When it comes to choosing the right medium for coloring books, to say that you have a lot of options is a massive understatement. There are countless brands of colored pencils and markers to choose from on Amazon with no real way of knowing what is and isn’t a quality product, what will actually look the way you want it to, and what is a normal price or not. Professional artists consider alcohol-ink based markers, like Copic and Prismacolor, the golden standard for coloring. As an artist myself, I’ve always used alcohol-based markers to color my own art, but as a coloring book enthusiast, there are so many options that would still give you a great coloring experience and not break the bank.
You might ask yourself, why not just use Crayola or any other inexpensive brand at the art store? They can be found everywhere, have lots of great colors and are relatively inexpensive. However, they dry out quickly and the result is a bunch of streaky lines (pictured at right).
To find markers that will give you a more a nice solid field of color and have complete coverage in the areas you are working on, it’s time to upgrade your tools for a better experience.
Now that we know what doesn’t work, what are the qualities we do want to see in markers for coloring books? To start with, we looked at markers that colored in larger fields without a lot of streaking, either water- or alcohol-based, didn’t bleed through the paper too much, had many different colors available, and ideally had dual-sided tips for covering larger areas and more detailed work.
Starting our search on Amazon, we looked at the Ohuhu Maui markers, Crayola, and for comparison, alcohol-based Caliart markers.
Ohuhu Maui (below): High quality water-based marker. Extremely cheap ($20 for 60 Maui markers / $36 for 100 Maui markers), brush tip and liner tip, doesn’t bleed through too badly unless you color over a specific spot over and over. Comes with some extra tips and instructions for replacing tips, and its own color swatch sheets – one printed and two to fill out yourself to really see what each shade looks like.
Ohuhus don’t bleed very badly, because they are water-based, but… The downside is that they are water-based, so if you accidentally drip a bit of condensation from your morning cup of iced caramel macchiato like I did, the drop will dilute the color and likely bleed onto the next page.
Crayola – The Big 40 (below): Low quality water-based marker. Extremely cheap ($20 for 40 Crayola markers), round tip, tends to bleed if you’re trying to lay down thick, even layers of color. Comes with two guides, one on top and one on the back, showing you what each color looks like, but they aren’t very accurate.
You can probably tell by the splotchy streaks and uneven layers of color that we had a very hard time using these Crayola markers and creating a nicely-colored picture. We were worried at first that the markers would be too small for our adult-sized hands, but they weren’t at all – the problem was that the ink is not very pigmented, so while it’s usually enough to satisfy kids in school, it doesn’t look very nice.
Caliart Markers (below): Medium quality alcohol-based marker. Extremely cheap ($40 for 100 Caliart markers), small round tip and chisel tip, bleeds very heavily. Comes with a nice black carrying case. Unbelievably smelly.
Caliarts, like most alcohol-based markers, are highly pigmented, so laying down that even layer of color is effortless. In fact, they were so pigmented that when we would touch pen to paper, the ink would pool around that spot quite a bit more than we wanted it to – and as you can see, it bled through multiple pages. All alcohol markers will bear at least a mildly dizzying aroma of alcohol, these were nearly unbearable. They made us feel so sick while using them that coloring in this design took multiple attempts with long breaks in between.
In the end, out of this selection, we would most strongly recommend Ohuhu’s water-based Maui markers to people who want their coloring pages to be frame-worthy pieces of art. They’re cost-efficient, very pigmented without bleeding excessively, and they dry in much more even layers of color than markers like Crayola will. It’s about as close as you can get to alcohol markers’ superior color and blending without the hassle of using alcohol markers, especially on coloring book paper which tends to be pretty thin.
We hope this article helps you narrow down your buying options, Happy Coloring!