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Mark Making Part 16: Fountain Pens
Yay, the mark making project continues! Fountain pens are a medium I used to think was more for literary types rather than visual artists. I’m not sure where I picked up that idea, but after reading different artist’s sketch journals and following various urban sketchers, I’ve found they are a popular sketching tool. The lines have a unique quality, compared to felt tip fineliners and other pens. And the fact that the ink blends with water can be an asset!
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Mark Making Part 15: Oil Pastels
Oil pastels are the medium I have the least experience with and also the least amount of supplies*. I often feel more of an affinity to painting that drawing, though, and oil pastels ride a line between the two in an interesting, if messy way.
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Mark Making Part 14: Compressed Charcoal, Graphite Sticks, and Powder
Onward with my mark making project! This time was all the charcoal that makes a giant mess: compressed charcoal sticks, vine charcoal, charcoal powder, and then graphite powder and sticks.
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Mark Making Part 13: Charcoal Pencils
How can time both seem stuck in amber while also moving at warp speed? Most days, it feels like the evening passes before I can motivate myself to draw or paint. Yet every day feel so similar, it’s hard to believe the seasons are still changing, fall to winter. I worked through using almost all my charcoal pencils back at the end of September, before moving. Then finished out the rest at the end of October. So now it’s nearing the end of November that I’m sharing them! At this rate, I’ll probably finish my haphazard mark-making “use all my art supplies” project in *checks calendar* meh. Spring? So here…
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Mark Making Part 12: Soft Pastels
Now we’ve come to the dry mediums that I rarely use, such as pastel – and next after this, charcoal. Ever since moving to my own apartment (eek, 10 years ago ::stares into the far distance over the insistent passage of time::), I just prefer to avoid potential mess. I miss having studio space – or at the very least space in my parents’ house where I was less worried about losing a security deposit if I spilled a bunch of charcoal dust into the carpet. I’ve been looking at photos and videos of art studios recently, pining over creating an improved setup. Most of the studio tour videos I…
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Mark Making Part 11: Col-Erase and Other Pencils
Yay, more gesture drawings! Col-erase and gesture drawings go so well together. The lead is just soft enough to flow easily on the page without too much smudging. Once again, I used Line of Action, Quick Poses, and Pexels for reference photos. I’m feeling more comfortable with the overall figure, compared to face drawings. I’ve been defaulting to cartoon-ish or stylized manga looking faces, rather than looking at sweeping lines or form. Which was okay for this, as the purpose was to use each pencil for any kind of mark. Yet, I feel drawn to practicing realism and grounding my art more in fundamentals. Learning the “right” fundamentals is an…
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Mark Making Part 10: Prismacolor Pencils
Prismacolor colored pencils are one of my favorite mediums; I find them relaxing, perhaps in part because they are a medium with relatively minimal setup and cleanup. They also blend well over other mediums, like markers or watercolor, making it tempting to include them in other traditional art illustrations. I keep mine organized by color in a large pencil case, which is a much better set up then my Copic marker situation of having all of them jumbled together in a photo keepsake box from Michaels (though at $3, the photo boxes work well enough for many of my art supplies. Plus you can label them within the pretty front…
Art with a dash of old school blog rambling
