Currently Browsing: Brush Pens
Sketching Warm Up—A Quick Approach
Just as it is important to do your daily exercises, go for your walk, ride your bike, it’s important to do your drawing warm up. These can be done very quickly. The sketches on the above page spread were done in less than 12 minutes. That’s how long it takes to make my breakfast noodles. […]
Picking a Pen to Suit Your Paper
I write about picking your art tools and media to suit your paper (canvas, etc.) a lot on the blog. Lately I’ve been working in one of the journals I bound in #2017BigBind that I made with the OLD Gutenberg paper. (This is the Gutenberg paper made before 2017, before the cancelation of the paper […]
Warm Ups: Some More Thoughts…
I’ve written about warm ups many times, but readers still often forget how important they are. So I’m sharing some warm up pieces from my journals again today, before I get some more warm ups done and get my day going. My goal with warm ups is to check myself on my ability to correctly […]
Have Fun By Working on a Different Surface
Sometimes it’s fun to work on a toned surface, whether you create that tone (or texture) yourself by preprinting the surface, or your work on a surface that comes toned. Typically I’ll work on toned paper but I had some chipboard in the studio for another project and grabbed a piece to sketch on the […]
Running Out of Paper Space
In the last post you saw me add a fold down section to a journal page. Today, just for grins, here’s a loose sheet—a quick sketch that saw me running out of space for the best part of the portrait: hair in a top of the head ponytail. I slapped a piece of extra […]
In Context—Losing a Loved One
We can find insightful quotes which remind us of our humanity everywhere.
Simple Approaches for Backgrounds—A Five-Part Series: Part 5 Lifting Off Color
This is Part Five of a five-part series on executing simple backgrounds in your journal or other artwork. Part One of this series can be found at this link. I’m going to end this series with the simplest approach to background texture—color lift off. To do this you need a paper with sufficient surface sizing […]
Simple Approaches for Backgrounds—A Five-Part Series: Part 4 Fold Outs
This is Part Four of a five-part series on simple approaches to backgrounds in the visual journal and paintings. See Part One here. Last December I was buried beneath the latest of the blog transfer issues. I didn’t get to post a number of images and posts I’d worked up. Today’s image falls well into discussion […]
Simple Approaches for Backgrounds—A Five-Part Series: Part 3 Patterns
This is Part Three of a five-part series on simple approaches to backgrounds in the visual journal and paintings. See Part One here. Today I wanted to look at pattern—it’s something that you can use to quickly fill up the background space around a subject. I’ve written about some of my favorite approaches numerous times […]