Escaped from the hustle and bustle of Christmas shoppers to the calm interior of this church - St Jean de Montmartre. The building was completed in 1904 and is made of concrete. 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint-Jean-de-Montmartre

I used a sumi brush pen and a UniPin 0.5mm. The combination of the two is quite interesting. the brush pen on its own is much to heavy for a detailed subject like this.

Here's a still life in soft pastel. (Conté)
If you haven't tried drawing in pastel yet, I strongly suggest you give them a go!
:-)

Home at my parents house for the weekend...
I used the UniPin Fine Line 0.5mm.

Quick sketch this morning over coffee using the Pentel Sign pen. Good for blocking in shadows quickly.

A Victorian pub along the seafront in Southend, Essex - one of the few public houses remaining from that time. I used a dip pen and indian ink for the drawing and then added some watercolour. Make sure the ink you use is water resistant if you're adding watecolour. The paper I used wasn't watercolour paper though, so the washes are not as even, but okay for a sketch like this.

A watercolour study of a house in Leigh-on-Sea.
I have been so busy lately I haven't managed to get out with my sketchbook. Hope to remedy that!

A watercolour sketch of the interior of my brother's old flat in Epinal, France. I used a soft pencil for the sketch and then laid in some washes to to give a feeling of light. Is this a painting or a drawing?

Another brush pen drawing from this morning. I've already used up the first ink cartridge! This pen is REALLY fun to use but takes a lot of taming. It's not at all about subtlety but confident strokes. Blocks of shadow ; cross-hatching is a no-no - I have tried cross-hatching with it but with less than satisfactory results. (A dip-pen is better for that, I think). I am used to subtlety and fine detail, and this sketch shows how I am struggling to adapt to this new tool!

More sketching with my new brush pen this morning.
If you draw quickly the line starts to break up. If you use it on it's side it creates a neat 'dry brush' effect. takes a lot of getting used to! 
  
Here's a close-up to see what I mean :

Hooray! my new brush pen finally arrived!
I've been trying it out...

Here's a doodle of figures drawn from imagination based on yesterday's café sketching, and below not based on anything really :-)
The squared paper is unfortunate - it's my notebook on my desk at work that I did these. 

I sat in a café on the way to work the other morning and drew some road workers. Apart from the fact that my mind is not generally up to speed at that time of the morning, it's a real challenge to try and get something that looks correct. It's nevertheless a good exercise because it builds your visual memory...

An exhibit from the Guimet Museum in Paris. Lots of amazing Asian art.

Hey! Can you pass me the pencil...?

Doodling while I should be working...

This morning at a café - I'm trying to practice drawing people...not easy!

I was amazed how long she let me draw her for...!

Got the early train at the beginning of last week. Time for a bit of sketching!
 

A couple of sketches with a fibre tip pen. The one on the left has very controlled hatching. Thought has gone into the direction of the shading to describe the shapes with economy. The second one was done standing on a wet pavement on a cold February night and is much less controlled. Large areas of flat tone are not so easy to produce with a pen as crosshatching can easily become heavy-looking.

In response to a request for info on what I use to draw with, here are a few of my favourite drawing items :

1 Rotring Tikky Graphics fibre tips : good all-purpose pens. I use a 0.5 and a 0.3mm.
2 Pentel Sign Pens : These have a thicker nib but at the same time it is also 'dry' enough and hard enough to be able to achieve a wide variety of line weights depending on the pressure you apply. Fine light strokes are possible with these pens.
3 UniPin 0.5mm : These are great pens, especially for finer detailing. I used them for the Saint Eustache church drawing that I posted last week. They are suitable for more absorbant paper as they don't bleed so much.
4 Derwent Graphic pencils : These are my favourite graphite pencils that I've been using for a number of years. They allow the build up of layers for a richness of tone.
5 Derwent Sketching pencils : I use these for quick loose drawing at a larger scale. I use an HB, a 2B and a 4B.
6 Lyra Rembrandt : I include these because I intend to try them out next time I do Life Drawing. A bit like charcoal pencils - they will help to loosen my style a bit...
What are your favourite materials? Is there something you can recommend that I try out?

On a slightly different theme, here's a Coelocanth (is that how you spell it?) from the Natural History Museum in London. Dip pen and sepia ink.

I just spent a couple of weekends drawing the church of Saint Eustache in the centre of Paris. I was impressed by this view with the differnet volumes and asymmetry. The photos below show a progression from pencil preparatory drawing on 6 sheets of A4 cartridge glued together, through to the finished pen drawing. I used a Unipin 0.5mm and I rubbed out the initial pencil lines afterwards. 

Here's the pencil draft showing some rectifications :

The following day I started going over it with the fineliner :

It was important to take photos at the start because the shadows changed a lot in the time I was there :
 

 

Here's a close-up. And no I'm not left-handed :)

Another close-up. Building up the ink drawing and some shading/cross-hatching :

The weather stayed dry thankfully :

This is where I got to on the end of the second day :
 

The third day :

And the fourth day :

Nearing completion :

A close-up :

Here I've rubbed out the pencil lines :

This man was asleep on the train when I came home frm work late one night. He didn't seem to mind me drawing him...

This watercolour sketch was interrupted by rain on two occasions but I came back and finished it off eventually. When I started drawing the scene, it was at low tide. By the time I began painting, the lighter was now afloat and had risen a couple of feet... Leigh marshes, Essex August 2014.

I was sitting watching a concert and I had my sketchbook and a fibre-tip on me....

Here's another sketch from a trip to Barcelona sitting in a bar on the Ramblas. The light was quite atmospheric in this interior view and I tried to capture it by simplifying the drawing into areas of flat tone.

This page from my sketchbook is filled with quick studies of passersby, whilst waiting in a café in Wandsworth Highstreet. People are what I find hardest to draw convincingly, so it helps to make notes whenever you find yourself with a few minutes to spare in a busy place.

A simple subject treated simply. This balcony projecting out into a narrow street in Toulon caught my attention...or rather the shadow caught my attention, because it is, in fact a drawing of the shadow.... I used a soft dark pencil.

The curves of these brick arches take on an almost organic look when seen from an angle, like trees in a wood. It's easy to forget that they belong to the classically-determined layout of an arcaded square when pictured like this. The confusion of arches certainly gave me more than my time's worth of  practice at drawing elipses in perspective! :)

The intense red of these lilies was difficult to capture. As I drew them I realised that in order to convey the irridescent redness, several colours were needed, red being only one of them. Orange and magenta are found in equal proportions, plus the complimentary, a blue-green. I guess if I had used some subdued complementary colours in the background I could have made them vibrate...

Here's a close-up :

 

Here's an example of how to leave blank paper to do all the work. As the houses get further away they become less and less detailed and more white paper is left showing. If I had tried to put in the same amount of detail in the furthest houses, they would have been too dark, and the impression of distance would have been lost.

 

I did this line sketch of a street in Montmartre  sitting on the terrasse of a café. The detail of windows and rooves was of sufficient interest that I didn't need to add shading. The perspective was a bit of a challenge, but I guess that is what this drawing is all about. Being a line drawing, the technique is similar to a pen & ink one. A pleasant half hour was spent :-)