So not having my Stylus is making me a little crazy. I have so much work to do, so many pictures to finish, and they're all just staring at me helplessly from inside my "Works in Progress" folder, scanned, but further progress halted by lack of stylus. In light of this, plus a driving desire to apply color to my pics, I've started fuddling around more with *gasp* real media!

Pencils, Colored pencils, I've made marked progress on, and feel much better about working with than I had in the past.. but my Prismacolor markers continue to taunt and mock me spitefully while I try to bend their odiferous powers to my cause.

I see others produce these beautiful Prisma Marker pictures that are just dazzling in the variety and depths of colors I've seen produced, the gorgeous, subtle shading effects and broad expanses of perfectly uniform color, and I want to play. I wanna do that! I can do that! I can just take the markers to this little piece here and-*horrible catastrophy*

Fine, I'll just try it with -*even-more-horribler-catastrophy*

Argh! Why do you hate me so Mister marker? Why!?

I spent 8 hours fuddling around with the dang things, and while I feel I made some progress, I still end up with poorly-blended lines, bleedovers, and a Colorless Blender marker, who's only purpose as far as I can tell is to fuck up an already perfectly okay section of color.

This and one other piece were about the only things I produced that were worth half a crap, but I like the look enough to not want to give up on the media.

So, I'm putting out a request, to you Prismacolor gods and goddesses (pencil and marker alike), teach me some of your mojo? I'm picking it up as I go along, but I don't have the money to trial-and-error my way into mediocrity. Any tips or pointers would be helpful, or the address of some astoundingly-helpful video on youtube or something... any of that would be wonderfully helpful!