Face Eight – 6×9 Inches
It’s June 26, 2025 as I write this and so far, since my school year ended in Mid May, I’ve finished two 24×36 inch paintings. That’s actually quicker than I thought I could get two paintings done. I was hoping for three or four finished paintings by the end of August so I’m on a good pace. That being said after finishing the two (both in the month of June) I decided to take a break from painting and work on some other stuff. One of the other things is paint pens.
Back in mid-April I bought a bunch of paint markers. http://radiantcomics.com/art-writing-more-art-supplies/. I dropped about $120 on markers and refills for them. That’s a lot of money. At this point I’m not even sure exactly why I wanted them enough to drop that much cash on them. I like to try out art supplies and they probably seemed like a good thing to try out. Since I bought them I’ve had a couple of false starts with them but over the last couple of days I finally finished two small pieces.
That brings us to the title of this blog. It’s hard learning new things. That’s something I really should remember but somehow it slips my mind time after time. That’s probably for the best though. If I remembered how hard learning new things is I might not want to try new things.
In my first attempt at learning how to use these markers I was too ambitious with the scale. I pulled out a spare 11×17 inch drawing I had lying around and decided to see if I could use the markers to make a finished piece out of the drawing. I couldn’t. I probably only lasted fifteen minutes working on the piece before I gave up.
it was a matter of scale. The markers that I was working with had a 2mm tip. That’s fairly big for a marker tip but not really big compared to a 11×17 inch piece of paper. I couldn’t make big enough marks with the marker for the image I was working on. I could have built up the drawing with a lot of little marks but that was not what I was looking for.
Rapid Box 6×9 inches
When it comes to painting I’m a surface guy. My paintings have a physicality to them because I build up the surface in different ways. I like that. But with paint pens there is no surface. They put a thin coat of paint on the paper and it’s a flat coat. You can build up a little bit of surface but nothing like you can when using paint from a tube. I found that a little frustrating.
I probably had another two or three false starts over the month that went about as well as the first one. I had a vague idea what to do, tried to make that idea solid, and then gave up after twenty minutes. The frustrating thing is that twenty minutes usually came after an hour or two of thinking about what to do and coming up with ideas. That’s the hardest part. Seeing those ideas dashed up against the rocks in fifteen minutes after you launch them.
Today didn’t start off much differently. I pulled out on old 10×15 inch ink drawing of a figure and then tried to add color with the paint markers. I crashed out in fifteen minutes and then decided to go smaller.
I have a set of drawers underneath my drawing table. In the right hand drawer I have a whole bunch of “in Progress” sketches and drawings. Stuff says in that drawer for years. Every now and then I look through it when I get stuck to see if there is anything in there that I want to work on.
I’ve got plenty of good stuff in that drawer but also plenty of stuff that isn’t that good. That’s the stuff I decided to pick from. It takes the pressure off because if it’s not that good to begin with I can’t really ruin it. I can only go up from there. They were six by nine inch drawings and I thought that would be the perfect size for these paint markers.
My second thought was to put a lot of black ink on the paper and then work over the ink with the paint markers. The markers were fairly opaque so I throught that was a good approach. I grabbed my ink brush and inked the drawing. Then I grabbed my ink brush again after a false start with the markers and added even more black ink.
It took a while working back and forth with the color and the black ink but I began to find my rhythm. I switched over from the ink to a black paint marker because that seemed better to work back and forth with. The drawing was a face in profile and was nothing special but I think I improved it. I was happy with the piece and decided to make a second.
For the second one I picked a drawing I liked even less than the first one. It was a figure bent in a weird and awkward position. I figured I could improve on it with some color. This time I skipped the ink and went right to black paint marker. I remembered that I have a bunch of black paint markers with a bullet tip on one end and a brush tip on the other. I thought that these would be perfect for the task and they were. I like these black paint markers and have used them regularly over the last year so I don’t know why I forgot about them. They really helped out with this second painting.
I ended up liking the second painting too. Even after making this second painting I really don’t have a technique worked out with these paint pens. I was just working the color back and forth with the black on the page. I wasn’t doing a lot of blending and kept it graphic. I think I might try doing one of my “Covers To Comics That Don’t Exist’ with these pens but I’ll have to figure out the right image.
Despite the two drawings I made today I still don’t have a solid grasp of what to do with these paint pens. Learning new stuff is hard.