This one is taking more time than I anticipated. People plus architecture, it figures.
Work in Progress
Stillman and Birn
30 Days of Drawing: Days 16-20
I decided not to take part in Inktober this year. Instead I’ll be drawing at least one page a day in my Stillman and Birn Pocket Alphas. You can see days 1-5 here and days 6-10 here.
It was Yom Kippur when I drew these, and a very strange Yom Kippur it was. The country was under lockdown, and so some of the prayers were set outside, including this one in Kikar Atarim:
The streets were more deserted than usual during Yom Kippur. There are no cars around, and everything is closed, but the pandemic added another eerie aspect to it all:
I woke up early in the morning to draw Kikar Dizengoff utterly deserted. The Agam fountain in its centre is still colourless, but I actually think that it works. I love how the multicoloured chairs around the fountain just grab your eye:
I was searching for some flowers to draw, when this came up: a Dior dress from the exhibition we saw over a year ago. I’m not very happy with the wild highlight and shadowing choices that I made, and you can see that the Alpha paper doesn’t allow for multiple washes, but you learn from your mistakes more than from your successes:
I went for a stroll looking for things to draw and found this abandoned couch lorded over by a local cat. I had to juggle all of my art supplies on my hands, so that was a challenge, but I like how the cat and couch came out. I may later on touch up the bush on the left, but as Stillman and Birn Alpha paper doesn’t take too well to reworking, I may just leave it as it is:
30 Days of Drawing: Days 6-10
I decided not to take part in Inktober this year. Instead I’ll be drawing at least one page a day in my Stillman and Birn Pocket Alphas. You can see days 1-5 here.
I had some failures and some successes with my drawings this week. I did a very quick and not very accurate drawing of my gong fu table, and with that finished my first Stillman and Birn Pocket Alpha.
I’ll probably write a post about the Pocket Alpha, maybe later this week. In any case, the sketch above didn’t come out great and I considered not even investing in painting it, but then I figured out that while I learned from my mistakes in sketching the gaiwan proportions (I’m not using a pencil under drawing because I’m trying to speed up my process), I wouldn’t get a chance to improve my watercolour skills if I didn’t watercolour it. So the result was an OK watercolour, and another proof that paint can cover a multitude of sketching sins.
The next sketch took my two days, mostly because I was busy. It’s a “flowers of the urban desert” spread, and I created the top left sketch on day 2 and the rest on day 3. I’m trying to get myself used to composing pages, and this one will probably get some text added to it later.
We’ve just entered our second lockdown, and I got nostalgic to the office and to our little escapes to our excellent local coffee shop. Found a photo of this latte from one of my final pre-Covid visits there and decided to draw it.
This drawing, of the excellent Paul’s Café in Jaffa, took me the longest to draw, and that’s after I edited out a ton of details. It was fun to do and reminded me of better times. I hope that they pull through and I’ll be able to go back there someday soon.
30 Days of Drawing: Days 1-5
I decided not to take part in Inktober this year. Instead I’ll be drawing at least one page a day in my Stillman and Birn pocket Alphas. It happens that there are just a few pages left in my first pocket Alpha, the one I got gifted by Stillman and Birn as part of their sponsorship of Gabi Campanario’s Urban Sketches Porto 2018 symposium class. I use multiple sketchbooks at the same time, and finishing and starting a notebook is always the hardest part for me. So I decided to challenge myself to finish my old Stillman and Birn pocket Alpha and start on a new one, by challenging myself to draw at least a page a day for 30 days straight.
I will be batch uploading these 5 days at a time, so here’s what I drew on the 17th of September until today, the 21st of September:
Vengeful Fortress Part 7: Spiders and Gates
It’s combat time in Vengeful Fortress the free-form illustrated adventure that I’m currently running. See previous instalments here: part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5, part 6. Drawn on a Stillman and Birn Epsilon sketchbook (review in part 1), with Schminke watercolours, various fountain pen inks (Sailor Sky High, Diamine Earl Grey, Diamine Christine, Diamine Robert), and Deleter Neopiko-Line-3 fineliners.
Vengeful Fortress Part 6: Dark Moon Rising
After a long, unplanned hiatus, I’m running my free-form illustrated adventure, Vengeful Fortress. See previous instalments here: part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5. Drawn on a Stillman and Birn Epsilon sketchbook (review in part 1), with Schminke watercolours, various fountain pen inks (see if you can guess which ones), and from this instalment, with Deleter Neopiko-Line-3 fineliners.
Vengeful Fortress Part 5: Split Party
Vengeful Fortress Part 4: The Well
What would you have done?
Vengeful Fortress Part 3: Rohrer and Klingner Lotte SketchINK Mini Review
Welcome back to Vengeful Fortress, a fantasy roleplaying game that I’m drawing in ink and watercolour (no pencil underdrawing, to save time) as I’m running it for my group of players. We’re now in Part 3, and here are Part 1and Part 2 (which also include a review of the sketchbook I’m using, the Stillman and Birn Epsilon).
As you can see, things are starting to heat up. I’m using a TWSBI Diamond 540 fountain pen with a fine nib, filled with Rohrer and Klingner SketchINK Lotte. SketchINK Lotte is a black pigmented and waterproof fountain pen ink. It’s not a saturated ink, and you can see the grey shading quite clearly here in the lettering and the line work. R&K SketchINK Lotte is also a hard starter, so while it does flow well enough when you get it primed up with a few preliminary scribbles, if you put the pen down for even a few minutes, you’re going to have to prime it again. It is, however, waterproof and relatively fast drying, which makes it worth my time using it. In case you’re wondering if “hard starting” is just an issue with this pen or this nib, I have tried R&K SketchINK Emma and Lotte in a Lamy Safari and a Super5 pen and they are hard starters in all cases. It seems to be a property of the ink, perhaps because it dries to relatively quickly, or because of the particular waterproof formula R&K are using here.
So know that you can trust the Rohrer and Klingner SketchINKs with your watercolours, and know that they’re great for when you’re in a rush and don’t want to wait for the ink to dry, but also have a bit of scrap paper for the first few seconds before you use them .
Vengeful Fortress Part 2: More Thoughts on Stillman and Birn Epsilon
You can find part 1 here. You can see that there is a slight bit of show through with the Stillman and Birn Epsilon, but at only 150 gsm that’s to be expected.
I decided to play a bit more with ink colours and wider nibs here, so that’s a Sailor medium stub nib and Diamine Inkvent Blue Edition Candy Cane ink for spells and effects:
There’s no show through for the ink, and though it may not seem that way, there was no spreading. Also, if you like granulating watercolour effects, the Stillman and Birn Epsilon paper seems to be a champ for that.
