Last Night I Dreamt I Had a True Love #14
I got the Royal Talens Pantone markers that I wrote about buying on eBay last week. This week I can tell you all about using them. They’re water based pigment markers as opposed to the alcohol dye based markers that I’ve been working with for the last decade. It turns out that makes a big difference. It’s sort of the difference between oil paints and acrylic paints. There is a lot of overlap but there are different techniques to achieve the same results. Plus there are results you can get with one that are harder to accomplish with the other.
The first thing I did was to make some swatches of the new markers. I made up a digital file of ninety-nine boxes with the number of the marker (Pantone colors have numbers rather than names) underneath the box. I printed this out on a sheet of 9×12 inch Bristol board and then filled in each box with the corresponding marker.
It turned out that I made a mistake. I like to make my swatches on the same paper that I’m going to draw on them with. But the 9×12 paper I had was a brand named Caslon and the paper I would be doing the finished 11×17 inch drawing on was Strathmore 300 Bristol board.
I didn’t think this would matter much but it turns out that the ink of the marker brings out the grain of the paper more than the dye based markers that I’m used to. After sampling some of the markers on scraps of the Strathmore paper I noticed the grain was lighter. Plus the paper looked a little bit bluer. So I took a piece of the 11×17 inch Strathmore paper, cut it down to 9×12 inches, and printed the boxes out on it. I made the first swatch sheet on Thursday afternoon and the second one on Friday morning.
On Friday I decided to make a finished color drawing out of one of my “Last Night I Dreamt I had a True Love” drawings. I finished two of them earlier in the month so I had two finished 11×17 inch ink drawings to work with. Usually I color this series digitally so I thought it would be fun to color one of them with the new markers. Spoiler: It wasn’t fun.
I wasn’t fun because learning new things is hard. The new markers were different enough from my alcohol based ones that I had to figure out a new techniques to use them. That took a while. It took all day and about twice as long as if I were to use my usual markers. Plus I don’t think it came out as good. That’s to be expected when learning a new technique but it’s not always easy to deal with.
Last Night I Dreamt I Had a True Love #15
The new pigment based markers can’t be layered the same way that the dye based ones can. The colors don’t blend together like the dye based ones do. So I had to figure out new ways to make the colors work together. I can still layer them but they won’t look the same. There is more of a hard edge. The colors are much less transparent.
I am especially having trouble with lighter skin tones. Mainly because there are no light skin tones in this ninety-nine marker set. Alcohol dye based markers have dozens of light skin tones that can be layered but all the skin tones in the Pantone set are dark.
Dark skin tones that can’t be blended made me experiment with the way I made marks on the paper. I tried to blend the colors together through a hatching method. I would make lines of a slightly darker color over a lighter one to blend them together. It came out okay for a first try. I liked all of the drawing except for the face. The face wasn’t bad but the technique needed work.
As I was finishing up that first drawing and looking for a finishing technique I suddenly remembered that I had other ink based markers. I had a set of six Prismacolor Premier brush pens. They had some pretty dense and colorful ink in them so I used them to make lines of color on top of the color I already had down.
After I finished the piece with the Prismacolors I remember that I had even more ink based markers. I had a set of 24 Fabel-Castel Pitt brush Pens, a set of 8 Big Brush Pens, and four “Wallet” sets of Pitt Brush pens. I’ve had these sets for years and used them a little bit but since they don’t sell refill ink for them I never got into them in a big way. Refill ink is essential to me if I’m going to use markers as a finished medium. I can’t be running out of ink in the middle of a piece. But using them as a flavor at the end sounded good.
Though I had some swatches of the Pitt pens I didn’t have all the sets on one sheet of paper. So I made a new digital file with boxes and the names of the pens to go with them. I printed that one out and filled out the colors on Sunday morning. Then I got to work on the second “Last Night I Dreamt I had a True Love” drawing.
One of the “Wallet” sets of the Pitt pens was a portrait set. So I had six skin tones of varying lightness to work with this time. I did the color on the rest of the drawing and saved the face for last. The rest of the drawing went pretty well. I used a couple of tried and true techniques and, though a little different, came out as I expected.
Though I had more colors for the face and a few of them were on the light side the face still come out darker than I expected. Not the end of the world but I’d like a little more choice. I used a similar line method on the face and I think it worked better this time.
All things considered I’m excited about these new ink based pigment markers. They are more archival and lightfast than the dye based ones so that’s cool. I’m going to do my first “Dreams of Things” covers in them on Monday. I’ll see how that goes.