Two more Treasure Island Illustrations, me hearties.

Yesterday I moved away from my illustration copies just for a change and produced a couple of responses to daily drawing challenges on Facebook. Before that I’d made another copy of a Peake Treasure Island illustration, which you can see here. 

So this morning I made up my mind to take the plunge and make an ink AND  watercolour copy of Ralph Steadman’s fantastic illustration of Long John Silver. I had to spend a while working out a methodology for doing it. My initial thought was to maybe put some background colour down first. The thing is, though, it can play havoc with an ink pen when you try to use it on top of dried watercolour. So it had to be ink lines first, hen apply the colour. I bought new uniball 0.05mm and 0.1mm pens since the ones I had are pretty much used up. Using the 0.05mm pen, a 0.3mm and a 0.8mm this is what I came up with.

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Incidentally I used Uniball pens because they are reliably waterproof and will take a watercolour on top with no running. No, they haven’t paid me for a testimonial, more’s the pity. Now, at one point I did cosier just laying down some watercolour to begin and finishing with watercolour pencils. But, you know, while I’m pretty confident of achieving what I wan with black ink fineliners, I’m always fearful of overworking with colours, and once I got to a certain point with the paint I felt that I was in danger of overworking it if I added more, and so I stopped. So this is the finished copy. 

As a copy, I’m pretty pleased. As a colour copy I’m absolutely delighted.