Rhodia is a legendary brand of pads and notebooks, a favorite of artists, architects, writers and designers since 1934. Imported from France, Rhodia paper products are treasured around the world because of their high quality and timeless design. Rhodia pads project an understated, classic elegance, instantly recognizable by their minimalist, urban chic. Rhodia’s renowned, luxuriously smooth paper supports a wide variety of inking techniques.
Rhodia paper is fast-drying and resists bleed-through and feathering. The paper is processed in a hot-press method, resulting in an ultra-smooth surface that resists skipping and greatly lessens the friction between nib and paper. That makes Rhodia paper the perfect companion to the best-selling pens and markers on the market today.
The iconic orange and black Rhodia staple-bound pads are shown here to celebrate Halloween. We offer these pads in four sizes in either orange or black covers, each with 80 micro-perforated sheets. These pads are available in four interior formats: dot grid, lined, graph and blank.
Header Image: Pumpkin Artwork by Jorge Santiago
Materials
- Pencil
- Kneaded Eraser
- Drawing & Sketching Pen Nibs
- Pen holders
- FW Acrylic Inks
- Sakura Permapaque Black Marker
- Rhodia Pad, Dot Grid
Artist Statement/Techniques
Step 1: To begin, I lightly sketched the piece in pencil in my Rhodia pad, making sure that I was creating an interesting composition. Once I was satisfied with the design of the drawing, I used a kneaded eraser to remove most of the surface pencil, because the ink is largely transparent and I did not want the pencil to peek through the color.
Step 2: Time to ink! I chose FW Acrylic inks because they have an intense color and can be used right out of the bottle. For my inking tool itself, I used a Deleter brand G-pen which is a Japanese fountain pen used largely for drawing comics. I inked the pumpkin first with FW’s Flame Orange color, which when built up with multiple lines, created a vibrant and warm orange that really makes the jack-o-lantern feel like it’s lit up from the inside! Once it was outlined, I began cross-hatching across the pumpkin, making sure that my strokes were following along the form, as diagonal lines would flatten it out and it would lose its three dimensionality.
Step 3: Once the pumpkin was drawn in, I changed my focus to the candy. I decided to go with a FW’s Red Earth ink, as it was deliciously warm and felt the closest to capturing the look of chocolate. I outlined each piece of candy separately, jumping around the illustration so I could let sections dry as I was moving around. Once the candy was rendered, I used hatching to create their basic forms and finally, adding hatching underneath to give them all some weight.
Step 4: With the drawing mostly inked, I decided to tackle the backdrop, which I wanted to accentuate the jack-o-lantern and push everything forward. For this, I chose a Sakura Permapaque marker which has a water based black pigment that would not bleed to the other side of the page! I filled in the backdrop, making sure to avoid covering too much of the line art, switching between the broad chisel tip for coverage and the bullet tip to get into the nooks and crannies of my composition.
Step 5: Once I had the backdrop in, I was able to see how light my foreground elements were and decided to go in and add more hatching to the jack-o-lantern to make it feel more substantial. This project was a blast to create, colored inks have such an interesting voice compared to black ink alone, and it was a joy drawing this on the exceptional Rhodia paper that could reflect the vibrant colors of my inks and endure the scratching of my drawing tools.
