Never done anything else

I dreamed that I was drawing my picture of a goth couple that I just started yesterday. Don't know if that was even a boring or interesting thing to dream about. I had just started trying out drawing dark brown skin colours with my promarkers and it's trickier than it might seem, because I'm both shadowing and highlighting with 3 different shades of brown.

I'm used to only doing two different types of white/caucasian skin, one cold and pale, the other slightly warmer and livelier. And now just playing around with the brown shades I think I already found the perfect combination of burnt sienna, cinnamon and tan.

It is a whole science drawing with these pens to bring life to my cartoons, and I only just recently started drawing in 3 shades instead of just 2 to create even more depth. And desperately trying to squeeze out more ink from my dying pen cool grey 4 as I use it for most of my shading when it comes to basically everything except skin colours.

I did buy cool grey 2 and 3 as well as more 1 and 4 and I also have cool grey 5 which is the darkest. So, soon I'll be able to do much more detailed shading when it comes to all the other stuff than the skin tones as well. I keep learning despite having teaching myself how to use these pens for over a year now, I think. All self taught too.

Don't even remember when I got my first set of promarkers, but I think it was about or a little over a year ago. It's like my favourite toys these days. It's interesting, cause my favourite toys as a child was pens as well. Drawing is like the one thing I've always done. And this technique that I'm doing these days, seems to me not that far from the colouring books I (rarely) used as a child. Filling in black lines with coloured ink, I mean.

It is much more advanced, of course, since I'm drawing everything from scratch and basically making my own colouring books and then with the shading too. I'm hoping I can upgrade it even further as I'll get more pens and that thinner black line pen. I really love submerging myself in tiny details and learn more advanced techniques.

Still find myself watching youtube videos of tutorials and found that Letraset (the brand of promarkers that I buy) has its own channel there with lots of useful tips and tricks. Some things I still haven't figured out how to get right, or neat looking enough, like hair. Light hair, mostly.

For the lightest blonde I use ivory and layers upon layers of cool grey 1, but it still doesn't quite give it a lot of depth. I think ivory is my favourite shade, actually. It's very light, pale yellowish beige almost kinda and it works for a lot of things. Like skin, hair, wallpapers, light wood furniture and so on.

Before, I only had ivory and sandstone for light skin colours, but now... I think I have at least 5-6 different shades ranging from ivory to blush, from tan to dusky pink and vanilla to what not. These days I most often use tan, blush and ivory mixed together to create a light, soft and warm skin tone. And sandstone, vanilla and ivory to create a colder one.

In all these tutorials I find, people seem to prefer the rosy look to light skin, which I honestly don't understand. Most people are rarely that rosy. They just seem to overuse the light pink shades and rarely use ivory, which is my favourite. Maybe I'm just so hooked on the dead goth look that only ivory can give me, I don't know.

Since I often draw either pale white people or pale darker skinned people (yes even dark skinned people can be pale, as pale means ghostly/colourless, not light), I don't see the point in adding pink tones to cheeks or what not.

Should I try drawing K with promarkers? Maybe. I have only so far drawn him with lead pens, but I think it could be fun drawing him with colours too. And it was a while ago since I last drew him. Just a thought.

What more can I say about my drawings? Oh yes, I'm a bit bothered by the fact that my expensive special paper is so thin, cause it can't contain that much ink before it gets mushy or what to say. Three or four layers and that's about it. Sometimes I can stretch it to five layers, but that's rare. Why so many layers? Cause that's basically how you draw with promarkers, to blend the colours to give it a softer, more natural look.

I still prefer working in small scales, drawing smaller pictures. Or, the paper that I have is in A4 so I can't really do as big pictures with what I have. Although I can use other types of paper. For my big artwork with world of warcraft characters I use just a thicker, simple piece of paper and that works fine too.

It doesn't bleed through and the paper can hold quite a lot of ink before it starts getting mushy like that. Although it really sucks in the ink, or how to explain it, so it might dry out the pens a bit quicker, and also it makes the colours appear darker and more grey, for some reason.

Other than that, I don't really have any far ahead plans for my drawings. I just draw for my own sake and to get better at it. I have no plans to sell anything or such. Unless someone wants to buy something out of the blue, of course. This kind of technique isn't commonly used for something to put up on a wall though. But possibly for tattoos or comics or some kind of cards.

I should put up a few of these on my own walls though, those that look more like actual artworks and maybe not most of the rooms I did before. But the male draenei, maybe the living room, my self portrait if I can ever finish it and possibly this dark goth couple that followed me into my dream this night. Maybe make my living room a gallery of sorts. Although most of it isn't even framed, it's just put up with needles in the wallpaper. It's hard, finding decent frames that will fit.

Just to finish this off, I really do love drawing with promarkers, although I keep comparing myself to real artists that, just as me never done anything else, but somehow are still so much better at it than I am. Although, I did only start with promarkers about a year ago, I'm still sort of a beginner at that. But the funny thing is that it's a lot more fun starting a new art style than it is perfecting an old one.