trying something new

This past January, while exploring Mike Daikubara’s Color First, Ink Later, I briefly gave 3 shades of gray Tomball markers a try. Following Mike’s technique, the grays, along with white gel pen, are added at the end to enhance the sketch with shadows and highlights. This works fine as long as you don’t want to add any more watercolor — the Tomball markers bleed if touched with a wet brush.

While I now love doing splashy washes of watercolor before ink drawings (when I have time — this technique takes more time than a quick ink sketch followed by watercolor), I found the added step of using markers for shadows a bit tedious.

Then fellow Texas sketcher “unhyphenatedanarchy” (on Instagram) suggested using a diluted mix of Lexington Gray ink and distilled water in an extra waterbrush. He was sharing with me ways to sketch people more quickly; I have heard of other sketchers doing the same but had never tried it myself.

What a great way to add those shadows to an ink sketch BEFORE adding watercolor! The ink washes, which can be built up in layers for darker tones, will not blur when watercolor is added. Great for sketching outdoors when you want to catch that shadow before it moves (I tend to sketch slowly and the sun doesn’t wait for me). And the ink wash goes down much smoother on the page than when using markers.