Tag: art

I took a walk around downtown Mesa the other day and wandered into the Arts Center there. It was a blustery and cold day and it was all I could do to get the line work done before I had to get up and move around. I did the watercolors a bit later after I warmed up.

Materials: This was painted in my Moleskine watercolor sketchbook using Sakura Koi watercolors and an off-brand fineliner pen that wasn’t quite waterproof, and will be kept away from the watercolors in the future.

I’ve recreated the various Copic marker colors and also made set of brushes that mimic the various marker tips and placed them for sale on Gumroad.

Copic is known for a wide range of color markers, and it’s not a stretch to say they’re the gold standard of the industry. They’re also expensive. It’s also easy to rack up over $100 in markers. At the usual prices of $5-6 for each one (buying sets doesn’t provide much of a discount) the cost adds up quickly. As much as I’d love a 72-piece set, I’m not going to spend around $300 for one.

To be blunt, October has been a month of failure. I’m glad to see it gone. Pretty much all my plans fell apart, and I accomplished very little. Read on, if you’d like to see a detailed post-mortem of the tenth month of 2015.

The 80in80 sketchbook project died in flight. October is also “#Inktober” and a nice time to show off ink drawings over the course of the month. There’s also a lesser known hashtag “Drawlloween,” that focuses on Halloween related images. I linked them up and planned to do ink drawings of the Drawlloween as my Inktober subjects.

As promised, here’s the results of the sixth week of my 80 Drawings in 80 Days challenge. This covers pages 36-42, drawn Sep 14-20.

Here’s the drawings from this past week. (I’m a couple days late on this one, sorry.)

As promised, here’s the results of the fifth week of my 80 Drawings in 80 Days challenge. This covers pages 29-35, drawn Sep 7-13.

Here’s the drawings from this past week. (I’m back-dating this post because I totally forgot to keep the weekly posts updated!)

So I’ve been doing a daily drawing for thirty days now. I posted the 30th last night.

[instagram url=https://instagram.com/p/7ZxX6nBZzt/]

That’s thirty down and fifty(!) to go for those keeping track.

I’ve posted each one to Instagram, and I’ve managed to not miss a day. There’s been a few days when I really didn’t want to open up the pens. But I did anyway. The drawing might have been simpler than I would’ve liked, but I got it done.

As promised, here’s the results of the fourth week of my 80 Drawings in 80 Days challenge. This covers pages 22-28, drawn Aug 31-Sep 6.

Almost half done!

This week I experimented with a Rotring ArtPen. It’s a quill pen styled fountain pen that handles well. But I found it’s line is a bit thick. For an extra fine tip, the line is the same as my #1 (0.5mm) Rapidograph, and using the back of the nib is still thicker than the #0 (0.35) Rapidograph. For a lot of the thin crosshatching, that’s still too thick. I really wanted to like it, as I have some doubts about how well Rapidographs will take being carted around in a pen case. So I sent it back to Amazon.

As promised, here’s the results of the third week of my 80 Drawings in 80 Days challenge. This covers pages 15-21, drawn Aug 24-30.

As promised, here’s the results of the second week of my 80 Drawings in 80 Days challenge. This covers pages 8-14, drawn Aug 17-23.

As promised, here’s the results of the first week of my 80 Drawings in 80 Days challenge. This covers pages 1-7, drawn Aug 10-16.