The humble biro pen has for a long time been the tool for some quite astonishing artworks by artists such as Shohei Otomo and Juan Francisco Casas. These two and many othersa show just what can be achieved with a simple ballpoint pen. So I figure I would have a go myself...
This illustration of a Chinese Lion Dance was drawn using both Illustrator and hand painted from Chinese food ingredients (a wash of diluted soy sauce, concentrated Chinese tea and dabs of dipping sauce). Blending both digital and hand painted elements brings up some weird and interesting effects to the final piece. It was created as a result of following a course on Domestika by Marcos Chin.
It's currently lockdown here in the UK due to the COVID pandemic so I'm using the extra spare time I currently have to work through as many online art tutorials as I can. It's a rare opportunity for me to spend time investing in my artistic development. Vintage lettering was always something I've wanted to try my hand at so when I saw that Domestika offered a course on this topic, I jumped at the chance.
It has been a long time since I created artwork completely using Adobe Illustrator - these days I draw all my line art in Procreate and then port it to Illustrator for colouring and layout. But I've always enjoyed the vector style of artwork created by Hydro74 and Sweyda and Daniele Caruso's (@danielexcaruso) work fits into that same style of bold, line-heavy, aggressive style of vector illustration.
I wanted to get back into doing this style so his Domestika course served as a good moment to be inspired again. Here's how I got on...
Domestika is an online learning website that mainly caters towards the art and design community. Their courses cover a lot of topics from learning to paint and draw basics to game design and 3D design, craftmaking, photography etc. I was curious to try out a few of their courses and hopefully pick up some tips along the way.
