, a few people said it works fine, maybe the black does, or maybe it works as an outline image. I will test this out later and post the results.
 Another point seems to be card or paper- everyone has their own preference. These samples above were done on plain white 100gsm multi-copy paper from Staples.Yet the Memento and Adirondack performed really well.  But just in case the paper type had a bearing on the Versafine & Archival, I tried both on NEENAH card, which seems to be one that almost everyone recommends.

Archival (left) & Versafine (right)

 Again, the Archival on the left performed really badly,(if anything worse on this card than plain paper),the blurring around the butterfly isn't my attempt at blending, its almost as if the Promarkers 'bleach' away the ink colour. You could get some interesting (but probably not very controllable) effects though. The Versafine on the right didn't fare any better, you can see that it still smudges & blurs any fine detail, I didn't think there was really any difference between the two types of card/paper. Oddly enough though, I did notice more bleeding of the Promarkers outside the image lines than I had on the copy paper-not sure if this was just me being a little careless, or if it does bleed more.  I will be trying a few more images in outline, to see if that improves how the Archival, Versafine & Impress perform, and I have ordered a Letraset Bleedproof pad, which is recommended also for Promarkers, so I shall do some comparison images on that too when it arrives. Have a great WOYWW.