Sketches from my Demo

Pattern, Texture, and Depth of Field

I had so much fun at my demo yesterday! A lot of the students who purchase Copic markers at the University of Oregon are Architecture or Product Design students. They love seeing texture and patterns on buildings, objects, and foliage. When I demo at the bookstore, I have found that people love seeing me experiment with buildings and plants.

Here are two sketches I worked on while I was there. Sorry, the photos are from my phone, so they aren't that great.

This first drawing is actually a design sketch for some paintings that I am going to make for the Copic offices.I made this on some big scratch paper I was using for my demos.

This drawing is just a little bigger than a regular size sheet of paper. Since this was a concept sketch, I was worrying more about placement of objects instead of details, so all my lines are rough and I'm OK with that.

I don't remember all the colors I use when I demo, because people stop by and ask questions and I get sidetracked. But,  I know that the reds are R24 and R59, and that I used a lot of YR21, YR27, and E44 on the wall. The ground is C3 or C5, plus a bunch of other colors, and the plants are G28 and G82.

 I mocked up the walls with E43 and a scrap of washcloth dipped in colorless blender. Architecture students love seeing that technique!

The yellow-orange background texture was made with a couple layers of different YR's, and a quick scribble of warm grays.  Then I airbrushed some speckles of YR27 over the area. I then dripped colorless blender straight onto the colored area. For the smaller dots of blender I used my blender marker and dabbed it on.

Start to finish, this sketch took about an hour.

Depth of Field, Making things look near or far
My next drawing I spent a lot more time on, and I didn't finish. I'm guessing I spent about 3+ hours on this one already (minus interruptions). I wanted to work on how I render depth of field, or how to make things look farther away in a sketch. This is on a 9 x 12 Copic Sketchbook.

I worked with a lot of greens! I know I used YG11, YG41, G85, G28, G43, and G46. I probably used more, but I can't remember.

Although it is not done, what I want you to notice is that the leaves closest have high contrast- very light greens, mixed with shadows of G28 and C7. These are bigger and because of the contrast, they really appear to be closest. As I moved backwards in the sketch, notice how the contrast and level of detail gets less and less. The plants in the middle of the page have lost that lightest shade of green and the darkest shades as well. Move up even more and see how there is even less contrast and the colors are grayer, less vibrant.

The trees in the background are YG93, G85, and BG75. The lantern is made with warm grays, and the unfinished steps are an assortment of warm grays, and browns.

Notice on the steps as well, although they are not finished, the use of depth of field in my color choices and details. The bottom step has the most contrast, gradually getting less and less as you move up in the picture. I'll try to get this one finished sometime and show you how it all comes together.