Mark making for any form of art is a great exercise to begin developing skills. This session looks at investigating digital mark making using Kleki.com. This short video demonstrates all the tools of kleki and outlines some tasks you can follow to focus your skills.

Textured Mark Making

For your first task use kleki to create a range of textures from smooth, patchy, italicised, rough, spiky, transparent, opaque. Place the textures next to each other to illustrate the contrasts that can be achieved. Here are some examples as inspiration. This method will help you to achieve great textured work and building layers into your digital sketch. For extended activities go to How to create digital artwork using layers.

Chiaroscuro Mark Making

This task focuses on light and dark (chiaroscuro) to focus on how to achieve stark contrasts in your mark making. For this activity use a colour palette that grades from white, through grey to black. Use blending tools to illustrate how the marks merge to create light, dark, shadow and illumination. This will particularly help for you to create Shaun Tan inspired characters in the extended activity How to create character sketches.

Complementary Mark Making

Colour wheels are great to investigate how colours contrast and vibrate with each other. The notion of complementary colours comes from a primary colours being shown next to it’s opposing secondary colour.

Blue + Orange

Red + Green

Yellow + Purple.

Between these two colours, they make up all the colours in the spectrum for examples Blue + Orange (yellow and red). Without knowing it, your sight see all the variants of the spectrum and that’s what make them complement each other and vibrate before your eyes! To use your colour mark making skills further and use them to create a David Hockney inspired digital sketch go to How to collaborate on a piece of art work.

Here are some examples of mark making work that Lorcan, Ruby, Aneurin and Teagan created during Summer Camp.