I do like having linework. It lets me have a clear
guide line for where things go as I'm painting, pencil can get too
easily lost under the paint and then I make a lot of mistakes once
that happens, mostly in the proportion of facial features. And
especially with watercolour it can feel a bit hard to understand the
end result without some line art in there somewhere, landscapes are
fine but people can end up looking a bit hazy.
A lot of the time though it's just too extreme a
contrast to the colours it's bordering if that makes sense. For
example if I was to draw blue water with black line art then it makes
it more solid than I'd want it to be, it's even worse for really pale
things...drawing the sun, a nearly white thing, should probably not
have such a solid black outline.
Unfortunately I only bought the 8 colour pack, and
one of them's black. So other than the red their all pretty dark
colours...still doesn't help greatly with drawing pale things.
The pens are great but buying them were a pain.
Firstly they have to come from America and buying them directly from
there the postage cost more than the pens themselves (£40 in total,
way too much for pens) I ended up getting them here for £20...still a lot for pens but at least I
knew I'd use them.
When they came in the packet had been smashed, by
the looks of it before they had been sent since the envelope was
fine, and two of the pens were damaged. luckily it was the black one
that was really badly so and leaking ink (I've wrapped it up with
sellotape, we'll see if it dries up.)
But when I sent the seller a message they sent me
out a second pack for free (without even asking for pictures which
makes me think they had a lot of complaints about this.) so now I
have back ups at least.
So the pens themselves: I've always loved micron
pens. they're waterproof and fadeproof, they last forever and you can
get them with really fine nibs (these ones are 0.25mm) which keep
their point for a good long time.
In this coloured 8 pack there's black, a really
dark brown (basically my go to new black,) a warm brown, dark purple,
sky blue, magenta pink, light green and a bright red.
The first thing I tried out was scrubbing the pen
marks with water (vertical lines on the left) and they do loose some
of their colour after doing so but they barely bleed into the
surrounding area at all. I image at worst this will make me have to
go over some of the line art when I'm done painting (mostly with the
red and green.)
Another thing is that if your pencil marks are too
strong then once you go over with pen and rub out you can still see
them under the pen (bottom right.) The pink and red are the worst for
this.
The rest of the tests I did was mostly checking
which pen sits best with most of my paint colours. Making the line
art coloured unfortunately also makes more planning required, you
need to know which colours your going to use in advance.
Despite these things they're still amazing pens,
and I'm probably going to completely switch to using the coloured
ones for everything soon. I love micron pens, I don't normally care
about one brand over the other but these pens are great for line
art.
~*~
So there was a few things I wanted to test out
with this little A6 painting. Firstly of course the new pens, I'm
really happy with the end result there. I kept the lineart thin since
I was mostly testing out how well it would sit with the colours
around it but I should do a think line art test at some time.
I also used the darker brown on her eyes and
eyebrows just to help make them stand out more and I'm glad I did.
I think the two mistakes I did make though, well
mostly just one, is to make sure the line art is always darker than
the paint around it so in these cases I probably should have made the
entire outline of the girl in the dark purple instead to sit against
the background better and there were quite a few cases where the red
pen in her hair was actually lighter than her hair it's self which
gave a weird look when I didn't go over the lineart completely.
The next test was adding patches of different
colour to make up the whole area of colour...not described great but
for example her top is more purple at the top left and more a sky
blue at the bottom right...just sort of braking up the flat colour.
Her 'red' hair is yellow, orange, pink and a dark wine colour with
very little standard red in it at all.
I really like the effect, it's not
realistic...well it kinda has a touch of realism in that, say, a
yellow ball will have different colours on it from the light bouncing
off the surrounding different coloured objects: like the green grass
it's on and the blue sky.
However since I'm doing this all from imagination
I'm just adding patches of other colours to break up the flatness of
a colour, I really like the end result, it's...painterly? I did try
to make the yellow in her hair be near the candle at least.
Watercolours I used (as far as I can remember.)
Daler-Rowney: Permanent Mauve, Permanent Magenta,
Shadow, Indigo, Prussian Blue
Daniel Smith: Quinacridone Sienna
Schmincke: Cerulean Blue, Magenta?
Winsor & Newton: New Gamboge, Perylene Violet,
Alizarn Crimson
So as you can see far more than my normal
range...I've actually been sticking to only using three paints for a
few paintings before this...I wanted to try going to the other
extreme with this.
The third test was with her face, The painting I
did before this I really struggled to do the shadows well on her
skin. It didn't turn out to be the best practice for this, I kept her
face too subtle and originally I was going to give her darker skin
but I liked the contrast too much. I'll keep working on it though.
~*~
Sorry for not posting here in ages...life's been complicated. Should be able to post more often now though.
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