• Art Supplies Suggestions
    10 replies, posted
So i've decided that i want to start drawing more. Specifically, i want to get into drawing and inking. What kind of pens and pencils should i get? And what size paper should i buy? I guess this thread can be a place for everyone to come and ask for suggestions when it comes to buying supplies.
Pilot V5's are nice pens.
I got a pot of Pilot V5 and V7's right by my desk. I've been using Pilot pens ever since I started college. I also found a stash of Wolff 2B pencils at work that I... accquired... For inks, I have a set of windsor and newton inks. For paper I would strongly recommend a watercolour pad just to take all the heavy weight of the inks on the paper. But that's just my preference.
Semi-unrelated, but as for digital; A Wacom Bamboo tablet should be fine for any amateur artist (you can then move up to the Intuos line when you feel you need to)
If you're getting artist pens, go for acid free paper and paper that isn't for water colors and the like. The reason is that this type of paper will gladly suck up any liquid it gets, which means it'll empty your expensive pens way before they should be. And [B]don't[/B] rely on the price for quality! Check the paper yourself. It should be thicker than normal printing paper and it should not appear to bend or become fuzzy easily. By fuzzy I mean that it shouldn't seem as if the paper would easily disintegrate. It's an advantage to avoid this if you either erase a lot or you're just starting out with wet-on-dry water coloring. You should get sketchbooks of varying sizes. I have a travel-sized A5 doodlebook, my regular A4 sketchbook and a A3 artbook for detailed pieces. If you're doing drawings for the sake of lining and inking them, get a mechanical pencil rather than a pencil set (Faber Castell not recommended for this purpose). You should also get an eraser pen with a hard and soft eraser in each end. Faber Castell is a recommended brand for that, as well as art pens. However, if you want to do more detailed work you should buy some additional pens in a smaller size from another company. You can usually compare sizes at the art store on a piece of paper.
You don't really need to have expensive high end stuff at the beginning. I actually prefer to have a more affordable option in the beginning, and get used to it before moving on to the more expensive stuff, because when you get used to the normal pens and pencils etc, you'll know what how the pens work, what they're good at and what they're bad at. And then when you move on to the higher end pens, you'll realise what the strong points of the pen are just by using it etc. That doesn't mean that everything that looks more expensive, professional actually suits better for you. For example, when it comes to water color, I started with one of those 12 color watercolor things for kids in school, but I got used to it and learned how to use it properly, that I never felt the need to change for something more expensive.
Using standard bic medium pens when you don't have anything else can actually be pretty fun, the rough-ness can create some cool stuff.
I'm sure this is fairly controversial but I love working on brown paper. You can do the highlights with white colouring pencils and it looks really nice. It's encouraging because you need to work into a drawing on white paper for so long before highlights have any effect, so it's great for working in depth really quickly. Apart from that I recommend getting a couple of fineliners. Between .1 and .5 are ideal imo, any smaller and it's a bit of an overkill until you're being reallllly painstaking with your drawings. Personally I really don't enjoy pencil drawings now I've gotten into fineliners; I love the instant gratification of laying down a big fuck off black line.
I love drawing tidbits on note cards (The ones with the blank side on the back, i draw on that, then i can put a description on the lined side) , you can easily and quickly draw an idea and you can just stack em up when your done.
post it notes
[QUOTE=Eltro102;37511081]post it notes[/QUOTE] one of my favourite artists does most of his stuff on post its [URL]http://www.facebook.com/pages/John-Kenn-Mortensen-Fan/187366434622180[/URL] [IMG]http://a2.sphotos.ak.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ak-prn1/558828_518241261534694_205064110_n.jpg[/IMG]
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