Here is a summary of recommendations given by different artists for sketching or sketchcrawling.

Glenn Vilppu uses a Namiki Falcon fountain pen filled with a range of Sepia, brillian brown and black non waterproof Pelikan ink but also Polychromos Faber-Castell pencils. The Namiki Falcon nib is solid gold hence the price but doesn’t corrode like cheaper models. Glenn also recommends the $15 “Pen and ink sketching fountain pen” which comes in extra-fine, fine or broad size. expensive but the pigments are much stronger.

Enrico Casarosa uses the Fabriano Artist journal which alternates white and brown pages. He also carries a Water brush pen like most Sketchcrawlers and a set of Windsor& Newton Artist watercolours and does most of his drawings using a pencil.[…] (more…)

Bath time

As suggested by Bobby Chiu, I just did a quick painting exercise in the style of one of my favorite artist Nate Wragg. Well it is pretty much a copy of one of his paintings. The grey background was just to avoid working on white but in retrospect white could have been better 😉 Ah I will have to learn colour harmony one day… how/where to start?

someone was asking about TV Paint on the AM forum so I decided to share my toolbar with everyone. The drawing underneath is based on someone’s blog.

You can download my toolbar here

http://www.olivier-ladeuix.com/blog/uploaded_images/tvpaint/Olive_TradiTools1.6.zip

For the past few weeks, I have started sketching on my way to work. I am still using a demo version of TV Paint that closes down after 20 minutes and doesnt allow saving.

TV Paint is a really great software and I haven’t used Sketchbook pro for a more than a year now.

I mostly do caricatures/character design and usually start with 2 spheres, one for the cranium and an other one for the chin/jaw, then I place the different features (ears, noze, eyes) at different height, in order to give some personality to my character. That s a tip I got from Steven Silver. The drawing above was my first test with shadows and didn’t work very well. Instead of starting with a white page next time, I will start with a mid gray background. This should will give me more range. An other exercise I learnt from Steven Silver is to draw the feature into a geometrical shape (triangle, square, rectangle and circle), do you know any other?

Here are a collection of old drawings and paintings dating from when I lived in Africa… 10 years ago. One of the digital painting is from yesterday night. I was playing with my Clean up brush in TV Paint and I love it. It gives such a clean and sharp line with a beautifull transition from thick to thin. Even better than Sketchbook pro.