Investing In My Work (buying stuff)

I've picked up some new tools. This post is *NOT SPONSORED*

This post is *NOT SPONSORED*

When I got back into drawing as an adult, I was big into pen and ink. Absolutely everyone you asked was using Micron pens, so that’s what I did too. Micron pens are great - they are affordable, portable, they don’t leak, they have great pigmentation. No notes.

But I wanted something a bit more special to work with. My dad is an engineer, so he lent me his ancient Rotring ink pen set. I loved them, but they were older than me, so I invested in a Rapidograph. These pens are amazing but they require discipline (read: cleaning) to keep them working well, plus replacement nibs are very expensive.

I tried dip pen for a while - I love dip pens - but they are MESSY and not easy to pop in your bag for sketching out and about.

Enter the Lumos pen by Tom’s Studio! I had my eye on this for a while, and I took advantage of a discount code to pick one up, along with some of their lovely inks. This pen is SO lovely. It is a refillable pen with swappable nibs. Tom and his team clearly thought of everything, because it is extremely easy to use, clean and change over the ink reservoirs and nibs. I am so thrilled with it and it was 100% worth the money.

First try with the Lumos with the 0.1 nib and Dove Grey ink by Tom’s Studio

I also treated myself to some new brushes for Procreate, due to a project I’m working on that I want to “paint” in a watercolour style. In my experience, this style is very difficult to recreate digitally, but I’ve recently found a very good brush set by Adilson Farias which is the closest to the real thing that I’ve used. The brushes have an authentic watercolour feel, and Adilson provides really helpful guides to how to use them together to avoid digital tells. So far I’m hopeful, but it’s a steep learning curve and I am taking lots of breaks on this one!

Practicing with my new watercolour brushset. It’s going to take some time…

It’s fun to challenge myself and adapt. I have a lot of projects on the go at the moment which is overwhelming at times, so these two items have given me a chance to just play, which is such a valuable creative method.

Thanks for reading!

A