Drawing On Black Card

A4 sheet of black card at the ready

Drawing on black card is more of an experiment for me and so lets do this!

Black card comes in a range of different sizes and surface texture, but the ones I prefer are the smooth thick black A4 pieces of card and are perfect for drawing on with white ink pens or other similar pens or acrylic paint.

When drawing on black card with a white pen I always try to draw the highlighted areas and leave the black to show the shadowed areas. This looks effective and quite cool looking and plus you can always black out areas you've messed up on with a thick black Sharpie marker or something similar.

It's a good idea to draw the absolute outline of your idea on the paper to get the drawing that you want, then you can move on to the infinite details (as I like to call it!)

One thing with pens of this kind is similar to any other gel pens. They have a tendency to clog a lot and this can be quite frustrating, but it is best to try and plough through it. Try and warm the pens up first beforehand to get the ink a bit more fluid, that usually helps and try not to leave the pen without drawing for more than five minutes to assist with the clogging issue.

If pens aren't for you consider white acrylic on a thin brush, just be prepared to have patience and a steady hand.

Using a Sakura White Gelly Roll ink pen, an outline of the concept has been simplified as a basic outline.

I think with these black and white illustrations it is a great idea to establish where the light source is coming from and that is illustrated in the picture below. So everything on the right hand side will be whiter than the left hand side, creating the illusion of more depth and light.

Establishing a light source helps guide you through placing the white areas and leaving the rest black.

The important thing to remember is that, if you want to, you can break the rules of the light source if you wish or add more things to the drawing which we'll cover later. There are always them Artists out there that will look down on illustrations were you have broken the perceived rules and I say "Bollocks to em!"

Realizing texture of the creature heads can be done by varying the hatching away from the edges of where the light source is coming from.

Don't worry too much about the white ink dominating the drawing, because you can scale it back with black ink markers or black paint if you wish. It's better to get all the details down that you want so that everything can be blitzed later with white paint splashes and other dark detailed stuff.

In the drawing now, you can see that a more interesting thing is happening as I go along with the design. I'm figuring out dribbles and other textures of the flesh. Notice how the tentacle parts have a tree branch look to them.

The white color of the ink is making the illustration shine more here now. It's at this time that I want to start to think about expanding the illustration further beyond the basic outline I did at the start, there is the rest of the black card to draw on.

Having worked on this for over an hour, there is a small issue with finger prints that has been annoying me slightly. I suppose I could wear surgical gloves to avoid greasy fingerprints, in fact that is a good tip, Yay! go me! lol.

In the photo below I've added a couple more small tentacles and details all around the design, was contemplating adding more to the surround design, but wasn't sure what to add.

I think more experimentation is needed to test out the full capabilities of white on black card...The next thing to do is test out some glow in the dark type pens...now that would look cool.

What do you think?