New Pens and Brushes

Last month Aissa's cousin Ivey came home from the US (or rather visited, since the US is home for them now) and kindly brought home some art supplies I ordered from Jetpens.  I've had a hankering for Japanese brushpens ever since I bought a double sided Motec Pen during our honeymoon in Japan.  Unfortunately these pens are notoriously hard to find outside their homeland (I've tried looking in China, Korea and Taiwan with very little luck) and Jetpens has created an entire business around delivering these pens to the rest of the world.  Unfortunately the Motec Pen was out of stock, so I went and ordered three different kinds of pens and try to figure out which one I liked the best.  I'm currently using the Kuretake Pen seen above, and liking it so far.

Since I'm trying to expand from just line sketches to sketches with a bit of gradation, I also purchased the Sakurai Koi Coloring Brush Set in Grayscale.  I'm still scared of color, but this set offers 3 gradations of warm and cool grays, so it's a good stepping stone to learning to sketch in values.  This set is unequivocally the best buy so far, and I absolutely love using them.  Their best feature is that if they're applied lightly, they don't bleed through the paper of my monologue sketchbooks, which is very important to me since I always use both sides of the paper.  Once I'm comfortable with grayscale I think I'll eventually move up to buying their colored set.  Below are some of the sketches I've made with this combination of tools.

First Sketches, people in Starbucks

Woman in Greenbelt 1

Dimsum Chefs in Shi Lin