Coloured Fineliners

 This time last week my wife Mary bought me a pack of Staedtler fineliners. Each has a 0.3mm nib. This is about as thick as I like to use as the main pen for a sketch. In fact it's thicker than I would normally choose to use in my current and previous sketchbooks since they are a little more absorbent than others I've used in the past. For comparison you might compare the sketches of Pentonville Road, and Newgate Jail. Both were sketched with the same 0.01mm pen. The less absorbent paper on which I made the Newgate sketch resulted in a sharper image, I think. 

To come back to the coloured fineliners, I've used them for several Monopoly pictures this week. This wasn't the first sketch I used them for, but let's look at the picture of Bankside Tate Modern.

Okay, it does highlight an issue that I tend to have with colour. I'm not as good or as confident at using colour as I am at making monochrome sketches. But the colours have scanned rather well. Now compare it with this:-

Monochrome. What colour would you say that it is? To me, it looks black or grey. There's just a few railings in the bottom right hand of the picture which look brown. Well, it is what it is. Still, for me it means that it's a shame but I'm not going to be able to get a sepia tone with this pen.

The first sketch I made using one of these pens was Kings Cross.

If you look at the Bankside picture you'll see that I used dark blue and light blue pens on that one. This - obviously - is the dark blue. This is quite nice. I've made monochrome watercolour pictures before and tend to use dark blue, so I knew I could get decent results with it

In the pack we have light blue, dark blue, light green, dark green, orange, pink, purple, red, brown and black. To the best of my knowledge I've only ever sketched with black, blue, brown and red. So I was tempted to see just how sketches in other colours might turn out. Here's Northumberland Avenue in dark green- 

You know, I really like sketching in this colour and the consensus of opinion amongst my nearest and dearest who've see my recent sketches is that it's the best colour after black to use for monochrome sketches.

What colour would you say that this is?

Darker dark blue, perhaps? It's a decent shout, but no cigar this time, I'm afraid. No, this is actually purple. Again, I do rather like it, although the family thinks it looks like biro which is running out. 

This morning I completed this red sketch -

You can see on this sketch even more than the King's Cross sketch one of the drawbacks of using anything lighter than the darkest colours - they make dark blocks of colour look just too light, almost shiny, which I guess is part of the scanning process.