working with digital brush pen
Today we’re using Tayasui Sketches app and a finger on an iPad Pro for digital brush pen line drawing.
Certainly an analog brush pen such as Tombow or PITT will work similarly. So will digital brush pens in other apps such as Procreate, Adobe Sketch, Adobe Draw, and others.
I love to take the opportunity to work exactly with LINE today, especially because most of my work lately has been purely based on shape.
BRUSH PEN ART
has an incredible dynamic of line weight and thickness variance, as opposed to a ball-type ink pen or fine line pen like MICRON or UNIBALL.
REMEMBER TO PURCHASE WATERPROOF PENS ONLY unless you want it to feather and bleed when adding gouache or markers
I always make a point of taking my students through working with pure, large shapes before getting busy or detailed with lines, because culturally we give so much importance to line that most students start off with very little awareness of shape.
The awesome thing I love about working with line is to COMMIT sometimes.
We tend to like to sketch softly with a pencil , but it’s really beneficial to take time to allow yourself to draw BRUTALLY HONESTLY sometimes with a single, commited line and I call this CONTOUR DRAWING.
This means, allow yourself to explore these questions:
WHAT HAPPENS IF I DON’T LIFT MY PENCIL/ STYLUS/ FINGER?
How far can I go in a “commited” way? (meaning, how long can you commit to a line before you lift your pencil, pen or stylus? What in you resists keeping your brush pen in contact with the paper?)
This is a great exercise because it gives you a sense of TOTAL HONESTY, even if you don’t like the drawing!
You can undo or erase if you don’t like the result after, but don’t skip the step of LOOKING AT WHAT YOU’VE DONE first.
Just sit with it, respond to it, and see how it makes you feel.
Before you move on.
This can bring some really unexpected feelings inside and results/ reactions that are PURE GOLD for you to mine.
I used the brush pen
in green and kept it fully opaque.
The variations in the lines from thick to thin/ light to dark here are actually built into the app.
I used iPad Pro, with Tayasui Sketches but I didn’t use Apple pencil because I just lost it on the train, so I used my finger.
COMPOSITION
One fun element at play here was placing the face BEHIND the hands to get layers of space. This is a great composition/ spatial concept to incorporate in your drawings!
I drew this illustration from my imagination, not from a photo, and i was happy and surprised afterward to feel like it looked like…..me!
I added words and a splash of (digital) yellow watercolor at the end to soften the effect because when all of your lines are the same weight, they can really compete with each other.
Thickening and darkening some lines, or adding color to some areas, are ways to break up the uniformity of the lines on the page so the eye can PRIORITIZE where to go.
I hope this inspires you to create!
Remember to play, enjoy, explore. This is YOUR SOUL- SPACE !!!!
Love
Laura
