Gab with Gaby

An engineer's creative corner studio.

Markers

Gab about COPIC Ciao Markers Refills

Copic Markers, Markers, ColoringGabriela SimsComment

Hello and welcome to another crafty chat on my blog. Today I’m talking about ways to get more life out of your Copic Markers; my Copic of choice is usually a Ciao marker. I chose Ciaos because the come in 180 colors at a lower price point than the Sketch version. Quite frankly, those are enough colors for me and it allowed me to buy more colors when I was starting out. Ink refills are available for all of the Ciao colors as well as replacement Super Brush Nibs. But how to refill them?

You will need:

-Your dried out markers

-Matching refills

-A gram scale

-Some patience  

To check all of my markers (approximately 105) and refill the ones in need (approximately 10) it took me about 1.5 hours.

I found many videos on the Sketch markers, but not much on Ciaos. The technique is the same, but the amount of ink needed varies. For a new Ciao, I weighed it with the caps on and found it to be between 10-11 grams. 

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I then weighed a marker I knew was drying out and got a weight of 8-9g. I put those to the side and then weighed my refill with the cap off, a full refill weighs about 26g with no cap.

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Next, I removed my chisel nib from my marker and added 10-15 drops and the reweighed my refill, as the value decreased, I knew how many grams were transferred to my marker. I continued until I had added 2g to each dried out marker or brought the weight back up to 10g. A word of caution, 11g proved to be too much ink for my markers and I had to do some coloring on a scratch pad to run off the excess, I would stay as close to 10g as possible so you do not waste ink.

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I also noted the markers that weighed in at 9g so I would know which refills I need to pick up soon! 

I hope this tutorial was helpful for any other Ciao artists out there, until next time, stay safe in these crafting streets! 

Happy crafting,

Gaby