Moonlight Ramble Sketches

Thinking In Color

Sketching in color requires much more thought than doing so in monochrome. I bought some Tombow markers today as I like the markers, but have been itching to make my sketches more colorful. The Tombow markers make for very good quick color studies. One very positive point is they don't oversaturate the paper like the Copic markers I have used. For this reason I can get much more use out of my sketchbooks.

With some markers I can only use one side of the paper because of bleed-through. Unfortunately as handy as my Sharpie marker is, I am going to need the use a black Tombow instead to deal with the way the Sharpie bleeds through.

The Tombow does have dual nibs. One is a brush and the other is a hard round nib. Today I didn't even really get to experimenting with the hard nib end. I only used the brush.

As I went, I found myself using the following pattern:

1.) laying in a quick drawing gesture
2.) deciding the temperature of the light and choosing an appropriate shadow color marker.
3.) laying in the shadows.
4.) dropping in local color.


This is more apparent in the drawing of the three people sitting beside the bus. I chose this method because local color is situational and can be left up to the imagination, but the gesture and lighting are of greater importance to my mind.

Figure (Heather Dawn) in Marker

Monochrome Urban Sketches

Urban Sketches

Sumi Ink Figure

Sumi Ink - Two Figures