Pens and pencils

Last week I got some new toys, a set of Copic multiliners. Drawing with pens is something I've been meaning to tackle for a while now, now I can have a crack at it with some decent pens rather than any old biro which has been the limit of my ink drawing equipment up till now.

Here's a few birds drawn with these, I'm rather enjoying drawing in ink, an interesting discipline.











In the last few days I've also made a start on doing some work based on my Antarctic trip, I'm planning quite a body of work on this subject so these graphite drawings are going to be the first of many.

Foray into the land of graphite

Graphite? that's what's in pencils isn't it? If you're familiar with my work you'll have noticed that there's not much of this particular form of carbon to be seen. In the past I've preferred to work with the rougher, looser medium of charcoal.
Last weekend I took home a sketchpad and whatever graphite pencils I could find lurking in the studio with the hope of finally getting into working with this elusive medium. Oddly enough after perusing my reference archive I've ended up working in and entirely new subject for me as well, flowers.

These are Pale Maidens, the national flower of the Falkland Islands. Both on A4 cartridge paper.

Unison

Well...after being treated to a set of Daler-Rowney pastels by my wife last week....look what arrived in the post today,  

a rather nice set of Unison pastels. I was warned about these and the warnings were justified, they are soft, they are intense, once tried nothing else will do....all true, these are stonking pastels.

Knocked out a couple of quick hand sketches with them (that's sketches of hands by the way).

Hands: charcoal and pastels on white Ingres paper.

...and this one, Pastels on white Ingres (nice pastels Unison)