Continuing my A3 Doodle Project, here is the June doodle. I don’t have a name for this pattern, but I guess Circles or Dots would be appropriate. To go along with the circle theme, I used the circle template from last month’s doodle to keep these contained in a nice, round pattern.
Here’s a look at the finished doodle
These dots want a nice, wet pen, preferably with a broad nib. With that in mind, I filled up my Platinum 3776, which has a Coarse nib, with Iroshizuku Yama-budo. It did a fantastic job of putting down a lot of ink and making so many small circles was pretty easy with such a big nib. One thing I didn’t anticipate was how much the square shape of the nib influenced the roundness of the circles. As I drew them, they felt lopsided since the nib has such a broad, square surface. This isn’t something you necessarily experience when writing with this nib.
Here’s a closer look at the three pens I used
For the second color I chose Cross Violet ink. It’s a darker purple and has a great green sheen to it, so I thought it might make a good companion to the rich burgundy color and gold sheen of Yama-budo. The first pen I filled with it was my Kaweco Original 250 with a Broad nib. While it worked, it wasn’t nearly as wet of a nib as I wanted, so it took a lot of time to create each dot and they weren’t as dark as I had hoped. So, after the first full circle of dots I switched to a different pen.
My second pen for the Cross Violet ink was a vintage Tempo that I picked up the Colorado Pen Show a few years back. It has a glass nib that is extremely wet. I really can’t use it for writing since it is so wet, so I haven’t used it much since I acquired it. This was such a good use for this pen! It puts down so much ink, each dot filled in fast. Almost too fast in some cases, as the amount of ink caused the little hole in the middle to just close up from time to time. Still, I like the darker purple color and sheen that I got from this pen compared to the Kaweco.
Both inks show some nice sheen
As is always the case, I wanted to do more with this doodle than I had time for. To put it in perspective, each full circle took me about 30 minutes to do, so this was a much more time-intensive doodle than I originally anticipated. I am going to have a shortened July due to travel and other activities, so instead of starting a new doodle, I think I’m going to continue with this one and add a third color to really fill out the empty space. It will make me much happier and I think it’s going to look great!
Comments 2
Ha! It’s like those circles with numbers in them to test if you are colorblind! This looks just awesome!
Are you going to do a demonstration of this one? Did you draw circles to fill in, or just wing it? They seem very symmetrical.
Author
“It’s like those circles with numbers in them to test if you are colorblind!” Haha, my wife said the exact same thing! 🙂
I may try to do a post or video about this pattern. I never did since it is really simple and there’s not much to explain. For some I drew the outer circle and filled in from there, while for others I drew the inner circle and expanded until it was the size I wanted.
For the overall shape, I printed out a circle that I put underneath the paper and used as a guide. That’s the nice thing about this 52gsm paper, you can see right through it!