Title: Surprise!
Medium: Acrylic, ink, watercolor
Type: Mixed Media Paper
Size: 9×6
Artist: Aikoi Sugoi
A new day, a new kawaii doodle illustration. Despite a near disaster at the finish line, I think this one came out ok. A lot of work went into this illustration off paper. Part of its existence is actually the result of an abandoned illustration I worked on while sketching this one.
Unfortunately as I was finishing the now abandoned piece, I slightly ruined it with a Posca paint pen. That’s right. A Posca disaster struck me again! I was doing lineart on a portion of the piece and too much paint bled through the paint shield I was using as a straight edge.
By this time I was kinda over the illustration anyway. I had been working on it for a few weeks, painting portions of it night after night as time allowed and I was just tired of it. Plus I was disappointed with the overall look of the doodles after painting them white and lining them with my acrylic pens. Not only that, but I had an unusual amount of bleed through with my washi tape, something that was surprising. After replacing painter’s tape with washi tape, I found it to be more dependable for painting clean lines without bleed through or paper tears. But the bleed through on this illustration was something else.
So when I messed up on the part with the paint shield I was over it. I literally said out loud “I’m done!” closed my sketchpad and went to bed. Now, I have a policy of never abandoning a drawing I start since there is a lesson to be learned in everything I make, but this drawing just felt off. It landed too far away from what I was aiming for and it felt like a waste of time to keep going. Maybe that in itself is a lesson. To know when to walk away?
But there was something important I took from that disaster and carried over to this newest illustration, something that will likely stick with me going forward with all of my work. After the mounting paint pen disasters, I kept thinking that maybe paint was not the way to go with lineart. My art interests were literally inspired by pen and ink drawings, yet here I was focusing only on acrylic paint. It was then I decided to try using ink more in my next work. And the failure of the old piece was just the push I needed to do so.
And long story short, it was clearly the right choice. There were no bleed throughs or hairy lines and I could control my line weight so much better. I say this even though I am absolutely terrible at line control, but at least now I can learn how to do it properly. For example, I recently borrowed Alphonso Dunn’s book “Pen and Ink Drawing” from my library and have been watching his videos on YouTube. I mostly sought out his lessons to learn more about applying texture to pen and ink drawings, but I’m picking up tips on line weight and shading too.
His book, along with my wonderful Uni Ball fineliner pens and my recently acquired set of black Sakura Micron graphic pens, helped make this painting a decent success. Now I just need to learn how to use my pens correctly. For example, while wrapping up the illustration by applying texture, I let my hand rest on a part of my inking that hadn’t yet dried and accidentally stamped that ink on several parts of the illustration!
It was a bone headed move but with age comes more patience (sometimes). I kept calm, grabbed my paint and brushes and got to work repairing what I could. Thankfully I was able to repair most of the damage. A quick shout out to Golden’s Titanium White fluid acrylic paint for helping me to salvage my work. It has slowly grown on me and I think it’s going to be my first choice for white paint as I transition to using more ink in my drawings.
I have so many ideas and so much to say about my art that this post could go on for hours, but I’ll save my thoughts until next time.
Tata for now.
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