Drawn with Pentel Sign pen on marker paper, colored digitally © 2015 Stephanie Smith
I couldn’t resist this week’s Illustration Friday word: “whimsical.”
I also decided to experiment a bit with some new digital brushes I hadn’t used before, so the colors are a little different than my usual. It was refreshing to use color again, after spending nearly all of “Inktober” working in black-and-white!
The concept sketches for this drawing were made for last week’s Illustration Friday prompt: “prize” Alas, I didn’t have time to finish before the end of the week, but it still makes a nice entry for Inktober today!
Drawn with the Pentel Sign Pen on Strathmore vellum surface bristol.
This drawing took longer than I thought it would… and I’m still not completely sure it’s done. But I’m posting it for Inktober anyway! I’m having fun inking with the brush instead of the pens… although I used technical pens for the seaweed in the background.
Drawn with Pentel Color Brush and Micron pens on Strathmore vellum surface bristol.
© 2015 Stephanie Smith
Finally a return to Illustration Friday! They picked an appropriate word for the start of Inktober, and just when I was challenged to add more solid blacks to my artwork (although I’m not sure this is exactly what was intended…)
Drawn with the Pentel Color Brush (supplemented with some old fashioned regular ink) on Canson Marker paper.
The first part of of my recent shopping expedition to the art store was about the non-brush pens. But the rest of my shopping basket was full of brush pens: self-contained pens designed to emulate using a small brush with ink. Why is that important? The technical pens I usually use are designed to make lines that are always the same width, but that’s not always the look I want. Due to having cats whose instincts are so refined that they believe they can walk across a glass-topped table that’s at a 45° angle (they can’t) using an actual open ink pot is out of the question unless I want to end every art session with a massive ink-spill clean-up. Fortunately I’m not the only one to have this issue, and for folks like me they’ve invented brush pens!
So what did I try this time around?
First up, for reference, the Faber-Castell PITT B
I’ve been using this pen quite a bit lately because of the issues I’m having with the Sakura Brush pens (losing their fine points quickly, fraying if I’m not careful, etc.) so I used it here as a benchmark for comparison. As you can see, it has a pretty wide range from wide to narrow, but it can difficult (not impossible!) to get extremely fine lines.
Since it has a flexible solid fiber point, it can get mashed and damaged, but I’ve found it to be relatively sturdy. It’s easier to get extreme line variation by changing the angle and direction of the pen rather than pressing harder so the point bends, but in practice you’d do both. This was a new pen, so it wasn’t broken in very much and started out a bit on the stiff side. It’s very easy to control, but not as expressive as some others. Even though it’s classified as a brush pen it doesn’t handle much like a real brush, it always remains a bit stiff. It uses a waterproof pigment ink so if I want to embellish with watercolor later I can do so without the ink lines bleeding or smearing. This one has become a familiar and comfortable go-to pen for me.
By comparison, there’s the Pentel Arts Color Brush
This pen has a few distinguishing characteristics:
The brush is clearly the standout feature of this pen. I haven’t used an actual brush for a while, so I wasn’t sure how well I was going to handle this one. When I opened it my first reaction was “this brush is way to big for my drawing, it’s going to look completely blobby unless I draw something larger.” Boy was I wrong! As you can see in the sketch lines above, it has an impressive range, making lines from very fine to wide, even in the same stroke, moreso than the brush pens with a solid nib. Right out of the box, the Color Brush’s synthetic fiber bristles were still white and clean. The pen has a ring to keep the ink inside the storage chamber during shipping, and once it’s removed you have to prime the brush a bit (squeezing the ink out) to saturate the bristles with ink. After just a little bit of doodling it created a smooth, even line. It seems like it’ll need just a bit of a squeeze to re-prime it every time I start using it. 
Even after pressing hard enough to make the widest lines the brush springs back very quickly to a fine point. The bristles have just the right amount of give that it offers a lot of control, although it’s still a brush so there’s more wiggle to it than the more pen-like brush pens. This drawing was made mostly with the very tip of the pen with very little pressure, but didn’t need such a light touch that it was difficult to maintain. Using a very hard pressure, it was difficult to maintain a clean, smooth line, so it’s not really something you can use as a mop brush, although it seems like it would do an ok job of filling large areas with solid black. With very little warm-up I was up and running, although I’ll need more practice to feel really proficient. Ordinarily, I’d probably have switched to a technical pen or solid-nib pen for tiny details like the pupils of the eyes — and definitely the lettering! — but I wanted to push my limits. I’m really enjoying this brush, and have been wanting to find a good way to use more real brush-work in my drawing. However, because of the flexibility of the barrel I’d be reluctant to just chuck it into my travel bag like some of my other pens for fear it will become damaged or waste ink. I’ll be practicing more with this one!
Pentel Arts makes several different brush pens, all with different qualities and features. I picked up a couple more in this same shopping trip, but haven’t opened them all yet, for fear they’ll dry out. But I’m looking forward to trying them all!
I’ve been doing a lot of digital work lately, which I enjoy but in many ways it’s not as satisfying as scraping and smearing pigment across paper. So when the local art supply store was having a sale and a shiny new display of Pentel Arts pens… well, I couldn’t resist. Since I hadn’t used these pens before, I had to try them out to see how they stacked up with the ones I’m used to.
In other words: Yay!!! New shineys!
From top to bottom: Pentel Color Brush (Medium, black pigment ink), Pentel Stylo Sketch, Pentel Sign Pen, Faber-Castell Pitt B
By the way, I’m loving that the Pentels retain their Japanese labelling, even though these are being distributed for the American market. I’m sure that has as much to do with manufacturing costs as it does with their manga-inspired display and packaging.
For reference, the fine art pens I usually have in my arsenal include:
Notably not present: Dip pens, like crowquill, and actual brushes. Why? Both require an open jar of ink, and the last time I used one of those I had to look up how to get ink out of cat fur and how much of it a cat can ingest before you need to be concerned. Since my studio door doesn’t latch well enough to keep overly-curious furry critters out, for now I’m sticking with pens where the ink is safely encased in a cartridge. But I do miss using a brush and have been keeping an eye out for a good solution.
Coming home with my armful of new pens, I needed to give them a practice session to see how they performed. I started out with a quick pencil sketch. Dragons, of course! (Although one of them is a bit beaky and feathery… wait a minute, how did that one slip in?)
(Yes, that’s an el-cheapo mechanical pencil from the drug store cuddled up next to my Prismacolor. Don’t judge!)
For the tests I used Marker Rag paper, which is very smooth and slightly translucent, so I could trace over the pencil drawing. That way I’m comparing apples to apples. Thusly:
My husband: “Wait a minute, are you just drawing the same thing over and over again?”
Me: “Yes. Don’t look at me like I’m crazy, it’s an artist thing!”
First up, the non-brush pens, starting with the Pentel Stylo Sketch 
I wasn’t sure what to make of the nib of this pen at first; it was hard to make out from the picture on the package, which said that it could make both wide and narrow lines. It looks like the white part is made out of some kind of very stiff wicking material, so I assumed you could use the tip for narrow lines and the sides for wide lines, but even after my practice drawing and a ton of just plain scribbling I was able to get only a little variation. More than from the technical pens, which are designed to always be the same width, but not by much. Maybe it needs to be broken in more. This particular pen uses water-based ink, so it’s not waterproof like most of my pens are, but nearly all the Pentel Arts pens were available in your choice of waterproof pigment ink or water-based ink, depending on if you want to use water to blend it or not.
This pen handled like a really firm fine-point felt-tip, except it had more drag on the paper. It’ll be ok for sketching or simpler drawings and also writing. It has a firm-fitting cap with a clip on it, reinforcing the idea that it’s for carrying around. I looked online and saw reviews complaining that it spattered a bit, which I noticed too as a bit of roughness in the line (since marker paper is very smooth, the pen lines should be too). Not what I was expecting, but not a bad pen once expectations are adjusted. I probably won’t be getting another any time soon though. There are cheaper options, like the Paper Mate Flair, for this kind of sketching.
Next up, the Pentel Sign Pen
It turns out this is Pentel’s signature pen in Japan, and I can see why. The tip, while not as flexible as an actual brush pen, allows for a wide range from narrow to wide with a lot of control (important when writing traditional calligraphy, and it letters nicely in english too!) The ink is nice and dark; I bought it in the waterproof pigment variety, which means the lines shouldn’t bleed if I want to add watercolors or color markers on top later. Like the Stylo, the cap snaps on nice and tight, so it should travel well and hopefully won’t dry out too quickly. It’s hard to see in any of my photos, but the barrel is ever so slightly hexagonal rather than round and also tapers near the tip, which makes it a little easier to hold despite having a very slick surface. And the flat-ish sides mean it’s less likely to roll away when you set it down for a just a second without the cap oh my gosh where’d the pen go it’s going to dry out did it go under the table is the cat eating it argh argh argh. Not like that sort of thing ever happens to me. Ahem. Moving on.
The nib of the Sign Pen has a little bit of give to it, but most of the line variation comes from controlling the angle and direction of your stroke. The nib is slightly conical so the wider lines come from drawing sideways and narrow lines from drawing with the tip. The nib feels a lot firmer than a typical felt-tip marker and seems like it will last at least as long as the ink does, unlike some pens I’ve used. Time will tell. I have a feeling that with a bit more practice I’ll get better range and expressiveness out of it, but the firm nib means it’s less temperamental and more predictable than a brush tip. It’s narrower but has a similar range as the PITT B, which is an actual brush pen that will be featured in the next post. In the meantime, I’ll probably be adding this pen to my travel bag for sketching, I’m liking it so far!
Next time: the brush pens!
© 2015 Stephanie Smith
I hope you’re enjoying your summer! Guess which summer popcorn movie with dubious scientific underpinnings I went to see last week? Jurassic World was a fun flick (although not without some serious plot flaws) but some paleontologists were not as amused: the current science says that critters like Velociraptors would actually be much pudgier and probably covered in some kind of feathers, virtually unrecognizable as the same critters from the movie. Which gave me the idea for this sketch!
I’ve always had a soft spot for dinosaurs and the original Jurassic Park totally blew me away when I first saw it in the theater. It was the first time we actually saw on the big screen the active and social dinosaurs that I’d read about in books like The Dinosaurs: A Fantastic View of a Lost Era by William Stout (I still have my well-thumbed copy of the original printing!) instead of the slow, plodding behemoths of the past. But that was 20 years ago, and paleontology has advanced a lot since then: the movement against “shrink-wrapped dinosaurs” (art that focuses mostly on the bone structure and discounts musculature, skin flaps, and fatty tissues) and concrete discoveries about pigmentation and feathers are starting to change the representation of dinosaurs again. And there’s enough evidence out there to back it up that the Jurassic World even hung a lampshade on the fact that their dinosaurs don’t measure up to scientific scrutiny.
Mine’s not particularly accurate either — I drew it too large, for starters, and the proportions are off — but as much as I like drawing my boney, scaly dragons I also love the idea of a world full of crazy, colorful, feathery dinosaurs.
Pencil sketch on bristol, with blue pencil underdrawing, © 2015.
As followers of this blog know, I recently had the pleasure of illustrating the book Plug Ugly Ball: A Mobtown Tale of Bullies and Baseball, including the design of the book’s cover. Here’s a little peek inside the process.
Like any other illustration or design project, this one started with a long conversation with the client (in this case, author John Everett) about what he needed and wanted. Since I had just completed the interior art for his book, I was already familiar with its subject matter and themes. My client wanted to be sure his cover evoked those same themes and the time period the story is set in: the late Victorian era in the American East.
After a bit of additional historical and market research, I hit the sketchbook and filled up several pages with ideas about layout and typography, integrating some of the visual elements my client specifically wanted. They included more formal, structured concepts similar to the printed matter of the time as well as more pictoral concepts built around the ballpark and painted outdoor signage.
Taking into account current trends in book design and the need to avoid making it look like it belonged in the non-fiction section, I worked up four of the most likely ideas in rough form and sent them to my client. He wanted the cover to reflect the parallel in his story between the old Plug Ugly Gang and the rough-and-ready days of the early baseball league in Baltimore, so his favorite concept was the one that took that very literally, seen below on the left.
With his comments in mind I refined the design further. Ultimately we included some period art of the city itself as an inset and a few visual motifs from the other versions I’d presented. As the design came together, I started integrating color, producing a set of different colorways for the client to pick from. Some of the palettes were authentic to the time period, pulled from vintage advertisements — they were more vivid options, in fact — while others just “feel” more antique to a modern viewer.
Now that I had an approved design, it was time to start making the artwork. But that will have to wait for the next post!
EDIT: Part Two is now online!
I tried to capture their respective personalities, but in reality my cats are rather ambivalent to Halloween… of course, in reality I would never try to dress them in costumes. Well, “never” may be a strong word…
The truth is, that while my tuxedo cat Simon may very well frolic in a costume, he’s equally likely to become inexplicably terrified of it. The end result is more-or-less the same: running around the house like a maniac, except in the latter case he will end up under the bed, with his impressively bushy tail even more bristled out than usual.
And my little tabby Tinkerbell? She wouldn’t even be in the picture, because the instant I attempted something like this there would be just a puff of smoke as she vanished, never to be seen again (until dinnertime).
I suspect that I may have to come up with a project that forces me to draw Simon over and over again until I get over my hang-ups about drawing black fur… I’ve used him and my previous black-and-white cat as body doubles in past projects, but usually chickened out and made a light-furred cat rather than dealing with their actual coat color.
This was a quick ink drawing on 9×12 inch smooth bristol paper with my micron pens. I was going to practice my brush pen with this one (it’s usually great for fur) but was already dealing with having no power or heat due to Hurricane Sandy and had to make do in the room with the most daylight instead of the one with my drawing table in it. Oh well!
PS: Be safe this Halloween! And please keep your cats indoors tonight, so they can be safe too.
Here are a few more of the “doodles” from my “Fantasy People” set of trading cards. These were all just quick little drawings — warm-up exercises, really — rather than finished artwork to share with some of my artist friends. Maybe I’ll turn them into something more, or maybe they were just a fun practice project. In either case, I hope you enjoy them too!
