Found a neat app - Paper 53 - that lets me make journals and offers sketching tools that include a pencil, fountain pen, broad and thin markers, brush and eraser. Colors are limited but it's fun to figure out how to best use what's offered.
First I tried a stylus that has a rubber tip. No luck at all as response time was way off. My finger worked okay, but I couldn't see where my lines were going. My new stylus that has a felt-like tip, by Stylus-R-Us, was amazing.
Sure am enjoying the iPad :)
Pam Johnson Brickell
Posted using BlogPress from my iPad
This was my quick sketch of the wetlands demo at the Anita Gorman Discovery Center, a Missouri Department of Conservation nature center.
It's a beautiful facility with lots to look at and explore...this is the lobby, looking toward the gift /book shop
I'd walked enough that my knees complained, so I tottered over to the tables by the wetlands display to sketch--handy!
I was trying out my Noodler's Konrad pen and some gorgeous new ink also
from Noodler's, Kung Te-Chung, a blue so dark it's almost black.
Waterproof, too! (Their little ink samplers are FUN.) Brian at GouletPens.com also suggested Polar Brown, which seems to be working well, too.
Here's my setup with my new bag...more on that in a day or so! Works great, so far...
The site has a wonderful garden, a prairie habitat, a half-size copy of Lewis & Clark's boat, mounts, skulls, turtles, bird feeders and SO much more...we'll definitely be having a sketchcrawl there!
Well they are together at least . . . I made so many mistakes while adding covers to these Coptic-bound book blocks! I
had originally planned on different colors of book-cloth for contrast
spines. But I'm still dealing with some vertigo/dizziness, so I kept it
as simple as possible. I may add some small bit of embellishment to the
front of each as I use them --- that helps to easily tell the front from
the back. I may shorten those ribbon bookmarks a bit as well.
The
first two covers were glued on before I remembered end papers . . .
they seem to work fine with just the first and last pages of the book
block used as end papers. Another one has a major folded ripple in one
end paper . . . pure carelessness. One book's spine board was too wide.
Oh, well . . . .
Most of my previous sketchbooks are
the size reached when simply folding/tearing down from the original
full-size paper -- ending with 5.5 x 7.5" book blocks. These are a bit
bigger this time, about 7 x 9". Three are Kilimanjaro 140 lb cold-press
watercolor paper from Cheap Joe's, one is Fabriano Artistico 140 #
hot-press, and the last one is a combination of Fabriano Artistico 90
lb. soft-press and Mi Tientes toned papers. Oh . . . and making my own bookcloth worked great! Cotton fabric and white tissue paper put together with Heat & Bond iron-on adhesive.
I've recently discovered Sennelier ink, and Indigo is my new favourite. Found this totally chaotic art shop in Mallorca when I was there recently, full of beautiful paints and paper and packing boxes and mess, but spent ages exploring it, and even longer salivating over the Sennelier ink selection. Could only afford one, so a huge selection was narrowed down to one. Though my lovely sister bought me one more for my birthday - happiness! Unfortunately I dropped my nearly new Indigo bottle so now the studio floor a much nicer shade. Manged to save some of it but it meant going online and ordering more and spending a fortune in more art supplies that I'm sure I really didn't need...
A lot of fingers and nails and ends of brushes were used in these drawings, just trying to get a feel for the ink and how it works. Been reading some comments about how they last in light, some good, some bad, so I guess its just a case of wait and see and leave some in the window to see what happens. In the meantime, I've ordered six new colours which I couldn't resist, so watch this space. Unless they all end up on the floor....
Great Blue Heron's have such lovely subtle shades of blue, gray and peach. I also love studying the shapes of bird eyes. Concentrating on a few little details really can make an unfinished study believable.
I was playing with a small Prang watercolor set before I popped the colors out to refill with my Hobein tube paints. You can see a formula written in the upper left corner of the page. Another note in the upper right is a reference to Spartina... the name of marsh grass, but in this case it's a reminder of the local company that makes wonderful handbags, tablet cases, wallets..... Ladies, check out Spartina449 :)
Don't you just love the information you can find in a journal?
OK, I've got one, really, but BESIDES my husband, I am really enjoying
playing with my Hero pens...
Like the Duke that Laure Ferlita featured in this video, the Sailor pen mentioned in this post,
and a number of others, the Hero calligraphy pens are Japanese (oops, I meant Chinese, I knew that! Duh...), and have a different configuration than Western calligraphy pens. They have a bent nib that makes a wonderfully brush-like mark, depending on the angle you hold the pen...
Depending on the angle you hold the pen, you can get very fine to quite broad, bold lines...
They also range from very inexpensive to rather more...I've bought a couple of Hero pens on eBay for under $10. It's the luck of the draw on really inexpensive pens, but they ARE fun to play with! I'm looking forward to getting a bent-nib pen of somewhat better quality, though I don't think I'll be getting one from a Living National Treasure like the Sailor pen described here: http://www.sailorpen.com/nagahara-story.html
Bent-nib pens are nice for quick sketches like this one of my cat, Merlin...they really have a brush-like quality, here.
Notice the varied lines, here...
Introducing my mini-video!
Of course you can use them alone, under a watercolor wash, or into a damp wash as I did in this super-quick sketch...I couldn't resist adding a sketch of the pen itself, sketching!
Fountain pens aren't for everyone, of course...they require a bit more care than disposable pens, but you can keep them for years, and enjoy a long relationship. You can use colored inks, too...I like the versatility as well as the long-lived aspect.
