Today I spent my hour working on a digital illustration. The initial short term goals was to beef up my sketching chops. However, the long term goal is using those skills to create bigger and better things. Today, I being to move toward that. Ultimately, this means less posts. However, the posts will be of higher quality. There will still be sketches.
If this bothers you…
I got over halfway through a sketch today when I got frustrated, crumpled it up, and threw it away. I’m admittedly very dissatisfied with my choice to drop $70+ on a set of Rapidograph pens. Ever since I was a graphic design student at Ball State, I was told that these were the pinnacle of pens. Because of their price, I always chose to use Zig Millennium pens and occasionally Micron pens instead.
As I began adjusting to the Rapidographs, I was frustrated with two points. Firstly, it was much more difficult to draw straight lines. With the felt tip pens, I was able to apply more pressure. This allowed me to steady my hand and draw relatively straight lines over long distances. With the Rapidographs, applying more pressure causes the line to skip and my paper to scratch. My second frustration, and this is the one that’s unforgivable, is that when I left the pen, the plunger thing puts a tail on my lines. This essentially turns all of my lines in to strange distorted L shapes. There are precious few ways that I can hold the pen without this happening and none of those ways are conducive to comfort, dexterity, or (much to my dismay) getting nice line quality.
I’ve watched the overall quality (cleanliness) of my drawings go down since attempting to use the Rapidograph pens. I moved away from my Zigs because I figured the Rapidographs would be cheaper in the long run and would produce superior drawings. However, I was totally wrong. I’m simply frustrated. While these pens my be great for drafting, they’re absolutely terrible for my kind of sketching. I’m extraordinarily frustrated.
I took the time today, instead of doing a lunch sketch, to register to vote.
Remember, vote now or forever hold your peace.
Indiana voters, you have until October 9th. You can even do it online here: https://indianavoters.in.gov.
This is an update to a post from way back in June. As you can see, the artworks are slowly making their way across my cube. I’m not sure yet what I’ll do when they reach the end. 🙂
After drawing this sketch I realized that I’ve always wanted a moongate behind my house. Since they don’t exist, I suppose this will have to do for the front of my house:
Moongate
The other day I said that I really wanted to see this colored. It’s not *good* coloring, mind you, just enough to be fun. I did it quickly because today I’m having lunch with a friend and won’t be able to do a regular sketch.
Since I may be going to lunch with friends once a week or so, I’ve decided to post something, even if it’s not a sketch. Today’s post is about why I usually draw on little randomly shaped cards instead of in a book.
It all started when I found a scrap of cardboard in the break room that originally came in a package of tea bags. The cardboard scrap was used to keep the rows nice and neat and I decided to draw something on it. That drawing was uploaded to Facebook and, after people seemed to enjoy it, later became my first post here. The package only had three of the cardboard pieces but I decided that I enjoyed having different sized spaces to fill so I cut bits of card stock to random sizes and kept sketching.
I discovered that the drawings looked nice in my cube so I started hanging them. I eventually hope to cover all available surface area of my walls with sketches. 🙂
