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  The smallest brushDec 11, 2013 6:37 AM PST | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:Spent a long time agonizing over the lines in today's page--that's right, the ones you don't see. I'd actually tried a few new things with them (as you can see in the original art), like confining the shading to relatively tidy little arrays of parallel lines, and using a large Faber-Castell "big brush" pen to fill in a large black area. None of that would really matter with this no-liney style I've been using for the past week or so, except that it seemed like the page really needed some lines. So I was gonna let the lines come through for a while, here's what that would have looked like:
 
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But I dunno, I don't think I've got my pen lines quite smooth enough. So I ended up just tracing a few key lines with the polygonal Lasso Tool, and I'm not sure why it took me so long to think to do that, since I did it in yesterday's page. : P Duh.
 
It's funny because the first page of this pen work--the last page of last episode--has kind of a mess of cross-hatched lines that I didn't really plan out all that well, but somehow I like the lines there. Maybe it's because they fit the mood and action of the image, whereas in images with less motion I'm less tolerant of lines being scratchy and all over the place. Or maybe it's because I went in heavier and a bit more chaotically and I've been getting too tight and regimented with them lately, which goes right against the idea behind trying the pen, which was to work on being sketchy. I'm still going the wrong direction on that.
 
Not for lack of practice sketches, though! Here are the ones from today:
 
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^ That last one was actually from last week or something, but the black around it is new, that was me testing out the "big brush" pen to see how it would work in conjunction with the finer pens. It worked pretty well, in fact it made this sketch look a whole lot better--decent enough to take a photo of finally, at least. ; ) (Also for this last one I'd found Instagram's sorta hidden "Advanced" camera and "high quality processing" options... Does that one look a little sharper / less jpeggy? Not sure really. I should have stuck with my usual "Lo-Fi" filter on these, though; "Inkwell" wasn't giving quite as much contrast.)
 
After coloring the A* page and wondering about the line quality of the pen lines, it occurred to me that I've got a bunch of small (size "0") brushes laying around, because the place I've been buying my usual size 4 brushes from has been including a small brush along with the bigger brush, for free (right here). And part of the reason why I switched from the brush to pens here was that I didn't think I'd be able to do a lot of fine linework in a bright environment like this beach with my regular brush. But a smaller brush, hm... So I tested out the size 0 brush with some smallish sketches
 
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and those seemed to go pretty well--the small arrays of shading lines take a little more effort than with the pens, maybe, and maybe aren't *quite* as thin, but they're smoother than my pen lines. Also you get that playful thick-to-thin line stuff going on that you can't really do with a pen. So, hm. I think I'll try using the small brush for the linework tomorrow; still going to try to bring in that sketchy energy, too, we'll see if I have better luck doing that with the brush than with the pens.
 
 
 
 
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