Demo 3: Between Drawing & Painting: Exploring Brush-pens/Ink-brushes

Demo Presenter: Ed Harker

This demo is aimed at sketchers who have little experience of using brush-pens, but would like to try them for urban-sketching. It will help them to explore this versatile medium with confidence.

Brush-pens and ink-brushes are portable, fast, and create marks that combine line and form. Their speed and immediacy is perfect for sketching around the city, especially the figures that bring an urban-sketch to life. They offer unrivalled flexibility and expression, but are disconcerting on initial use, especially after pens, with little tactile feedback from the tip. This puts some sketchers off using this wonderful sketching tool…

 I’ll share some of the wide range of felt/rubber-tip and ‘real brush’ pens available today, my preferred ones, and will demonstrate some simple ink-brush line drawing exercises that help to build confidence in the ‘feel’ of these pens. I’ll demo small ‘thumbnail’ sketches of subjects in the immediate area, and show how you can use dilute ink-brushes to add shading and form. I’ll use brush-pens to simply sketch the overall environment in larger sketches, and focus on drawing people, using the ink-brushes to quickly capture their essential lines and shapes.

(I will have basic ‘detailer’ and ‘broad’ water-brushes loaded with waterproof and dilute ink to enable you to have a go at brush drawing. I will also have a range of brush-pens to try.)