Ink No Brush

Okay, going to bring a couple of posts relevant to my EMP over from my main blog. Firstly, a drawing from my sketch book from early February. This is relevant as it's one of my first times using a Faber-Castell brush-tipped Pitt artist pen. I borrowed/stole a bunch from my girlfriend (now ex - for unrelated reasons!) and loved them.
However, prior to that, during the last couple of projects, I'd been getting more and more interested in inking with a brush. When I say interested, what that really means is that I enjoy doing it! I've been quite pleased with some of the results, especially when scanned in and scaled down.


This is a brush drawing from my Negotiated Practice sketch book.. it looks okay (if imperfect) at normal size, but scanned and reduced I think it looks quite nice, whilst having a bit more "energy" than a drawing rendered with no line-width variation.


For that reason, I've been very tempted to render my final images for this project with a brush. In fact, that would be my ideal scenario, in terms of enjoyment gained from making the images. However, with time an issue, even when the deadline was still somewhat distant, I was conscious of the possibility that my dissatisfaction with anything "imperfect" could be a big stumbling block with the brush option - I could imagine drawing and redrawing images countless times. So, it is with a little sadness that I have done the sensible thing (and what I would do if this were a live professional brief with a deadline of less than a year!) and decided to render the images with the Pitt brush pens. To be honest, this is hardly a compromise on quality - the images I've created so far look very nice and professional once scanned in and coloured.. and Elaine even posted a comment on the above "Shell" image thinking that I had done it with a brush! I am happy to do the images in this way and have more time to concentrate on composition, layout, and the audio.. hopefully this will make for a better final product.

I am looking forward to doing more brush work in my spare time though, and reaching a stage where I can use it in my work without fear of causing delays. Here are some CDR covers that I doodled, with a relatively large brush, whilst in Scotland recently (the CDs are of songs from my 100 Days project, which interfered slightly with the last project!).. I did them very loosely and in a care-free manner, but some of them actually came out quite nicely.