What the Falcon hath wrought - and my New Year's gift to myself - Copic Multiliners

I haven't posted many of my drawing with the Namiki Falcon, and it's because most of them - well, to put it bluntly they sort of suck. In the 1st one above I discovered that if you put much ink at all down the wash gets too dark and it loses that light airy quality - I suppose it's because the Falcon puts down so much ink to start with - it has a much more copious inkflow than the Pen&Ink Sketch pens I was using. So I had to become a minimalist. That's nice when it works, but it takes so much concentration and requires that things really be going your way on a given day. I want to be able to explore form, wrap lines around, not have to think so much about the special requirements of the pen, but just draw.

Lol, and through these images you can trace the movements of that pesky wandering hair on my scanner..

I was getting really frustrated - I guess the Falcon is too much pen for me - or just too high maintenance. What a shame - I'll keep coming back to it - I have a feeling when Im good enough I'll be able to handle it, plus handling it will hone my skills even farther. 

I was having some nice results using the Staedtler pigment liner pens I had bought some time ago, but the biggest one in the set - the 0.7 I believe, was dried out when it arrived, and I wanted some bigger pens, so I ordered a set of Copic Multiliners - rated the top favorite in Japan for inking Manga. This set starts much finer and goes much larger - up to 1mm!! I LOVE these pens!! Remind me of drawing with felt tips but these put down a faster flow of extremely black ink and seem to respond perfectly to my every thought - not in the overly demanding way of the Falcon, but without imposing their own special requirements and limits. They completely get out of the way - I think something and it's like it appears on the page with no conscious effort. And the set includes 2 nice fine 'brush pens' - not very flexible, but that means you don't have to be so careful about exactly how you handle it - it's more like a felt tip pen that can draw a nice thin line until you press harder and it very smoothly gets wider. The big problem with all the more flexible brush pens I've used is it's way too easy for them to suddenly go super side when you don't want them to - you need to hover your hand precisely over the page all the time, which is exhausting and impossible. This set came in on New Year's Eve, just as the Falcon came in on Christmas Eve. How perfect! Oh, and I did the grey 'wash' with one of my Tombow brushpen markers - the lightest grey (most of the rest are dried out, and half of them were when the set came in!) I've now ordered a 10 piece greyscale set of them.