Dang if Copic sketch markers aren't actually pretty excellent tools. I've used a lot of different markers and these are definitely the best of the lot.
An art materials rant follows in the comments...
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Matthew C Barrett
- The Matt
- Seattle, Washingtonland
- I am a nerd artist. I work at ArenaNet, drawing monsters and castles and such for people to do magic to and make them into a game called Guild Wars
8 comments:
yea copic markers are great! much better than letraset & Prismacolor markers. Very cool sketches! did you study any particular things before starting these sketches, like the international space station...? or is this from your imagination? ;)
Waaaah! Such awesome designs! I love the one with the doughnut shape one the bottom left!
Whats your thought process on doing these? Just random scribbles until you find a shape you like, or are you going in with a plan?
I do have a checklist of things spaceships need, critical things like reaction control, radiators, propulsion, etc., so I play with shapes that can fill these roles while still being interesting. I do study photographs of actual spacecraft like the ISS, but mostly as a diversion in its own right. I drew these at a coffee shop, so I didn't have any direct reference on hand, just things I keep in my head. Hopefully the next set will cut loose a bit with the shapes- tin cans and trusses are fine, but the starship Enterprise is undeniably epically cool. I used to draw spaceships all the time, and I'm perhaps a bit rusty after years of Guild Wars work, so I'm taking steps back into the habit.
I've long held the position that if you're serious at all about pushing your technical skills, you should pony up and buy the best materials you can afford. Cheap materials tend to behave less consistently, have less pigment density or inferior pigments, and often don't interact well with other materials. Frustration and fighting with the materials is a terrible reason to do less art. You may waste a bit learning with pricey stuff, but you'll learn faster and ultimately you'll have a more precise and personalized set of tools and strategies for approaching your art.
Quality is far more important than quantity- if you can't afford many colors of a good paint or marker, then buy fewer colors and adapt. Two tubes of Winsor & Newton Designer's Gouache (Zinc White and Ivory Black) can cost around $14, but you can do far more subtle things with them than with that $7 set of 12 cheapo Reeves gouache. Half a dozen Copics are basically just nicer to use than a dozen Prismas or Trias or Tombows.
Love the bottom left one.
But copics? You might as well use crayons you shamefully dirty otaku. *tease tease*
Bub that goes for all genres, the cost of supplies thing. I've noticed with my beading and my yarns, the cheaper stuff is okay to learn technique but no matter how advanced I get with stitches or style, the end result looks like poo compared to something with less talent involved made from better materials. So now I've got all these crappy materials I purchased on the cheap and I don't want to bead with them because I know nothing I do will be worth the effort. Talk about anti-inspiring. Same with the yarns, but it's easier to make crap look halfway decent there. I think it's fairly universal that quality comes at a price. Some things can't be bought though, like raw talent, and you've got that in heavy abundance.
These are great Matt! Nice attention of details and distribution of shapes.
re: quality equipment, that even works for the digital. My Intuos2 is finally falling apart, and now I'm thinking of either experimenting with one of the cheap Genius tablets and seeing if they're worth anything, or just ponying up for the established Intuos4 (or 3 if I can find em).
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