Artist Tools Automatic translate

By acquiring everything that is required for creativity, it is easy to get carried away and get superfluous or completely unnecessary. Try to start with only the most necessary, and then, as needed, you can add new tools and materials. Always choose the very best as your budget allows, as cheap purchases often disappoint - not the right shades of pigment, the wrong texture of paper or fiber from the brush sprinkled.

Types of brushes

Brushes add color to large or small surfaces, but they can also draw vibrant and very dynamic lines, both gentle and contrasting. Spring brushes are much more expressive than “sluggish” ones, therefore, to preserve the quality of the brushes, be sure to rinse them after the end of the work session, and the brushes should only be stored in an upright position.

Brushes come in various shapes and sizes. Round pointed brushes with long hair apply wide or thin strokes. But round pointed brushes with short hair are easier to use, it’s convenient to write small details with them. Flat brushes with short or long hair are suitable for covering large surfaces.

The best material for creating brushes is considered columns. Such a brush is expensive, but differs in great strength and durability, and also gives excellent results.

Squirrel and synthetic brushes are cheaper, but also allow you to create drawings of good quality. Quality brushes last a long time, and over time you will have a good collection.

To get started, buy nylon brushes, take a couple of wide brushes - they paint the details well enough and fill. You can also get an eastern alternative to expensive sable and squirrel brushes. A brown brush from a column, well springy when wet, prescribes the details, and a soft white goat brush perfectly covers the wide surfaces of paper or canvas with a wash.

Simple pencils

The good old “lead” pencils in a wooden frame with a core made of a mixture of graphite powder and clay have many advantages: they are economical, compact, versatile and convenient to take with you. On such pencils there are designations of different hardness: “N” - hard, and “B” - soft. Hard pencils are for technical drawings, and the line they draw is pale and inexpressive.

For art drawing pencils marked "B" are better suited, where graphite is much more than clay. The higher the number next to the letter, the softer the pencil lead will be and the quicker it dulls, but the line turns blacker and is easily smeared. When buying, choose high-quality pencils or pencils, on which their softness is clearly indicated. For starters, "2B."

If you draw with pencils of different hardness, try to prevail black, and do not expand the range of halftones too much. A shortened pencil will quickly become dull, so try to sharpen your pencils more authenticly using a sharp knife. Erase pencil drawing with a soft eraser only. So that the lines made with a soft pencil are not smeared, they are fixed with a latch.

When creating a drawing with many small details, try to sharpen the stylus more often so that it always has a sharp tip. Soft pencil leads are quickly dull, they have to be constantly repaired. Try to do this so that the wooden frame is far enough from the tip of the stylus, otherwise it may scratch the paper and damage the drawing itself.

Among the types of pencils, one can distinguish types with a wide, like a cutter, stylus, which draws a very wide line.

There are an incredible amount of colored pencils, and experimenting with them is very interesting. For example, try applying one color to the paper, and then another on top of it, and you will get a new color. Or “mix” the shades like this: draw colorful dots or lines on paper close to each other like the famous French artist Georges Cera did - you will get a very unusual and beautiful effect.

Individual graphite rods have the same graduation as wooden pencils. Actually, this is thick pencil leads, only without the usual wooden frame. They are widely used in drawing, because they create a winning uneven texture, and they quickly cover large surfaces.

Keep in mind that a line made with a dry, water-soluble graphite pencil spreads out when blurred. Soft pencils dissolve the easiest. Before using the pencil, check its effect on the draft to select the degree of moisture.

Crayons and wax pencils

For drawing fine and precise lines, these very soft materials are not at all suitable, however, they excellently cover the surface in large, loose and textured patterns. The pastel is made in a wide range of colors, and each color always has several shades.

Many manufacturers number shades of the same color with numbers from 0 (the lightest) to 8 (the darkest). Pastels can be bought either in the form of pencils or in the form of rods. Pencils are harder and easier to repair. Both that and others are on sale ready-made sets or in bulk. First you should buy a few pieces and try how convenient it is for you to work with them, do you like pastels at all. In addition, this way you determine the colors that you use most often, and then you can gradually replenish your collection.

The caret pastel is a solid pastel, and artistic crayons are dry, oblong stems densely pressed from a pigment, ground into powder, into which a binder component is added - gum and clay for hardness.

In pastel section, it is usually square, it creates a beautiful, expressive line, but is poorly erased. As a rule, the color scheme of earthy shades is the most persistent. The tip of the pastel is dull and wide, but easy to grind. By turning the crayon sharpened on one side, you can get a finer line. Pastel pencil leads are similar in composition to pastel and combine perfectly with it if the drawing requires more subtle elaboration.

Soft pastels are pigments with a small addition of gums (gum arabic), chalk or dark paint for a lighter or darker color. It crumbles very easily, turning into dust, and erases well with a plastic eraser.

The pastel has to be fixed with a fixer, however, the beauty of the velvety pastel is created precisely by the light reflected from dust particles, so the excess of the fixer makes the pattern faded.

If you mix too many shades of soft pastel, the drawing will seem dirty, so the measure is very important here, and at first, it is better to choose simple mixtures. Oil pastel, like wax crayons, has a dense coating, which allows you to scratch the pattern on the surface they applied.

If you are working on paper stretched onto a stretcher, glued with gum arabic or hooped, the oil pastels and wax crayons can be diluted or completely removed with turpentine or white spirit. The drawing made by these materials also needs fixing.

Different types of pens

It is impossible to list all the pens because new types are added all the time. Here are just a few examples.

Fountain pens familiar to artists consist of a holder and a removable pen. They are dipped in ink or any other liquid coloring matter. The best traditionally are steel flexible feathers with a split tip, in which a different degree of pressure allows for a variety of expressive lines and strokes.

Unfortunately, synthetic-based color inks for fading fade extremely quickly. Therefore, choose sustainable water-soluble inks from traditional formulations.

Sometimes in specialized stores you can see reed and bamboo feathers. A thin reed feather (kalam), like a strong bamboo feather, is not flexible, but their tips can be written at different angles, creating many different lines and strokes.

Conventional technical pens are convenient to carry and easy to use. They represent a mechanical device with a pointed tube, designed to create lines of a certain thickness. Great skill and ingenuity is required to make their “boring” lines interesting.

Refueling handles can save you money, but choose among them easy to clean. Automatic pens draw ink into the internal cartridge, so it’s very convenient to take them with you, going on a sketch. Some handles are even equipped with interchangeable heads that allow different types of lines to be drawn.

Ballpoint pens can also be a useful tool for sketching, just make sure that they do not blot and draw a high-quality line without “jumps”.

Coal

An ancient drawing tool - charcoal - is made from olive or willow branches, which are burned with a minimum amount of oxygen. Among modern options can be noted compressed charcoal and special charcoal pencils. All of them, although not completely, are erased with a soft eraser. True, a charcoal drawing, as in the case with pastels, requires fixing. Sauce - a thick lead used to create a thin or thick stroke, as well as a wash.

Usually, coal rods are sold both in bulk and in packs. They come in different sizes, from thin to very thick (the so-called "stage"), and according to hardness they are divided into three categories - hard, medium and soft. All of them create a fast and easily removable cover of various shades, from dark gray to brownish and black.

Pressed charcoal is sold as pastels. A high concentration of soot allows you to apply a very dense, slightly oily strokes with expressiveness and saturation, but it is useless to erase them. There are also charcoal rods of gray tones in which soot is diluted with chalk.

Typically, charcoal pencils are sold either in large bundles, like coal rods, or are graded according to their degree of hardness, like graphite. Their advantage is that they emphasize the expressiveness of pencil drawing with their rich tone. The Conte pencil (especially the hard pencil, invented by the French scientist Nicola-Jacques Conte) is slightly fatter than the charcoal rod, and almost does not wear out. It is not as fragile as coal, and it is black, white, the color of terracotta and sepia. Sangina - a soft pencil without a rim, red-brown. A pencil is a favorite material of many artists. It can be of different softness and it can be used both for instant sketching and for drawing small details.

If you intend to work on damp, pull a sheet of paper on an unvarnished board to prevent it from deforming from moisture. Cut four pieces of water-based gum arabic tape (they should be slightly longer than the edges of the sheet), and then gently dampen the paper with a sponge.

Run a sponge along the moisturizing tape and glue all four pieces - half on the board, the other on the paper. Then the sheet will remain flat, and after drying it will be firmly attached to the subframe. You can remove it by carefully detaching the side tapes.

Water based paints

Most paints and inks are water-based and can be easily diluted to achieve the desired color intensity. So, watercolor paints can be bright and muted. They create a soft effect, especially if applied to soft and thick paper. Usually, liquid paints work on paper of heavy grades. In addition, you will need a palette on which you will mix colors, as well as a surface on which you can put ink cans, paint, water and put a few brushes.

Surprisingly, wax crayons and pastel pencils are perfectly combined with water-based paints: they do not mix with each other, which allows you to achieve special effects. The expressiveness of the pattern increases with the use of liquid and dry paints.

Unlike water-based paints, oil paints dry very slowly, they are expensive and require good skills to use them effectively. Water-based paints, like inks, are cheaper and more suitable for beginner artists.

If you apply ink with a pen, drawing lines, and then do a brush wash, the drawing will be more artistic and voluminous. These two methods can be used separately. In order to maintain a sharp line under the washout, draw it with waterproof ink. After the ink has dried the main picture, you can apply a color wash on top that will not damage the bottom picture. Ink gives a bright color and is easy to mix. Some inks, especially waterproof ones, can damage the brush, especially if you do not rinse it thoroughly, so it’s best to use a special medium-quality brush to work with ink.

Familiar to all watercolor paints are finely ground pigment, which easily penetrates the paper, giving it a stable color. Really good paints are expensive, but they are stable and are bright and gloss.

For large jobs, immediately purchase tubes or concentrated dilution fluid. For small drawings, it’s enough to buy a small box with hard paint tiles, although raising them is a very tedious task. If your budget allows, buy large ceramic cups with semi-soft paint. An interesting combination can be obtained from watercolor paints with water-soluble colored pencils, which, unlike graphite, do not appear through the watercolor layer, but gently dissolve in it. They can even be washed until they are dry, until they are covered with wet paint.

If you draw on raw paper, the pencils immediately fix and come to life. Sometimes you can use oil pastels and wax crayons - watercolor rolls off grease stains, painting only uncoated sections of paper, resulting in a very unusual effect.

Gouache - dense matte water-based paint. The best gouache is sold only in tubes, poster gouache in bubbles, and quite unpretentious is sold in tiles. A great advantage of gouache is its hiding power, it gives the artist the opportunity to hide the wrong place if the top coat is applied carefully without touching the bottom.

Water-based acrylic paint is made, which is often used to apply paints in a thick layer or in relief, large strokes, like in oil. Acrylic dries quickly. If you prefer to work with tubes, you will need the same equipment as when writing in oil. But for a color picture, it is better to use liquid paint in bubbles, it has a good hiding power and mixes easily, including with water.