OLO Marker Review

In this review we take a look at something really special, it is not every day that a new innovation presents itself, in what is otherwise a familiar medium and in this case it is the brand new OLO markers. This review will be one you really want to read and watch the video review of as there is a lot of information and fantastic demonstrations, displaying the full potential of the OLO Markers.

One of the biggest questions I am asked every time I review a new marker is, “Are they better than COPIC?” and this review will be no different. I answer this burning question further into the review and if you watch the video review I also demonstrate COPIC and OLO side by side, showing exactly which marker is best and why.

What Makes OLO Different From All The Other Markers

There are a lot of markers on the market and over the last ten years, I have been privileged and honoured enough to have reviewed many of them, Winsor and Newton Brush Marker, Stylefile, Spectrum Noir, Arrtx, Prismacolor Brush Marker, Ohuhu, Sketchmarker etc.

As a result of this privilege, my understanding and experience of all markers has placed me in a decent position to inspect and evaluate new markers to the game, such as the new OLO Markers. All of the other alcohol markers that we love and use have a central felt absorbing system for replacing ink.

When your marker starts to run dry, when you pour in the refill ink, the ink is absorbed into the felt tube inside the barrel. After this, when the nib of the marker is run across the paper, the nib draws ink from that felt tube and delivers it to the paper. The only issue with this system is, when you fill the marker up, you only actually get back approximately 65% of the ink you used, this is simply down to the absorbing inner tube.

Where the OLO Markers really differ and I will of course, as always, demonstrate this difference; the OLO Markers don’t have this inner felt tube. The ink inside the barrel of the OLO Marker is liquid, you can hear it when you shake it. There is no felt absorbing inner tube, the ink is free flowing and connects to the nib, via a small stopper, just to control the ink and not have it spill out from the sides of the nibs.

An OLO Marker System For All Artist Types, Customisation To Suit Your Needs.

The next, quite noticeable difference of the OLO Markers over other conventional markers, is the size. The OLO Markers are individually, half the size of other markers, yet despite the OLO barrel being half the size, it hold’s slightly more ink than a single COPIC Sketch or Stylefile etc marker.

Obviously when you first see the size of an OLO marker, you would of course be forgiven in thinking how you were going to use it, and this is were the customisation of the OLO system really displays itself. As with other markers, OLO provide both brush and chisel nib, but you as the artist can chose exactly which nibs you want and which ink to use.

Each marker you buy comes with a Connector Ring, this screws into the bottom of your OLO Marker, from this point you have two options, you can connect another OLO Marker to it or one of the three brush handles you can buy. The brush handles as you can see are pretty much like a pencil extender, they come in Red, White and Black with the OLO name printed along the side.

If you would rather not use the OLO brush handles, as I mentioned, you can connect another marker, this would essentially provide you with the equivalent to two COPIC Sketch markers in one OLO barrel. You can either have two different colors on either end, for example, a pale tone and slightly darker tone, allowing for the artist to easily and quickly switch between both colors during blending, all in one barrel. You can do this with both colors featuring brush nibs or both with chisel nibs.

Alternatively, you can have the same color in each OLO marker, one with a chisel nib and one with a brush nib, its entirely up to the artist and this is how customisation of the OLO system is quite unlike the other markers. The only down side I found, and this is a very small down side. I chose for my OLO markers to run with a light tone OLO marker on one side and slightly darker on the other, however, when storing the markers, you are unable to see half the colors.

Because when you store markers, they are laid horizontally, and if in a marker storage system as mine are, one of the marker barrel color identifiers will be displayed perfectly and the other unable to see as it is inside the storage system. This of course will become second nature over time whilst using the markers, you will become more and familiar that BG2.3 for example, holds BG2.4 in the other marker.

OLO Color Palette

As I write this review in October 2024, the full count of colors in the OL O ecosystem is 160 colors. Very recently the count was 128 and 32 colors has been added to expand the count to 160, this is why I premiss at the beginning of this paragraph, that as of the date provided, the count is 160 because in all probability more colors will be added.

I was very fortunate to have been sent the 128 set and I chose for all colors to be brush nibs, I am only missing the recently added 32 count, which I can tell you, I will absolutely be buying them to complete the collection. The palette selection from OLO has been well thought out.

One of the biggest issues I found other markers suffered, when comparing to COPIC, was the lack of very pale colors. They had plenty of rich vibrant colors, but as any marker artist will tell you, very pale tones are essential. When you are working on gradients or blending, pale tones are a must and OLO have included such colors. Obviously I am unable attest for the remaining 32 colors, but from the swatch on the OLO website, there appears to be an exceptional mix of tones.

What I really love about the OLO palette is the selection of greys, there are three shades of grey, Cold Grey, Warm Grey and Red Grey. I have obviously used cold and warm grey before, but I really love the red greys; I know there is another brand that has red greys in their palette, but the transition between each tone in the OLO red greys is much more deliberate and the red more noticeable.

The colors over all are excellent, with just the right amount of tonality between each color, allowing for beautiful blending and gradients. However, there are three colors I really love, and the fact I am excited about the following three colors perhaps says more about my dull personality than any other hidden meaning; the colors are the K Black, BK Blue Black and RK Red Black.

I know the three colors seem like an odd selection to be favourited, however, for me personally, I love trying to draw fan art, Marvel and DC characters, Star Wars characters etc. For so many of these characters, red and blue are the dominant colors, with the Red Black and Blue Black OLO markers, they make the shadows and darks in such drawing really pop; no more black and trying to add a bit of red or blue, there are now dedicated colors and I love it.

Testing and Demonstrating

Now getting down to the real guts of the OLO markers, I have covered what is different, the OLO palette, the customisation of the markers etc, we now need to talk about the performance. When using any of the other markers discussed, because of how the ink is fed through to the nib, when filling in slightly larger areas, occasionally the nib drys out.

When this happens, you need to stop for a second to allow the ink to flow back into the nib, even though it is only literally a second, throughout the drawing, it can become frustrating. Because of the patent, OLO ink system, the delivery of the ink to the nib is much more fluent and consistent. I wracked my brains to try and find a way to demonstrate and show you guys this and eventually I came up with this test.

Here on the website you can only see the final result via the images, but check out my YouTube video review and you will be able to see this demonstration in real time and perhaps get an even better understanding of what I mean.

You can see three long coverings of marker, the only reason there is three, is because after I applied the COPIC covering in the centre, I applied the OLO covering first on the left. Because the color wasn’t close to the COPIC color, I decided to repeat the test with a more like for like color, just to make the test more comparative.

As you can see from the COPIC covering, there are slight areas of fading in the covering, now of course, if you were in the middle of an art piece you would just redo these areas,.However, as one solid covering, the faded areas on the COPIC demonstrate slight drying of the nib, a slowing down of the ink flow.

For both OLO colors, despite one not being comparative, you can clearly see a more consistent flow of ink, and this is the genius of the OLO marker. As you lay down ink using the OLO marker, the flow is gorgeous, it is consistent, no blobs of ink spilling out, no drying of the nibs etc; I sincerely wish there was a better way for me to demonstrate just how amazing the OLO markers are when it comes to the flow of the ink.

Brush Nib

I wish I had of got a few chisel nibs for the purpose of testing and demonstrating, and when I do I will update the review. But for now, the brush nib quality is superb, you can see from the image just how juicy the nib is when the ink flows.

OLO have sourced the nibs from Japan and if you are a keen marker user, you will know that Japan is the epicentre of all things marker related. It is a dream of mine to visit three places in this world, all three visits are completely art related and Japan is one of them, let’s see if you can guess the other two areas. The Japanese are serious about their art and art supplies and this shows in the quality and craftsmanship of so many Japanese sourced art supplies.

OLO Artwork Demonstrations

As I got started with the OLO markers, I obviously had to create some artwork as this is the best method for understanding the product. As this was a marker review I decided to use a sheet of Xpress-It Blending Card, this is a surface specifically for markers and is excellent paper. It is a bit expensive but you will absolutely see a difference in the marker ability on such paper.

As it is Halloween I thought about drawing a Halloween related scene and so I drew this gathering of vampire Minions. As you can see from the finished piece, the colors are exceptional, they are bright and vibrant and as I have already mentioned, the delivery of ink was fluent and consistent. The background was the real test and the OLO markers passed with flying colors, pun intended.

I was really happy with the outcome of the vampire minions drawing, but I wasn’t happy just testing the markers of an excellent quality paper, a paper dedicated to markers. So I decided to do another piece of art on some Strathmore 300 Series Bristol Velum. The Xpress-It Blending Card is excellent but not so good for colored pencil on top for detail and cleaning up.

The next piece I completed was this simple Lion King drawing of Simba, Timon and Pumbaa on the Velum paper. The ink flow threw me a little bit, as you can see from the drawing, at the bottom where the paws are, you can see a bit off feathering. However, after I got used to the flow on Velum paper, I was able to lighten my touch and control any feathering. Velum is a much more absorbent surface than blending card and so the flow of OLO ink onto the more absorbent Velum just took a bit of getting used to.

However, after this drawing, I still wasn’t satisfied, I wanted to test the OLO markers on some Bristol Smooth, this is a surface somewhere in-between the blending card and Bristol Velum. This time I used a sheet of Strathmore 300 Series Bristol Smooth and I wanted to draw something with a larger background area to cover and a more block covering.

My finial art piece as you can see was this Marvel character, Red Skull. Both the Lion King drawing and the Red Skull drawing were after thoughts, not much planning and so this is why they are not that well done. I completed the Lion King in 3 hours and Red Skull in just over 3 and a half hours as opposed to the 8 hours 45 minutes for the Vampire Minions artwork. Regardless, as you can see, the Red Skull drawing has a large area background and because there is a glow behind the character, I used the RB Red Black, Red Greys and Warm Greys.

Even though the last two drawings were an after thought, they helped to give me a good understanding of the OLO markers on different surfaces. Marker based papers such as the Bristol Smooth, Xpress-It Blending Card, etc have a very thin film on the surface, this film allows the ink to sit for a second, allowing the artists to move it and blend better. With surfaces such as Velum, this is much more absorbent and leaves very little to no time for blending. If you tried to use markers on a Cold Pressed watercolour paper, not only would the ink not blend very well, the paper would absorb the ink so much that you would use twice the amount.

OLO Marker Cost

Because the OLO markers can be customised so much, it is hard to pin point prices, so OLO have made sets and I have included a few here for you to view, but you can also head over to the OLO website and check out the sets.

There are two sets of Grey you can buy, set 1 and 2 with 16 markers in each set. Along with either set, included in the price, is 16 connector rings and each set will cost $65.60 for the Brush sets. The Chisel sets of the same colors will cost $54.24

There are also 8 other sets of 16 alternative colors, each set offering different colors and no duplicates. Again each set comes with 16 connector rings and for a Brush set it will cost $65.60 and for the same sets in Chisel will cost $54.24.

You can buy sets of 32 markers of which there are 4 sets, along with 32 connector rings. For a set of Brush nib markers they will cost $131.20 and for the Chisel sets $108.48

For the set of 32 new colors, the brush nib set will cost $131.20 and the chisel nib will cost $108.48

Next there are 2 sets of 64 random colors, each set comes with 64 connector rings and there is no duplicates between both sets. For the brush nib sets they cost $262.40 and for the chisel nib sets they cost $216.96.

There is a set of 128, which comes with 128 connector rings and for the brush nib version it will cost $524.80 and for the chisel nib version it will cost $433.92

Finally there is the 160 set, which includes the the new 32 colors, 160 connector rings and the brush nib set will cost $656.00 or the chisel nib set will cost $542.40

You can of course buy the OLO markers individually, the brush marker costs $4.10 and the chisel nib cost $3.39. You can also buy 10 packs of connector rings for $2.50, the OLO Brush handles are $1.99 each. A packet of 5 replacement brush nibs will cost $6.30 and a 10 pack of replacement chisel nibs will cost $6.30.

You can also buy refills and if you watch the video review I show you how the refills work, OLO have made the refill so easy. The refills have the same body as the OLO marker, all you do is remove the nib from the empty OLO marker and place it on a refill. The refills cost $2.69

Everything is cheaper than COPIC and if you consider the serious problems so many artists are experiencing with COPIC markers, they are also more reliable. Currently OLO are situated in the US, and they ship world wide. OLO currently have dealers in Spain and Italy for deliveries in Europe and next year OLO will be available in the UK via a retailer and on Amazon making for faster deliveries. Like I say, you can order from the OLO website right now, you will obviously have a short wait for delivery and when they are all set up in other locations, deliveries will be much more convenient.

OLO Marker Conclusion

So, can OLO knock COPIC off the top spot, well to be honest with you, given the serious issues with COPIC Sketch markers recently and the lack of support from them, I would argue COPIC have already been knocked off top spot.

But even if we consider COPIC are still on top, I would absolutely say OLO are a better marker and a better all round system. Of course, depending on where you buy your COPIC markers from, the OLO system is quite a bit cheaper as well.

If you would like to watch the video review of the OLO testing and demonstrating just follow the link, also if you would like to watch the speed drawing videos of all three artworks, simply click the link of each video, Vampire Minions, Lion King and Red Skull. I have only added still images of the Minions artwork and one or two of the Lion King and Red Skull, you can inspect these images by following the link. Unfortunately due to the Lion King and Red Skull art being an after thought, I never thought to photo the progress throughout the drawing; I just wanted to get the artwork done as soon as possible.

I know this has been a lengthy review, I hope the sub headings have helped you find what you want to know faster. Delivering to you the most honest and comprehensive review I can is my primary priority on The Art Gear Guide. This review, including the writing, video editing, artwork, testing, note taking etc has taken approximately two weeks. Thank you all so much for your continued and sincerely appreciated, support.