Little Marker Monsters

Little marker monsters. That’s what happens when I am left alone with markers, pens, and some paper. I had some scraps of printmaking paper left over from my printmaking class and I was curious how markers would handle on the printmaking paper and what they would look like. I believe the paper is Rives BFK. I used Prismacolor Premier markers and Faber-Castell Pitt artist pens (mostly the brush pen).

Most of these little marker monsters were amorphous marker blobs on the paper and after the marker splotches dried I used the Pitt pens to create creatures. I didn’t know what I was going to draw but I let the shapes feed my imagination and I let my pen discover the creatures hidden in the blobs of color. At that point, if I wasn’t completely satisfied I would add some additional shapes or coloring (like a shadow) with the Prismacolor markers.

The Rives BFK paper really soaked up the ink from the markers and bled a bit (marker bleed is when the ink from the marker is soaked up into the paper like a sponge and it spreads out). I couldn’t do much coloring on top of the Pitt pen ink because the alcohol in the markers caused the ink from the pens to smudge and bleed a little bit too.

Each one of these tiny little marker monsters is about 1-1.5″ x 1-1.5″. They are TINY. That’s part of the fun for me. The words and odd colors in each image are part of my experiments and notes when I was testing out the markers on this paper. The notes and other marker tests aren’t really relevant to the little marker monsters so I cropped that stuff out (and some of the little monsters were upside down and this way you can more easily view them). I definitely plan on doing more of these little marker monsters. And now, the moment you’ve been waiting for!

First up is Angry Big Head (yay for creativity in choosing names!):

Next, we have the Cocoon Monster: