Knippelsbro Sketch (Patreon)

YES!! Yes, this is pronounced exactly the way you think it is. :)

Knippelsbro is my favorite landmark in Copenhagen (not just because of the name, although I did titter when I discovered what they were called). It's this pair of strange tårne (towers) that were built in the late 1930s. I always come across them by accident, on my way back from a long hike into Copenhagen's downtown from my temporary home in Amager.

The towers are near the entrance of Christiania, one of my favorite places I've ever been. Not for the drugs, for the beautiful bizarre architecture and communal, creative atmosphere of the place.

On my traditional four-hour-long hike into and out of Copenhagen, I splurged on a visit to Viking, the town's fanciest art supply store. I picked up a waterbrush & a pair of watercolor pencils by Caran d'Ache, and a few small watercolor & mixed media sketchpads. 

Oh and check out the little pencil tip sheathes!! I bought two to protect the water soluble pencils, as they're a bit softer than the hard-lead pencil I bought.

^ If you're one of my $5 patrons, you saw my figure drawings last week using this same waterbrush for pan watercolors, which I wasn't wild about (perhaps just out of unfamiliarity). Remember how I said that I'd make a post showing you what the waterbrush IS good for? This is that post!

My last week in Denmark, I went out for lunch and packed the two watercolor pencils (grey and black, how goth/Danish of me), filled the waterbrush with water, and brought that gold pad of paper I bought, the one ambiguously labeled "drawing paper." (Am I the only one who judges paper by just touching it and guessing if I'll like it?) 

Once I'd ordered my EXTREMELY GOOD gluten-free sandwich with laks (lox) and spinach, I sat down and pulled up this photo of a Knippelsbro tower for reference, and rested my phone against my cup of chai.

From here I used a mechanical pencil to make the sketch you can see on the title image up there, and took out an 01 Micron to ink it.

Sadly, inking the sketch turned it into the Leaning Tower of Knippelsbro. But I decided that the purpose of this exercise was to practice my new tools, not to make something perfect! I lightly laid down the grey and black pencils.

I knew the immediate result would be messy and uneven, but trusted that the waterbrush would soften the patchy greys into pools of paint-like pigment instead. Here's the drawing after my first round with the waterbrush:

Still patchy, but much softer! I laid down more pencil and brushed it with more water.

Better! I felt I'd gotten the hang of the combination by the end. 

One cool surprise: at first I regretted buying just black and grey - essentially, black and lighter black - instead of black and and an actual color. Both colored pencils looked identical when I initially laid them on the page. But once I ran the waterbrush over them, they really did take on two separate values. The black washed on very dark (I used black to darken the tower on the second pass), whereas the grey smoothed out to something less intense - the sky, for example. 

I spent most of my Copenhagen visit on true vacation, just visiting with Sonja and her adorable two-year-old (featured in the Hourly Comics I posted), so this is one of the only drawings I made on the trip! But I've still got two more gouache painting processes to share with you, and I'd like to share some of my students' final projects. If I have time, I might even tell you about how my 3-hour layover in Munich turned into a 28-hour layover (spoiler: I'M CLUMSY). 

Either way, until Elephant Town returns in March, I'll keep sharing these $5 tier posts with all tiers, to make up for the mini hiatus. So keep your eyes peeled. :)