Saturday, January 17, 2015

Working out my system for ink and wash drawing with Copics and Tombows


After the legendary Jose Pepe Gonzalez. This was done using my new system, or at least working it out. I did a little digital cleanup on it above, below you can see the before and all the scribbling and writing I did on the page. 


As for the system - the .9 mechanical pencil was way too big, so I've since brought down a .3 instead. The only other fail was, sadly, the Pilot Petit3 brush pen. It is my absolute favorite of all the brush pens I've tried because of 2 factors the rest lack - the ink flows fast enough and is black enough that it doesn't skip out or fade to a light grey at normal drawing speeds, and the nylon nib is quite narrow with a good point and is probably the stiffest one I've interviewed, meaning that it won't suddenly go form thin line to big fat blob-line because your hand inadvertently twitched or relaxed a bit. I suppose I haven't developed the fine touch needed for delicate brush drawing yet, and these hard fude brush pens are made for us ham-fisted beginners. The only reason it's a fail is because the ink isn't waterproof and smears out into the Tombow markers when I'm adding a wash. The scribbles across the top of the page are with the Copic Multiliner BS and BM (Brush Small and Brush Medium - those silly Japanese and their inadvertently funny abbreviations!) It's actually the first time I had tried the BM, and it turns out to be very stiff, though I wish the tip was finer. Between both of them they almost do the job of the Petit3, but are completely and instantly waterproof.  So, with the new substitutions, my pen-and-marker-based ink and wash drawing system is quite possible perfected now.

The correction you can see along the top of her hand - where I tried to cover up some black ink with the Sharpie poster paint marker - was unfortunately the Petit3, so it bled into the white paint and stained it gray, which the waterproof inks don't do. At least I don't think they do. (EDIT - they do. Still need to find a replacement for the Sharpie poster paint markers.)


Playing around with some ballpoint doodles, getting frustrated because they keep cutting out on me. About to give up on them. Then I decided to move beyond all this gesture and quicksketch stuff and draw in a more finished comic book style - depicting the surface again rather than just pure form and movement, and paying attention to creating a nice finish. Ah, it felt good! Been too long since I drew like this! Rather than pencil though I did the initial sketch in light grey Tombow. And on this one I tailored the Tombow wash rather extensively - you can blend the grays together beautifully using a waterbrush and the colorless blender, as well as the standard method of using a lighter marker to blend over a darker one. I really love this combination of Copics and Tombows! If I keep drawing like this I'll begin to drop back into tight mode, something I think I really need to do.




I've posted the 2 above previously, but I did some more wash work around them that improved them nicely. 


And yet another landscape study, This one done fast because I really wanted to just go to bed. Still took 50 minutes before I was happy with it. 

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