Samurai

This is ‘Speed III‘ by Jung Shan, who, as far as I understand, draws digitally and then adds actual ink brush strokes :
Reference artwork in black and white: a focused-looking warrior with a long flying ponytail, feet wide apart, wields a sword. There are movement strokes.

I sketched the samurai on a Moleskin watercolor book (21×13 cm):
Rough pencil sketch in a wide watercolour drawing book. My pencil is seen on the table.

I used a Pentel brushpen for the black strokes and cold grey Faber-Castell brushpens for the rest:
Inking with a black Pentel brushpen and cold grey Faber-Castell brushpens for the rest of the clothes, face and ponytail.

Then I erased the pencil marks, cut diagonally one of my cheap brushes, prepared a lamp black wash, took a deep breath and stroke:
Large black ink strokes. the brush is visible on the side resting on the porcelain palette. I trimmed it diagonally.

Reproduction of Moebius’ ‘Le garage hermétique de Jerry Cornelius’

I discovered Moebius rather recently. Stéphane raved about him, Virginie was a fan. So when she suggested we all meet in Toulon at the occasion of an exhibit of Moebius’ work, it was a done deal. I was fascinated. All these intricate and thin lines giving life to surrealistic worlds, people and creatures!

From one book, I asked Stéphane to choose a few images he liked and this page was my favourite. ‘Le garage hermétique de Jerry Cornelius’:
Reference illustration. A flying character dressed in black with a bald head looks down from above at a city under attack from anti-matter magma rays

I sketched a rather precise version in pencil on an A4 white sheet:
Rather precise pencil sketch on white paper

Using a Pentel Brushpen, I started inking the straight lines (and later the flying figure as well as the black area around the title at the top):
Inking in black of the rays

The rest of the outline I did with a 0.05 mm Uni-ball pin pen:
Inking finished and pencil erased

Tada! Gift ready and framed. The resulting drawing was 16×21 cm:
Final piece framed in natural wood. My hand is holding the frame and my left thumb is visible.

Other work from late December 2017

I doodled a few Moebius’ figures to test how badly black ink bleeds against alcoholic ink. Maybe I didn’t let it dry enough, but the Uni-ball pin pens supposedly don’t bleed but they did:
Two sketches of caped characters, one standing from behind, another in the water pushing a skiff
Sketch of a levitating character with spread out arms, dressed in a long billowy dark blue robe, a headdress that looks like antlers, and two large orbs at the ears.
A bit frustrated, I continued with a Moebius’ figure of a queen in heaven, part of an illustration of Dante’s Divine Comedy, but this time I used a Pentel Brushpen and watercolor:
Black ink and coloured alcohol markers drawing of a madonna on clouds with joined hands, wearing a crown and a halo full of stars
This one I liked doing very much! I used a Black ink Pentel Brushpen for the black background and a white Posca pen for the zebra:
Zebra painted in white over a black rectangle

Goldfish triptych

The exercise consisted in using masking fluid to paint the blue backgrounds and save the white for the goldfish:
Three postcard sized watercolour sheets where I drew the shapes of goldfish and painted the background in light blue. The watercolour pans, brush and water glass are visible.

The masking fluid was painstakingly slow to peel off, left some residue and I ended up scraping paper a bit in places:

Scrapped paper and residue of the green masking fluid that would not be removed

I filled the first goldfish with black ink from a Pentel Brushpen (which is awesome for very thin lines as well as large areas) after painting the fins, tail, eyes and mouth in bright orange watercolor:

The second and third goldfish were a mix of bright orange watercolor, black on some fins, eye and mouth, and to cover the masking fluid residue I applied a layer of white watercolor paint:

I framed those and painted the frame bright orange as well before adding a layer of varnish: