Inspiration
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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.…
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Mark Making Part 1: Markers and Fineliners
There is such a delicate balance between making art and then having time to scan/edit/crop and write about it. And also the balance between making art and having time to watch more Sailor Moon, which is another way I’ve been filling my time (on episode 23 of… 200 ^_^”). But hey, look! I came up with a project for myself a couple months ago, and it’s been going pretty well in terms of finding time to work on it. And it’s *gasp* enjoyable! Back in February, I had this idea to start a “mark making” project. I was inspired by a suggestion in the book Once Upon a Colorful Canvas†.…
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Try, try, try again
Title to the tune of row, row, row your boat. So. I had written most of the post below (and the title and sentence above) at the end of February, when I was feeling like I had more energy to finally restart blogging and commit to making more art. But I didn’t want to post it until I finished creating a light theme for my blog (and let us leave aside this tried-and-true procrastination method for now); this retro-terminal-dark-mode one had been bothering me lately, though I couldn’t put my finger on why exactly it felt constraining. So the post waited a bit while I thought about a new layout…
