Monday, October 10, 2016

DProject 02: Drawing Tools




This video is about Drawing Tools and Techniques. I will show you some tools traditional and digital like copic markers, brush pitt pens, graphite pencil, charcoal and polychromos.
I am not necessarily promote any of the tools but instead I will try to give you some pros and cons for each.


Drawing: what is it actually? Drawing is a form of visual art in which a person uses various drawing instruments to mark paper or another two-dimensional medium with graphite, ink or charcoal and so on. A drawing instrument releases small amount of material onto a surface, leaving a visible mark….
Drawing is not painting. Painting is the practice of applying paint, pigment, color or other medium[1] to a solid surface (support base). The medium is commonly applied to the base with a brush, but aA common example of mixing both might be drawing outlines and adding the color later on.

Tools
There is a wide range of tools for us available like pencils, pens, charcoal, brush pens, ink and markers. Other tools will be erasers and different types of papers, cartboard and other surfaces to draw on which can make a significant difference.

More tools that I use can be lineal, circle templates, a compass, triangle and a mirror to check your drawing.

The first tool we are gonna look at is the pencil
One of the major differences in the applied material is contrast. So what you can see here is with graphite it is hard to create black. Therefore we can erase it. Pencils usually are available in different widths and  different  values for darkness and softness. There is graphite grading scales actually two for the graphite inside the pencil. I recommend you go to your local art supplier and try different pencils before you buy one.

Next tool is the copic marker which is presented here in cool gray and as you can see You can create black with it. You can only work from light to dark with them and creating gradients can be a little bit tricky. However with some practice it will work. This is what I started using after using pencil only… When you use them a lot you they will go empty quickly but you can refill them.

Next slide shows you what you can do with charcoal and polychromos pencils in comparison with copic and graphite pencil. Polychromos pencils have some colored pigment and some oil in it. You can use a copic blender to smudge around with them… Polychromos and charcoal can achieve darker values than graphite. I like charcoal but that is just personal preference. There are different types of charcoal pencils as well. You can try them out at you well sorted art supply store. I will provide links to what tools I have on my website….

Alright this does not belong to drawing but there are still artists out there in the field of concept art that use Gouache. I did not really work with it just tried it out at my sisters for one afternoon. But from what I know it is like a mix of oil paint and aquarelle and combines the benfits of those too.


Next is digital tools.
First tool ist the Cintiq. I have an older one 21 UX and I bought that instead of a 22HD after getting seing it being recommended on the conceptart.org forums by almost anyone and here is why.
Pros of the old one
Brighter.
No weird anti glare coat which makes it not look so pixelated well only if it is actual pixels.
More colors.
Different format (which I think is better).

Cons
Les resolution
I assume the distance between surface and actual screen is longer so you need to take recalibrate mor often or sit always in the same position…

There are others bigger and smaller this is just 2 examples.



The Intuos in this case 3 is a good old friend of mine and I have the old version which I just dug out for this photo and people who have a tablet can see that this is not the original plastic sheet on where I draw on. After mine got broken because I painted it to death I saw that the good Wacom does not sell the sheets anymore. So what I did now was I went to some hardware store and got me some plastic sheet and glue it onto my tablet… and it feels much better than the original. All it does is it does not hold for 6 years but 6 months and then you have to apply a new one which costs 1 euro instead of 50. So I am fairly happy with it. It’s called poly bi carbonate or something…

I also have an Intuos pro here which I never opened because I don’t need it. I did use one at work and I know it uses the pen tips up very quickly so there you need to rebuy that more often….
Also for the Cintiq you need to pay attention to the tips to not create scratches on the display too quickly.

Then there are the tablets and Convertables like my Surface Pro 3. I got me the SP3 Pro cause Youtube told me it is cool to work with in Photoshop but actually it isn’t . The technology behind the pen is not Wacom and not as good I say. Also the performance is not as good as expected. For doing some design sketches and giving presentations on the go it works perfectly fine but for the actual production work it does not have the perdormance by far that I was hoping for. There seem to be a number of people saying they use it for work and stopped using anything else but for my High quality multilayered PSD files I cannot recommend it.
Then there are a bunch of problems with support from Microsoft and Windows 10… but I don’t wann  go more into detail. There are other tools like the Wacom companion or the iPad Pro which you can use with a stylus.

The next video is about techniques.
If you want links to the tools go to my educational resources page.
http://danielthiele.blogspot.de/p/resources.html