Monday 21 July 2014

Pens and stuff


I've been shopping at the ludicrously addictive website Cult Pens and bought some new items which I will write about later. But in a mild bout of OCD, I decided to do a pen inventory of my art box, and here is the current line up (minus a bunch of duplicate pens and misc pens that I never use).


The brush pens (A) are new. I will be giving them a play around soon and posting up the results here. All the fineliners in (B) and (F) are the same ones I wrote about in my fineliner review.

The Posca and Kurecolour markers were bought solely for my series of canvas shoe and baseball hat artworks. I'm keen to do more, mainly so that I can make further use of these excellent colour markers.

The white pens (H) are new, one is a Tippex pen, the other is a Uni-Ball Signo Broad Gel Pen, which I have read reviews saying it is the best opaque white liner pen in town. White pens are vital for my drawings where I have to capture lots of white hair and fur. Even when drawing on white paper, a white pen has considerable use combined with the black colour fineliners.

Pencils, eraser and sharpeners are everyday tools for my sketches. The rest are kind of extras that fill my artbox but rarely get an outing. I definitely want to try some more calligraphy, or rather, my own shaky attempts at gothic hand lettering. In fact another one of the new pens I bought is a very wide nib calligraphy pen which I'm dying to test out.

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Wednesday 16 July 2014

Morcegão Vale Tudo Fight Shorts


I designed some Vale Tudo fight shorts. This style of shorts was popular with fighters a long time ago in Brazil and have since been a staple of MMA fighters and nogi grapplers the world over. My version features a big bat that I drew. (Big bat in Portuguese is known as Morcegão).

Here's how I put the design together:-

Saturday 5 July 2014

Bald Eagle - step by step video




This was a fun art project I set myself with the aim of honouring my USA followers. I began with pencil sketching the eagle and flag. I took a still frame with my SLR camera every few pencil strokes, then combined them within Windows Movie Maker. 

I next scanned in the sketch and inked the remainder of the lines within Manga Studio Pro. Finally, I saved the Manga Studio image as a transparent PNG and played around with flag background and grungy textures in Photoshop. All these digital work throughs were recorded using a screen capture program called Snagit.

This is the finished piece: