Adding colour to sketchbook portraits

I'm having lots of fun with my ink pen portraits in my sketchbooks. They're quick to do, and therefore perfect for a bit of creativity when you're really to tired to do anything else than flop on the sofa after work.

I'm trying out different ways to add some colour to the portraits. Gouache hasn't really been a favourite medium of mine, I've tried it out before, but then always went back to watercolours. But last night I thought I'd give it a try again, and I must say I'm very pleased with the result. They're more vibrant than watercolours and a good match to the bold lines of the ink brush pen.

The only drawback with the gouache is still the same as with watercolours when it comes to Moleskine sketchbooks. But as long as you don't want to create an accomplished work of watercolour/gouache art but just want to a bit of colour to your sketch, it works well enough.

The Liquitex acrylic markers on the other hand work very well on the Moleskine paper, but have some limitations when it comes to blending and transparency. But they're great for adding bold colour.

I bought some Tombow dual brush pens earlier this week, as I thought they'd be useful for adding a touch of colour quickly when you're out and about. They had some other pens, Shinhan or something there too, with a great selection of colours, but their smell was just overpowering. I'm not usually over sensual to the various smells of my art materials, but those definitely were too much. The Tombows are water based (maybe the others are alcohol based?), and don't smell at all. They're not as smooth and blending as I would have liked, you can see the individual strokes, but apart from that, they work well enough, also in a Moleskine.

I usually take photos of my work to post on my blog, but this time I tried to scan them instead. I've tried scanning before, and I was never happy with the results, and I wasn't this time either. But due to some technical problems (mainly due to Yahoo Mail being even more annoying than they have been for the past few weeks, i.e. simply refusing to let me access my account at all today), I had to use the scans for this post. The scanner never seems to get the colours right, and is having particular problems with the Moleskine paper (all images but the first are Moleskine). It doesn't seem to recognise the creamy colour of the paper but instead scans it as white, and as a result, all the other colours turn out wrong too (and in some areas didn't even catch the colour at all). I've tried to adjust them as well as possible in Photoshop, but they're still far from accurate.

What do you use for taking pictures of your work for your blog? I know that there are a lot of people who do use scanners, and if you do, I'd be more than happy to get some tips on how to successfully scan my images, as I seem to be doing something wrong.

And last but not least 

Happy Paint Party Friday!