September tree doodle

I brought some old water-based sketch markers to work for layouts. These Pitt brush pens seemed very promising when I first bought them, but they had the same flaw that all other marker sets except the most expensive have: their colors were too bright and rich. To get the quieter, more neutralized colors of the real world, you have to pay major bucks for Japanese imports or hard-to-control Prismacolors. As a result, I put my set of Pitt pens aside, and they remained unused in the studio for many years.

I took them out last week to see whether any of them were still usable. Most of them were, but to my surprise the colors in the pens had faded. I had already noticed their variability when I first used them, but even without any use the Pitt colors had changed quite a bit. They had actually faded to the colors of the "real world." I have been looking for just the right greens for muted autumn foliage, and here they were in markers. I doodled this little scene at work and saved it in my portable file box. The trouble is, these Pitt colors will fade or change further, and I can never predict what will come out of the brush. Again, colored pencils win. Their colors never change.

Drawing is markers on plain paper, 5 1/2" x 3 1/2", September 2011.

iPad Update: I found the instructions for "Autodesk Studio Pro." They are accessed by pressing an icon with the lowercase letter i. I've seen this icon before and have had all sorts of things come forth from clicking or pressing it. I would think it would be the square root of - 1 but no. The Autodesk instructions come in a variety of languages in case people in Turkmenistan or Angola need to learn this app. There are also drawings of a big hand pressing the icons and showing screens, in case the user can't read at all. It turns out that I deleted my drawing because I pressed a mysterious icon that looked like a piece of paper with a glass of blue water in front of it. This was the "Clear Layer" control. Since my drawing was a layer, pressing that cleared it to a blank white. And I thought that was a new drawing page, assuming that the old one was safely saved. Oh well. Autodesk made a fool out of me and it won't be the last time.