My Urban Sketching Equipment

I've been experimenting with a different process lately with my Urban Sketching, and since the results have received a lot of praise (thanks!) and questions on medium and equipment I use I figured I would make a blog post about it.  Above is the sample of one of my recent sketches while in Intramuros.  I found a nice, shady spot on the wall with a good view of Manila City Hall as well as a food stall on the road below.

Materials

Here is a photo of the materials I used for these sketches.  Yup, that's it.  Four pens and a sketchbook.  Usually I only have just the one pen and a sketchbook, and sometimes a small pack of grayscale brushpens.  Why so little?  This has a lot to do with my own personal philosophy of Urban Sketching.  I like to observe things and present them in as unvarnished a way as possible, especially people.  People react in all sorts of ways when they know they're being observed, so when I sketch I try to be as invisible as possible, and having less materials makes that a whole lot easier.  Of course this method has its drawbacks, but I'll save that for another post.  For now, I'll go over each item one by one and show you where you can get them.  Unfortunately most of them are only available on Amazon or in Japan, but hopefully that will change.

Metal Pencil Case

Actually, I'm not sure where I got this pencil case and how much it cost.  It might have been in one of those "container" stores like Beabi or Lock and Lock where they have containers for everything.  In fact I think this may have originally belonged to my wife, who likes buying containers for everything.  If you find one it should probably cost you less than 100 pesos.  It's simple, sleek, and carries my pens.  The Urban Sketchers Philippines sticker was given to me by the current leader of USK Philippines, Lauren Villarama.

Zebra Brush Pen

After trying numerous felt brush pens in the settled on the Zebra brush pen as my favorite (I forget the reasons why, to be honest).  I like brush pens because they give your drawings a sense of weight without even trying, something that regular technical pens and ballpens do not.  You get that sense of line weight using Nib pens as well, but for sheer convenience these brush pens can't be beat.  They rn out of ink in a few months, depending on use.  I usually ask relatives coming from the US to bring me a bunch, or I buy them in bulk when I go to Japan.  Amazon lists this as the Zebra WF1 Scientific Brush (Small Size) and Jetpens list them as Zebra Disposable Brush Pen Fine.  Zebra's brush pens are color coded so always make sure to get the gray one, not the black (medium) or blue (extra fine).  Zebra actually has a retail presence in the Philippines so maybe one day we'll see these in national bookstore.

Koi Coloring Brush Pen

Koi Coloring Brush Pens, made by Sakura, are surprisingly hard to find even in Japan.  I found these on Amazon and the first set I bought was actually a grayscale set that I really liked.  I then bought the 12-piece colored set and was disappointed because the colors were too rich and bright for my taste ( I think they were originally made for coloring manga).  On Kraft paper (the brown paper my sketchbook uses) it dampens some of that color and makes it more tolerable for me.  I originally fell in love with these pens because they don't bleed through the pages in the same way most markers do.  I use these to color and shade my line art to give them more volume.

Sakura sells 24-piece and 48-piece sets as well, but they get pretty expensive and I was worried that I wouldn't get the colors I like.  I actually found a store in Bangkok that sells individual colors, but I felt too pressured to buy anything.  Hopefully this is something Sakura Philippines will bring here soon.    

Uni-Ball Signo White Gel Ink Pen

This one you can actually buy in National Bookstore.  The Uni-Ball Signo White Gel Ink Pen costs around 96 Pesos.  Don't expect your local NBS clerk or saleslady to recognize the name immediately though, and bring a picture just in case.  This is one of my most recent purchases, and I bought it specifically to experiment in using it with my new Sketchbook.  It seems to be very popular among comic book artists.

Pentel Felt Tip Sign Pen

This is another one of those pens that I discovered in Japan.  I bought it because it was similar to the Zebra Pen with its felt tip, except colored.  I bought a single brown and grey pen while in Japan, but I recently purchased a set of 12 on Amazon, which I'm very excited to play around with.  As with Sakura, Pentel has a retail presence here, so it's not impossible that they will bring these over someday, perhaps USK Philippines can push for that.

Languo Metal Case Sketchbook

This sketchbook can actually be found in National Book Store, although I cannot say if it's available in all branches.  I found mine buried in the Megamall Branch along with a few others.  Oddly, they seem to all be flag themed.  Mine seems to carry the French flag, while the rest of the sketchbooks I saw bore the Chinese flag (Languo seems to be a Chinese company).  The  most curious thing about these sketchbooks is that they are divided into three sections : Kraft paper, dotted graph paper, and Kraft paper again.  I've never seen sketchbooks like these before.  The thing I liked most about them was that both the Kraft paper and the graph paper were able to hold my Zebra brush pen strokes without bleeding through to the other side of the page.  This "metal" version costs only 215 pesos while there is another square shaped paperback version that costs 146 Pesos (with similar paper divisions).  If the NBS clerks don't seem to  know what you're talking about, just dig around in the sketchbook and notebook sections of your local NBS and you might get lucky.

Conclusion

I hope you guys found this post useful, and have fun experimenting with these materials.  If you have any questions I'd be happy to answer them in the comments!

For more information on Urban Sketchers Philippines and how to join our sketchwalks, check out our blog!

Dr. Sketchy's Anti Art School Philippines

Dr. Sketchy's Anti -Art School has been around in Manila for about a year an a half now (at least about as long as the Urban Sketchers).  I'd been meaning to join their events but I'd been putting it off due to general laziness and a lack of interest in the burlesque/goth themes that usually permeate their events.  Nothing wrong with that of course, it's just not my visual cup of tea.  The one time they had a different theme, "Arabian Nights", it completely slipped my radar.  Being Halloween themed, this month's event was still kind of gothy, but since it fit the spirit of the season and my brother in law asked me to accompany him I went along.  It was a great visual workout for me, and I learned some key things about myself.  When sketching a single figure I'm happiest with a time limit of around 15 minutes.  In fact it was one of my 15 minute sketches (above, right) that caught the eye of our model and scored me an "art monkey" T-shirt.

5 minutes is a little too loose for me, although that's probably because I was using my brush pen directly, and was nervous about making mistakes.  With a pencil I'm sure I would have been much more comfortable with this time limit.  I'm not even showing my 30 minute sketch here because I think it's the worst of the bunch.  I was overthinking and overanalyzing each stroke, and the sketch ended up looking really stiff.

I'll definitely be checking out Dr. Sketchy's again soon, though I do hope that they expand their collection of themes.  For example, I'd love to see a 70s scifi theme (miniskirts and bubble helmets), maybe pulp fantasy along the lines of Conan the Barbarian.  Straight up fantasy like Game of Thrones would be great too, but the outfits would be a little difficult.  Maybe more modern themes like "Breaking Bad" (men in hazmat suits) or near future stuff like the characters in "Mirror's Edge".  In fact I'd go so far as to say that one of Dr. Sketchy's models/organizers, Jowein, would be perfect as Faith.

Big Sale at the Art Department

The Art Department is on sale again, offering all of their downloads for $6.99.  This is a great deal, especially considering some download originally cost $60.  I haven't been very diligent with reviewing the tutorials, but here's a list of the tutorials I've done quick reviews on:

• Jason Manley on Composition
• Jason Chan
• Donato Giancola
• Zhang Lu and Jason Manley

I highly encourage you to give these videos a shot.  While there's a lot of free stuff out there on the internet, these are some finely made videos that really helped me along with my artwork.

David Allcock and Eva Kuntz

Something I've taken to doing in movies is waiting for the credits to roll and listing down the names of the artists who took part in conceptualizing the film.  I take down production designers, art directors, concept artists, graphic artists, illustrators, storyboard artists.  Basically these are the names of people nobody else knows or recognizes but are integral parts of the creation of any movie.  I do this partly to recognize them for work but also to learn from them in case they have a blog hat I can visit.

For this movie, the blogs that I dug up were for David Allcock and Eva Kuntz (there's a joke there that I'm going to leave hanging).  Allcock is more my kind of guy, sort of an all around illustrator/concept/storyboard artist (it's his storyboard seen above), while Kuntz is rather adept at photomanipulation and photomontages.  I hope you enjoy poring over these blogs, and I'll try to update these as I watch movies in the coming year.

Animahenasyon 2011

Animahenasyon is the biggest local animation conference in the Philippines, and has been going strong for the past 5 years.  This year's event brings quite a few interesting talks for anyone interested in entering the animation industry.  I must admit I don't know all of the people who will be speaking at this year's conference, but there will be speakers from countries like Japan (Jun Awazu) and companies like Cartoon Network ( Silas Hickey ).  The talk I'm most interested in attending is the one by Caravan Studio, since they create concept art and CCG art, which are the things that I'd like to eventually be doing in the future.  Unfortunately it turns out they'll be speaking at about the same time that my sister's family and I will be at the beach (She's visiting fro the US and I'm seeing my niece and nephew for the first time).  It's a shame, but I'm sure there'll be even better speakers next year.

To get more info about Animahenasyon you can check out their website or download this pdf.

The Art Department Tutorial Review : Zhang Lu and Jason Manley Portraits volume 1 Caucasian Females

This is probably the first Art Department video that I downloaded that I can comfortably say is not a "must buy".  I was already wary about it from the start but I had a couple of extra dollars lying around from a commission I made so I figured why the hell not?  My trepidation was based on the fact that the video didn't seem to promise very much more than watching a guy paint heads.  While there are many artists out there who would be able to glean hoards of information from that, I am unfortunately more the type that needs to see AND have what he's seeing be explained to him to make that information click in his brain.  Jason Manley bravely tries to do just that in the first 30 minutes of this video, talking about what Zhang Lu is doing onscreen as well as art history and some basic head creation tips.  But even he seems to realize that it's a lost cause and halfway through the video his commentary ends and we're left with Zhang Lu painting to music.

I'm not casting any doubt on Zhang Lu's skill whatsoever, and indeed I'll probably take the time to go back and watch him make paint heads sometime in the future.  However as a sheer value for money proposition you can watch people paint in silence on Youtube.  Or if you want something that can be downloaded that can be watched at your leisure, Carlos Cabrera's got your back.  I actually haven't watched any of his videos so I can't vouch for them, but at least they're free.  I was already disappointed after paying $7.99 for this video, and I can't help but feel I'd be even more disappointed if I'd paid the full $20.

I would highly recommend that you buy some of the other videos that I've reviewed, like Jason Manley on Composition, Jason Chan's set of videos, and Donato Giancola painting "The Mechanic".  You should also download them soon because recently I noticed that some of the videos were going back to regular prices.  I think that the Art Department willbe going through a website overhaul very soon so I'm not sure how long they'll be up there.  Most of the videos  I mentioned above are still on sale but I'm not sure how much longer that's gonna last.

Gobelins Master Class on Character Animation

Just a heads up for anyone in Manila interested in learning more about animation concepts.  The Gobelin L'ecole De l'image Master Class on Animation will be holding a workshop in the DeLasalle CSB campus from October 20-22.  Alexandre Heboyan, an artist who has worked on Dreamworks Animation movies like Kung Fu Panda and Monsters vs Aliens, will be the guest speaker.

I'm not actually interested in a career in animation per se, but some animation principles can obviously extend into still illustrations.  The schedule is below, with emphasis on the classes I'm intersted in attending:

Day 1 My Personal Approach for Organizing a Character Animation Sequence

- Getting in a creative mode

- The right method to walk through the animation process

- Key principles of animation

Day 2 How to Bring Life to Your Character

- Bringing expressions out of body articulations

- Breaking down facial features

- Lipsynch method

Day 3 Locomotion and Weight

- How to approach a walk cycle

- Each walk is unique

- Perfect your action scenes

If you're interested check out their Facebook event page or get in touch with Ms. Carla Ting at  carla_ting3@yahoo.com or call 09273810745 Globe/ 0933-313-31-30 Sun.

The Art Department Tutorial Review : Jason Chan

Since the Art Department's Sale is still ongoing, I'll do another quick review of a tutorial that I found very useful in my art (re)education.  This tutorial was particularly helpful for me because I'd always struggled with the transition from line art to painting.  There are some artists out there that are so used to painting and already have such a good understanding of light, color, and matter that they can paint directly on the canvas and essentially "sculpt" out a figure using the paint.  However there are people who are just more used to lack the understanding necessary to go directly to paint for whom it's helpful to have some guidelines set down before they start painting over things.  I fall into the latter category, and I found that Jason Chan's tutorials helped me bridge the gap.

Jason Chan has numerous videos on The Art Department, but if you only had $16 and had to choose two tutorials of his to download I'd suggest "Thunderdome" and "Character Design vol.1".  Thunderdome takes you through the process of creating an illustration from an approved thumbnail all the way up to a finished illustration that you can show to a client. My problem had always been the part between thumbnail and illustration.  For whatever reason I couldn't wrap my brain around how to get from point A to B.  Jason provides the answer, and it's rather simplistic; a lot of time.  Obviously it's not that simple, but essentially what I was lacking was the understanding of just how long it really takes to create one of these illustrations.  Being able to see the process from point A to B and more importantly being able to rewind to see it over and over again just unlocked something in my brain that text tutorials simply failed to do.  There are some free youtube videos out there that may help, but a lot of them are really speeded up and so you lose a lot of the nuance that goes into particular brush strokes.  Chan's general insight into his work process is also very useful.  This is the artwork I produced right after watching this video, and here's the artwork prior.  I'm not sure if it's obvious, but personally I feel like there was a very big leap in terms of quality between the two artworks.

Character Design volume 1 is very useful because he takes you through a variety of styles that you might use to create concept art or illustration.  More importantly to me he showed how you can render lineart in monochrome first before using an overlay layer to color it in.    This is not a new trick and in fact I'd heard about it before and written a tutorial about it, which frankly I'm now a little ashamed of.  Again as with the previous video there seems to just be something about seeing the process and listening to Jason talk about his workflow that just made sense in my head.  He also goes a little bit into how he thinks about the psychology of his characters when he creates them, and how that informs things like armor design and their poses, something which he goes further in depth into in his videos on designing Heroes and Villains.

If you're interested in concept art but have a lineart background and would like to transition from one to the other, I highly recommend all of Jason Chan's videos.  But if you're on a budget, these two should definitely be on the top of your list.  If you've an extra $8 and want a third video, I'd go for his "Quick Sketch" video, which deals with how to create these artworks if you're under a tight deadline.

Feng Zhu's Free Tutorials

While Feng Zhu's School of Design may be out of the price range of many aspiring artists, he's kindly put up a series of free online tutorials available for anyone to view.  Of course these are partly meant to be promotional material for his school, but he doesn't skimp on the details and with sharing his thought process and workflow.  These tutorials probably won't be as in depth as the stuff I downloaded from the art department (7.99 sale still ongoing btw), but these should provide a good (free!) complement to them.