For the past few days I’ve been practicing the technique I learned at Eduardo Bajzek’s workshop in the USK Symposium, sketching directly with markers. This has been an interesting challenge in various ways.
Sketching without any pencil or pen linework is probably the hardest; however, it’s been really fun and spontaneous. A change in the way you observe the subject is necessary… seeing shapes of color feels a bit like flattening the three-dimensional objects. Also, with a limited range of markers you can’t focus on trying to reproduce the actual colors you’re seeing, but building up tones by layering, from light to dark.
For the first couple of days I concentrated mainly on grayscale sketches, assigning values has been the focus. Yesterday I used the colors they supplied to us in the workshop. These colors are too saturated for my liking, but decided to try my best, keeping them as practice exercises. I have a larger range of Copic markers, but they are so expensive that I don’t like to take them out every day. It’s nice that they’re refillable, but having them in my bag where I can lose them is a headache. On the field I’m using Letraset Promarkers and a few Chartpak AD. I’ll see if I can pick up a few more today at the store.
Here are some of my latest, done on a tiny 6″x 4″ sketchbook: