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Mark Making Part 8: Graphite Pencils
Yay! Graphite pencils! And I decided to do several gesture drawings and warm up pencil drills for this one, as I own a lot of 2B, HB, normal #2 pencils, and mechanical pencils. It would have gotten quite repetitive to make general abstract lines with all of them. Especially given it’s all the same grey color. Not that I didn’t do a few sheets of plainer mark making – though even then, I choose a few classic drawing drills with ellipses and lines, compared to the more intuitive drawings I’ve been doing with the other mediums. I had a lot of fun drawing very loose and carefree with most of…
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Mark Making Part 7: Crayons and Other Nostalgia
So this one was on the principle that if I’m using all my art supplies, the little kid ones count too! I bought these crayons and markers way back when I was first working through The Artists Way. I thought making art with them would be a fun “artist date”. I can confirm, drawing with crayons is a) fun b) satisfying to my “inner child” and c) like sooo easy to relax, because who cares what it looks like, it’s just for enjoying the moment of creating stuff! Little kids get this stuff right off the bat, but we can remember that carefree creativity through some repetitive effort *grin*. I…
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Mark Making Part 6: Ballpoint Pens and Highlighters
Today was a low day, not much to talk about. I managed to do some yoga in the morning after a long shower, so that was nice. Sat out on the apartment balcony and video chatted with my family. Read more of Below the Root. Sketched with colored pencil sticks (aka, part 10 of this project). Still have a headache from allergies. >_< Today’s post are the pieces I did with the pens kept with other office supplies such as tape and paper clips. I wanted to include them in this project because using ballpoint pens to sketch can be fun. I also have occasionally used a highlighter to add…
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Mark Making Part 5: Prismacolor Markers and Little Loose Ends
Tonight was photo session night: taking the photo for this post’s title card, as well as a couple more. It was too overcast today to use the sun for good photo lighting. Then it became so late in the evening that I had to use the LED lights, which are suuuuch a pain to set up. They are Ricky’s photography lights, so he was helping me at least. Tonight is also a night where I feel tired and worn out from stress, reading too much news, and feeling uncertain about the future. Still, it’s a blessing to have art to focus on. I am just ready to go make chamomile…
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Mark Making Part 4: Copics, Brush Pens, and Loosening Up
I was super looking forward to reaching my Copic markers in this mark-making-artistic-medium-whatever-it-is experiment. I don’t use Copics near enough, but they are in my top favorite art supplies. <3 I tried not to use too much Copic ink on the project (after all, these things aren’t cheap!), using each color only a bit, to practice blending more than the expressive marks I was getting out of the brush pens. Plus, that way it was easier to get through them all without drawing like…5+ pages of marks. Using the Copic multi-liners to first make boxes/shapes helped with having specific small areas in which to blend color. I really like the…
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Mark Making Part 3: Calligraphy Pens, Random Felt Tip Markers, and Other Such Things
Calligraphy pens are one of those things I buy, thinking I’ll practice fancy hand lettering techniques, and yet I never really get around to it. I have this vague notion that, as someone who majored in graphic design, I should be obsessed with lettering and typography, but my interests have always focused on web design† and illustration. Typography is intriguing to me, but that isn’t a very high bar to jump: my curiosity can be peaked by pretty much any article on Wikipedia. It’s no wonder my calligraphy pens don’t see much mileage, if it was general curiosity that spurred me to buy them, rather than passion. I do like…
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Mark Making Part 2: Multicolored Paper and Gel Pens
I love how white gel pen looks on tan paper. I think the first time I fell for the technique was watching Will Terrell’s sketchbook videos on YouTube. With my mark making project, as I became more comfortable, I began to seek out ways to experiment further – not just varying pens but also the paper. I have a bunch of multicolored card stock (you know, impulse buys when it’s on sale at JoAnne Fabrics….). Card stock is so smooth to draw on, much better than the cheap copy paper or the lighter sketching paper I used for some of the other mark-making sheets. It has a satisfying paper weight.…
Keep your muse happy
