Al Fresco Art Club, Jan 3, 2021 -- Pen and Marker Day

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Self-portrait with Marvy Mrkers

Self-portrait with Marvy Mrkers

The Al Fresco Art Club director was back in form today and our days of slacking off and doing whatever were a thing of the past. Today we all had to follow the instructions and use ink and markers to create our one-hour masterpieces. Since I was feeling uninspired, I drew a self-portrait, which, to my surprise, actually resembles me. My selection of Le Plume markers had a few useful muted colors, but skin tones were lacking so I left my face paper color. The black shirt was painted with a Copic marker.

Supplies :

  • Marvy Uchida Le Plume permanent markers (set of 24), alcohol-based markers (24)

  • Copic Marker, black

  • Rotring Tikky 0.1mm liner. The Tikky’s are my favorite liners. The price for these is absurdly marked up Amazon by whacked out resellers, so get them from Jetpens.com for about $3.60 each.

  • HB pencil

  • Marker paper

Laundry day, Apartamento Magazine, and Letterkenny

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48/365

I like doing laundry. It’s the only place I can sit and relax while the washing machine is chugging away. I sit next to it so I can lift the lid when it gets hung up before the spin cycle. When it starts to grind I reach over from my comfy camp chair and lift the lid, then go back to reading my new issue of Apartamento with an eye-catching clair ligne drawing by Nazario Luque on the cover — he’s the king of Spanish underground comics. After that I watched an episode of Letterkenny, my new favorite show, second only to Rick and Morty.

After all that relaxation, I got a craving for a cup of coffee, which got me back in the mood to dig in to my children’s book project. I spent several hours researching exactly how many pages the typical children’s book has (32), and how many actual pages there will be for images. That’s more complicated, but I narrowed that answer down to 14 two-page spreads after subtracting the front and back covers, the front and back white-matter, the copyright page, and the title. 14 two-page spreads translates to 24 images for single pages and 2 images for two two-page spreads.

The sketch below shows Momma Jay walking her Pomeranian. This picture has nothing to do with the children’s book. I used my Rotring Isograph .20 for the fine lines. My Rotrings are a smooth ride compared to my rather scratch Rapidograph technical pens.