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Felt Tip Pens and Bleeding Biros

Blogs: #271 of 468

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I've enjoyed using this technique of late, first I do a line drawing using a biro (ball point pen), I prefer blue ink but any color would work, then I use a light grey Copic felt marker to do some shading. When you go over the pen lines with the marker the ink bleeds slightly which means you can shade in both grey and blue/grey with the one marker. The bleeding can also lead to some interesting blurring effects and these 'happy accidents' sometimes add a sense of movement to the drawing. I tend to use a marker that's running out of ink when I do this because you can get a wider range of tones by applying different pressures, plus you don't wreck the nib of a brand new marker! The effects are quite subtle but it's a fun way to enhance a line drawing.
Here are a couple of examples where I've used this technique, it's probably worth clicking on the thumbnails and then clicking again on the image to get the magnified version in order to see the effect properly.
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