I tried out a Tombow brush pen this week and it’s pretty great, nice line variation from thick to thin but just a little too chunky for the small stuff. I added some details and hatching with a carbon pen and some uni-pin fine-liners. After scanning and removing the blue line, the carbon pen lines are much clearer than the uni-pins. It’s also much easier to ink with the carbon pen, something akin to a dip pen without all the dipping.
Day 09 of #marveluktober is the ever so shiny and somewhat homicidal Death Metal! Believe it or not I attempted a version of this on paper and spent about an hour on it. Needless to say it did not work out so I quickly sketched up something in clip studio paint before going a little OTT with the texture. Some of it works I think… I mean I like the thumb print brush stuff in the background.
Got a little lazy with this one towards the end and relied heavily on the thumb print brush and ink spatter to fill in the bulk of the figure. I’m not entirely sure the composition works but I’m happy with the Mignolaesque background and general horror vibe.
Always loved this character, had some fun with the shading using a thumb print brush and stippler, such an awesome effect.
Here’s some initial sketches trying to figure this guy out, I was planning on a landscape orientation to vary these a bit.
The pencils and ink close-up produced in Clip Studio Paint for Day 02:
I last tackled Deaths Head back in 2019 for #DrawDeathsHeadDay but I never really felt like I got him, it’s a difficult design to get right.
I approached it completely differently this time and spent a few hours sketching out some ideas earlier in the week, just messing with proportions and style. I was also planning to draw #MarvelUKtober traditionally and thought the sketches would be a good way to test different pens, paper and whiteout. I inked some of this with a Posca fine-liner and it’s a really rich beautiful black on the page, very satisfying!
Traditional inks are just too time intensive for me at the moment so the majority of the list will prob be produced digitally, here’s the final ‘rough to inks’ drawn in Clip Studio Paint for Day 01:
Been squeezing in some true grit texture supply brush tests from their free sampler. I’ve had this seriously generous collection of goodies resting in my inbox for a while, glad I finally imported ’em.
Heres some of my favs so far:
Something just kind of clicked with the rusty nib brush especially, love the line variation and the rough paper feel. Might be my new favourite inker… just don’t tell real g pen.
I’ve been itchin’ to ink over some more blue line work since writing my Blue no more post back in April. I sketched up a quick marsh man in Clip Studio Paint and converted the line art to Cyan.
I printed it onto an A5 sheet of cold pressed watercolour paper (200gsm) and inked with a Pentel brush pen, Uni Pin fineliners and a Posca paint marker for highlights.
I got to work on this around 2pm and completed it in chunks throughout the day, approx. 2 hours altogether including quick colours in Procreate.
Overall, I really enjoyed inking over this blue line piece, there’s a freedom to it, knowing that you could just print off another page if you messed up the inks and start again without losing your original drawing.
I’m disappointed with the brayer texture and will probably need to look at using another ink next time or practice with the roller on different paper. The masking tape also damaged the page in places so I might use masking fluid or cut out a stencil overlay on any future attempts.
The Posca marker worked really well on solid black ink but tended to mix with the brayer texture and grey wash. It’s really difficult to get a good all-round consistent line with whiteout pens like this but it’s also entirely possible that I just didn’t allow enough time for the inks and wash to dry.
I pretty much gave up on the clip studio workflow to remove the blue lines after scanning, the results looked a little faded/grey and the background wash was lost entirely after edits. The technique seems to work best on clean line art only. It’ll probably need tweaked or approached from a different angle for washes/texture. One solution would be to scan the line art and then add washes/texture using digital brushes. Alternatively, washes and textures could be scanned from separate lightboxed pages and added as multiply layers.
Finished a page that I started last year to test a gel pen brush in CSP, it’s not bad, just felt like penciling for a bit too.
A fun wee spread from my A5 sketchbook, I flatted it really quickly in CSP with the intention of trying out some colouring techniques sometime.
Couple of days late but why break tradition? Happy Alien daaaay! Party like it’s 2122!