Pens, Pens, Pens!

Sketch for "The Chefs", Noodler's ink and Creaper pen

The new year is about to start, and January is a good month for resolutions and for experimentation. If you've read my blog for a while, you know that I love drawing with pens. Pencils and charcoal are fine, but pens are my favorite. For the last few years I've been drawing with what we used to call "felt tip pens", but with permanent ink. My favorite of these is the Tombow, which are very reasonably priced, come in lots of colors, and a set of gray values. I stick to the gray values, and use them for thumbnail drawings and value sketches. Here are a couple of examples.

Gordes, France, sketch 2015

Olive Grove, Bedoin, France 2015

And here are a few of the Tombow pens with another drawing.

The sketch at the top of this post was done with my new Noodler's Creaper Flex fountain pen. I've spent some time over the past few days learning how to get different line widths, hatching, and other pen and ink drawing techniques. This pen (below) is excellent, especially for the $14 price, and available on amazon.com. 

I hope in January you'll see some more experiments from me. I've got some new Dr. Ph. Martin's India inks in lots of colors to try.

Happy New Year!