Monochrome magic

This video is one from my vault and was filmed in 2022.

I am a lover of colour and all its infinitely sumptuous and seductive hues, but I am also very attracted to black and white for its simplicity and strikingness.

In this post I share a few thoughts about working in black and white and a few of my favourite art materials.

Contrast and composition

The black and white palette is the most high contrast one there is, the lightest of lights and the darkest of darks. And as contrast and difference are what can make an artwork feel interesting, black and white can be a powerful and bold combination.

When using just black and white the composition of an artwork becomes more obvious, there is no colour to hide behind and this can be quite helpful in seeing how shapes, lines and all the constituent parts interact.

It pares everything back to its bones and I enjoy the elemental nature of this…when working in colour there are so many decisions to make, just using a few black pens takes away a lot these decisions.

Sometimes colour can obscure what is happening with a composition, in black and white the composition becomes extremely obvious.

Constraints

I find the limitation of just using a few pens and a limited choice of black and white quite liberating. Sometimes constraints can be, paradoxically quite freeing in art making, they can make it easier to start when infinite possibilities lead to option paralysis.

The materials

Here is a run down of the pens I am using, they’re just the ones I like, but I often get asked about which pens I use, so here they are:

BLACK PENS:

• Pigma Micron Fine liner Pen for fine lines

• Pentel Pocket Re-fillable Brush Pen (this is the pen I use for the large sections of black, it is refillable with cartridges)

WHITE PENS:

I can’t whole-heaertedly recommend any white pen, in my experience they are all often a little difficult. I often revert to a dip pen and a small pot of white ink.

• Molotow One4all white acrylic pen

• Sakura Gelly Roll 10

• Uni Posca Marker Pen Fine

• Uni Ball Signo Broad

I’m also just trying out some Zig pens from a brand called Kuretake which have had good reviews and I will let you know how they pan out…

SKETCHBOOK:

The sketchbook I use here is called the Venezia Drawing Book from Fabriano which comes in several sizes and has 200gsm paper and 48 sheets or 96 page surfaces. I mostly use the largest one which is 23cm x 30cm as it can take quite a bit of wet material and collage and the double page spreads lay quite flat…