New Adventures in Art-ing

It has been a bit exciting around here this fall. I have been tackling projects and making so much art I am excited and stunned. No really. I don’t remember when I have done so many pieces of art, either full pieces or sketches in such a short amount of time and even so much in one day. I would credit both the daily sketch projects and the experimentation and use of a couple of new media.

Quick side note because someone will ask. And I just looked it up. If you are wondering why sometimes you hear or read media and mediums used regarding art and are confused here’s the explanation I just found. Medium(s) is the materials used to create art, such as oil paint, pastels, pencil etc. Media is the plural of medium, so they mean the same when it comes to art. I found the explanation here.

Now, on with my story.

I have been wanting to do more digital art, along the lines of drawing or painting, not just the 3D digital art I do. I’ve tried a couple of different programs, but I haven’t put a lot of time into really learning how to use them. As an effort to start to get comfortable in at least one of the digital art programs I took one afternoon and opened up Adobe Fresco and decided to make a cartoon like mushroom, or maybe a storybook type of mushroom. It came out pretty good. From there I tried taking a sketch I had made and set about recreating it digitally. Things were looking good, and I was thinking I might have found something that I could get comfortable with. So, I decided to take a sketch of a crooked Christmas tree that I did late one night and work it up as a digital painting. That became this year’s Holiday card and t-shirt.

I continue to do pieces in Adobe Fresco. Most, right now, are quick sketch sorts of things since I’m still learning my way around all the brushes and layers and so on. Right now, I’m looking for a good fur brush for a couple of things I want to do. Even though I am looking for a fur brush, at the moment I mostly use the two basic marker brushes. Which leads me to my next new adventure in art-ing.

I’ve started using markers. I got a bug in my brain one night to try them. I think it came from a couple of things. One, was watching an artist drawing a Venom cover while basically being interviewed for Adobe Max this year. The other, probably has something to do either directly with Inktober or watching some artists on Instagram. At first, I thought I would just use the set of Prismacolor markers that I purchased several years ago and haven’t used. I thought that since I already have them, they would be a good place to start. And it turns out they work pretty well.

But I confess, what really intrigued me were the Copic markers. I’ve heard about them for a few years, even sort of looked at them one in the art supply store. But, as I was not using marker at the time, and they are not inexpensive, I didn’t bother to pick any up. I also couldn’t figure out what the big deal was about them. So, I did some research.

Here are the cool things about them. They come in three versions that all use the exact same ink. The Sketch version has the largest number of colors. At current count that would be 358. The ink is refillable. The nibs are replaceable. I was excited to see that they have four different colors of grey and each of those come in eleven different tints. Oh yeah. This is cool.

A little more research helped me understand why they are used by artists to create pieces. If you’re like me you use the markers you get at the local box store and try to color with them and you get all these streaks and such when your strokes overlap and if you try to fix it, it just makes it worse. So why use markers. It turns out there are two types, water-based, and alcohol-based. What you get at the local box store are usually water-based. They are less expensive as well. The Prismacolor markers I have and the Copic markers are alcohol-based. They behave differently when the color hits the paper and if you do it just right, they don’t streak like the water-based markers too. Oh, and they layer beautifully. The only downside to markers is that, unlike paints and many inks, they are dyes and not pigments which means they are not light fast. They fade when exposed to light for too long. They are great for creating a piece and then scanning it at high resolution and using the digital copy to create prints and other things from.

I decided I would worth it to pick up a small set of the Copic markers to try them out. And if they worked well, I have my Prismacolor ones that can help to fill in some missing colors until I get them in Copic. The one big difference between the two brands is that though they both come with a chisel tip on one end on the other end the Prismacolor come with a bullet tip, which is short and good for more detailed or more precise lines while the Copic comes with a brush tip for the other end, which is much as it sounds, longer, more flexible, like a round paint brush without the hairs. Because of the difference, and my tendency to really like control over what I’m putting down, I wasn’t sure how I would like the brush tip on the Copic. That changed considerable when I used them. Oh wow.

To start off I ordered as small set of Neutral Grey markers, that happen to come with a multi-liner pen. I thought they would be good to work in with the Prismacolor markers and would be a good base for some shading and such. But of course, I really wanted to give them a good try out. So, I chose a frog that I had done for my sketchbook project. It is mostly shades of grey with some splashes of color. I was able to use the Copics for the greys and the Prismacolor for the splashes. And holy cow. I was so surprised, and stunned even, at how well they handle and how well the piece turned out.

And now I’m hooked. I turned around and ordered another set of Copics the next day. This time a basic set of colors. I find myself looking for opportunities to use them. And I’m doing a bit more sketching with them, though not as much as I would like, or I hope to. That’s a time issue, and to some extent a limited color palette issue. Though, I do have the Prismacolor markers to compensate for the lack of colors I have in the Copic. I also have a couple of ideas I want to try out with them and another medium that I think could be interesting.

So those are my new adventures in art-ing. I’m really excited about working in these two new to me media and I will have much more to say on working with the markers as time goes on. It feels like they are opening up whole new opportunities for creation and I look forward to seeing what I can do with them.