New pens on black paper

I do like new pens

I spotted five metallic pens made by Bic in the shop today. So on a whim I bought them. I have to say I was impressed! They have large felt pen nibs and the ink flows well. The lines you can draw are a good weight and if you tip them on their side you get wider lines because they have a bevelled edge. The colours are strong and they seem to work well on my black cartridge paper sketch pad, they are nice and opaque. I will see how they work on white paper next.

Lamp

Metallic watercolours on black cartridge paper. I painted this back in February. I’m going over my college work and trying to select the ten best images, or the most experimental ones. I’ve got far to many to choose from but I like this, it’s got its problems, a bit rough round the edges, but I was just looking at someone else’s post and the way she used light and shade on figures, and it reminded me of this.

Spiral

Drawing spirals calms me. Following the contours round. Sometimes I add a dot so that the line has to deviate around it. I used all my metallic pens for this, mainly silvers, a gold and a purple. I did have a green but it has almost run out. I think this looks a bit like a tree trunk, like dendrochronology. Tree rings that you can look at to see how old the tree is (the outer ring is the one which was current when the tree was cut down). If you count inwards then each ring represents a year generally. You can alsu tell by the thickness of the line. I know that’s not what my drawing represents, but it’s what I see when I look at it.