Ronnie Tucker – Pet, Wildlife & Portrait Artist.

Where It All Happens – The Drawing Board

Jul 19, 2010 art

Today I thought I’d just post a couple of pictures of my drawing board (since I cleaned it up) and the ‘tools of the trade’.

All nice and clean! OK, apart from the ink marks, but they just won’t come out, I’ve tried… trust me!

On the window ledge is my little lamp, I only use it to light a subject in a still life. On the right-hand side of the ledge is my mannequin, it’s only about 10″ tall and really handy for when I need to draw a pose or sometimes I light it with the lamp and do a quick sketch of it for practice. On the board is some A3 paper, to give you  sense of scale… it’s a pretty big board. Top left of it is my masking fluid (white top) ink (black top) then my pencils and ink brushes. Right side of the board is my (homemade) tub of charcoal dust, pencils and charcoal, pastels, pastel pencils then more pastels.

Hey, look, it’s my pencils and what-not! From top to bottom:

• Pipette (for moving ink from bottle to brush pen)
• Masking fluid (for watercolour/ink stuff)
• Black ink
• Sandpaper (for sharpening pastels/pencils/eraser)
• ink pens
• erasers (rubber and kneadable)
• technical pencil
• masking fluid brush
• couple more brushes for blending charcoal/pencil
• ink brush (put ink in the reservoir then effectively paint with it)
• one more ink pen
• (homemade) tortillon for blending charcoal/pencil
• dip pen (for ye olde style inking)
• another blending brush
• another ink pen
• and, last but not least, my battery powered eraser.

Ooh, pastels!

Top left is my tub of charcoal dust, made by rubbing a piece of dark charcoal over my sandpaper and letting the dust fall into the rub, perfect for rubbing in to the paper to give me a neutral tone to start with. Top right is my tin of pencils (the six pencils you see are red, white, charcoal then three graphite pencils) by Derwent. It also has three sticks of graphite (top of the tin) and three stick of charcoal (bottom of the tin). Beside the tin of pencils are some of my pieces of pastel. The thin square sticks are hard pastel, the others are soft pastel. Middle of the photo is my tin of pastel pencils, also by Derwent, these are various colours and are quite hard, good for doing detailed work. Bottom of the photo is some more hard and soft pastels.

So there you go, a quick look behind the scenes of where my pastel and pencil drawings come from!

Tags: blending, brush, brush pen, charcoal, dip, eraser, graphite, hard, ink, kneadable, lead, mannequin, pastel, pen, pencil, rubber, soft, studio

ink drawing complete – finally!

Jan 17, 2010 art, ink

Finally managed to complete the ink drawing I was working on. It seemed like such a good idea at the time, but when you realise that it takes about three hours to cover about one quarter of the A3 page with a 0.1 pen, the novelty quickly wears off! But I managed it. I reckon that it took me about five or six hours in total to finish it. The dark background was done using a 0.8 pen, so that sped things up a bit and the black trees in the background were done with my brush pen, again saving time. But the 0.1 liner pen is almost worn down to the metal, there’s about 0.5mm left of the nib showing.

I’m glad I did it though, and I’d definitely do more. 

Tags: 0.1, 0.8, a3, a4, black, brush, brush pen, ink, liner, paper, pen, white

Cartooning – ink pen, brush pen, or both?

Dec 26, 2009 art, ink

Many people who do cartoons or ink outlines to their pencil sketches often use mechanical/technical ink pens (shown below), also called ‘liner’ pens.

While I do use these myself, I thought I’d show the difference that using a brush pen can make.

Brush pens come in different shapes, sizes, and makes. The one I use is shown left and is a Pentel Water Brush. Normally you fill it with water and use it with watercolour paints/pencils, but I fill mine with Indian ink and use it for cartoon/illustration work. You can also buy a ‘brush-pen’ which comes with ink refills, but I find the water brush more cost effective and I can fill it with whichever brand of ink that I prefer.

Technical/mechanical pens give a constant line thickness, this is handy if your an architect drawing out house plans, but not when it comes to cartooning/illustrative work, you want your lines to be of varying thickness to make it look less-technical.

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Tags: brush, brush pen, cartoon, cartooning, cartoonist, illustration, illustrative, indian ink, ink, liner, mechanical, outline, pen, pentel, technical, water brush