It's quite daunting going from drawing with pencil to ink and the same can be said for going from ink to full color acrylic. There's a few things to think about and this article is mainly written to help with materials to begin your journey.

1. A drawing board, you can purchase a sheet of plywood and some thin pieces of timber from your hardware store to construct one OR just purchase an easel:

2. A3 and above sized pre-primed stretched canvas.

3. Primers and mediums

White Gesso Primer (use this to prime your canvas again if you paint something you don't like the first time)
Mediums - Acrylic Retarder (not 100% necessary) but prevents the paint from drying too quickly on your palette and being wasted.

4. Brushes, Sizing is varied as it purely depends on the size of the canvas you're prepared to tackle, an important thing to note is that the brush bristles are on the shorter side so you will be able to control it. You need at least one synth flat brush for blending.

A flat decorators brush <- purchase this from any hardware store
Size 6-16 pointed brush
Size 6-16 flat synthetic brush
Size 3 or lower pointed brush for finer details like eyes, lips etc.

5. A basic lightfast acrylic set which includes the colors listed below, keep in mind to grab double the amount of blue and red as they will be used to mix other hues. Something to look at for is whether the colors are opaque or transparent, opaque is basically a stronger color so its more useful for blocking out other colors. Transparent colors are better for glazing. These techniques will be discussed in more detail in later articles.

Alizarin Crimson (optional but useful for mixing purples or just purchase a deeper purple)

As most creatives know, it takes a while to develop a process that works for you. My current process for full colour illustrations usually begins with a blunt 3B pencil and a sheet of watercolour paper.

I try to work with paper above 180 GSM, because it will be more adaptive to mixed media works and there is a lesser chance of crumpling.

With the pencil I would perform a quick gestural sketch of the initial subject, making sure to press lightly onto the paper as the pencil marks will need to be erased later on.

After a general impression of the image is complete, I go over the foreground and background details with more care still using a pencil at this stage. This is just to get it into my head which objects are meant to overlap.

When the sketching is complete I switch to aa 00 watercolour brush / speedball fountain pen using india ink to draw over the lines which have been determined by the sketch. I try to keep a scrap piece of paper underneath my drawing hand as to prevent smudging the ink.

When the ink is finally complete, there are usually a few blemishes on the drawing that would need to be digitally tidied.

I take a photograph of the ink drawing in RAW format to preserve maximum resolution, convert it to a TIFF image and start the colouring process in Photoshop. This can be the most time consuming stage figuring out which colours are suitable and limiting the colour palette.

Occasionally I'd add more illustrations in the backdrop although for consistency I try not to incorporate too much digital drawing into a piece which was originally ink on paper.

A piece after being coloured in Photoshop, backdrop was also created

A possible final stage involves processing the drawing with Google Nik Collection. It's an ageing tool, although still useful for subtle post processing.

There you have it! My first blog post on ink illustration, hope it was worthwhile reading.

If you have any thoughts or questions shoot me an email.