Added 1 new A* page:I got a new brush! In fact I've been using it for the last half or so of this episode's A* pages; it's a 1/8" (3mm) Winsor & Newton Artists' One Stroke Watercolor Brush, which is a flat-ended brush; here's a photo of the current three I use for watercolor work:
That's the new 1/8" One Stroke brush on top, my big ol' reliable 1/2" One Stroke brush below that (the sizes being the width of the end of the brush heads), and then an ancient, beat-up size 4 Raphaël 8404 that I use for the white ink (which is murder on delicate brush tips!) below that.
I *had* been using an 8404 for watercolor detail—what I'm using the 1/8" One Stroke for now—but the 8404s, which are *very* high quality brushes, excellent for both ink and watercolor, are round brushes, with very fine points for delicate line work—and line work, at least past the pencil stage, is not really my forte. See, I don't want to work in lines, but in um shapes, and the 8404 kept tempting me to put in little lines everywhere—as you can see if you flip back through the first bunch of pages in this episode. I've been having a lot of fun doing big areas with the 1/2" One Stroke, so I thought I'd try a smaller version of that for the detail stuff, hoping it might help get me away from trying to rely on lines, and I *think* it's been working, particularly in this latest page—look ma, no lines!
This particular 1/8" One Stroke doesn't form the most orderly brush tip of its own accord, but I've had problems like that with smaller Raphaël pointy brushes too (like the size 0, which is what I've been using for inked Patreon reward sketches), and I think it's just 'cause really short sable hairs are hard to manage. In a way that sort of helps because it makes it harder to do really nice lines ; ). You can do pretty zippy straight lines with it if you want though, which is keen; it's the more meandering curving lines that I think I was getting bogged down in—trying to do *those* with this brush results in funky cursive-ish squiggles, or even ragged split-ended borders, like on the edges of the background dust in the previous page, which can make for some nifty effects.
Another advantage of the 1/8" One Stroke over the size 4 8404 is that, having much less sable hair in it, it's about a third of the price. : )
(The other thing that helped today, I think, was restraining my urge to put every color everywhere just a wee bit, and resisting the urge to try to model volumes—so the pure blue and pure red are fairly isolated, for a bit of a graphic effect.)
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