A Brief Interlude Before Term 4
Extracurricular Courses
Creating Ink and Watercolor Illustrations — Bryce Kho
As I mentioned in an earlier post I often have extra time during the summer and like to take a break from the RadioRunner Curriculum to pursue extracurricular art courses. During the summer of 2022 I did a bunch of stuff, but in the fall I also did an ink and watercolor course by the awesome artist Bryce Kho.
The course focuses on drawing directly onto mixed-media and water color paper with ink brush pens and then applying color with water brush pens using a 4 color layering technique called glazing.
Being in Japan, it was easy for me to source all the materials for the course, which were very specific. Most of them, such as the brush pens and watercolors are made by a company called Kuretake. The pens can often be found in supermarkets here. To get the whole set I had to order them through amazon though. Same with the waterpens, by Pentel. What makes the water brush pens unique, compared to just using brushes, is that they have a reservoir of water in the handle that you squeeze to release and then they slowly draw water from the reservoir without you having to continually reapply water as you would with a brush.
Kuretake also makes their own water brush pens but the Pentel brush tips are much better in quality. Only the 中 (medium) pen is found in supermarkets for the most part here. All these pens are a few dollars each, so if you ever order them on amazon don’t pay $50-$70 for the bundles that you see people selling. They are trying to rip off unsuspecting people who think they are geting a deal. These aren’t rare or exotic materials, they are very common here in Japan. That said I had to order from several different people to get the need pens/brush tip sizes. (IIRC the course also offers to send you the complete set of materials for an extra fee).
You also need to buy several tablets of water color and mixed media for the course. Unless you have your own watercolor paper, but it’s worth it as the paper is nice and holds water well.
The Gansai Tambi paints are really good despite only being about $20. The course doesn’t even use all the colors (as he teaches a CMYK coloring method) so you could go with a smaller set, but for the price the 48 color set is a good deal, I think.
I really enjoyed this course, Bryce Kho is a good teacher and the course is really in-depth. Also there is a lot of exercises and homework to do. The course focuses on dynamic or direct drawing with ink, so mostly no under drawing. However, Bryce does show how you can use a light color like blue to lay down an under drawing to help guide you which will then disappear once you add color. A nice thing about watercolors , you can always remove or move around some color by adding water.
There was a lot of drawing figures in perspective, which you can see that I was still struggling a lot with here.
The 4 color glazing technique he teaches is really interesting and when done right, produces nice results.
I really enjoy drawing with ink so this course, along with Sorie Kim’s course, are a lot of fun to do. I liked this course’s final project a lot more though. The Sorie Kim course’s project was to draw for 30 days in a sketch book, which to me is very vague. I like having a tangible project goal I can focus on instead. I highly recommend the course if you are interested in Ink drawing or just a fan of Bryce Kho’s work. He is a good teacher and there are some great lessons on drawing in general packed into it. Class101’s prices aren’t too bad and there is always some discount or sale going on (a common marketing thing with these sites).
WOD and Krenz Cushart
Having heard about ARTWOD I wondered if I could create my own “workout of the day” for a weekly review of basics and art workout. Based on what I’ve already studied. So I started trying to design a schedule that would review pretty much all the stuff I’ve studied and rotate on a weekly basis like ARTWOD does, but without costing me any money. It’s still evolving even today (eventually I’ll have to do a post on it), but back then I was doing pretty basic stuff like one week of figures 2 days a week, then silhouette drawing the next week, then portraits etc.
I also started to do Krez Cushart’s accuracy training exercises from his youtube videos where you try to draw from a list of characters and images side by side. As well as an exercise I learned from Shane Wolf where you draw a shape then try to redraw it from memory on another layer, only checking if you get stuck, to build accuracy. It’s kind of hard to describe, and this is where doing a video would be more beneficial. Perhaps in the future I’d do something like that.
Here are some examples of drawing 2-tone silhouettes of images, from reference and from imagination. I drew these in Clip Studio Pro using the fill lasso tool, which is an amazing tool that allows you to quickly block out shapes. You can load up two colors, one as the foreground and one as the background color (as with any software tool like Photoshop or even Procreate I believe) then by pressing the X-key you can easily switch colors while laying down shapes. It’s weird at first but quickly becomes fun and it’s a great exercise in communicating form using shapes/silhouettes.
Overall I think taking a break from grinding fundamentals is good (the 50% percent rule) and if you are like me and have a hard time coming up with your own projects, picking a quick course on Domestika, Udemy, Class101, etc., isn’t a bad idea if you have some extra cash. Like I talked about in my Term 2 Round Up post.
I think that’ll be it for this week. I’ll continue next week with a run down of Term 4.
