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Two Byzantine Characters These two are from my college-years Byzantine adventure story, which is still buried somewhere in one of my cabinets. It's not something I want to resurrect, but the illustrations are still not bad. The character on the left is Demetrius, a member of a private band of guardsmen; the one on the right is Heliodorus, a eunuch who had been a member of the imperial court. Demetrius is not missing a hand; the imaginary model moved.

They are drawn in a medieval-retro style with sepia brown ink in a pointy liquid ink pen that was my standard back then. The pen, called the Pelikan Graphos, had a well full of ink that worked like a regular dip pen feeding a sharp metal point. The Graphos was inconvenient because you had to keep filling it, and ink fell out of it. But it was flexible, unlike the Rapidograph tech pen point. Eventually I stopped using the Graphos and switched to the Rapidograph, and then to the Pitt tech pens I use nowadays. The Graphos is no longer made. (Art materials nostalgia.) But...clever those Japanese...I just bought a set of plastic flexible point pre-fab drawing  pens from Pentel, in different colors. Let's see how this new set performs.

Sepia brown ink on sketchbook page, 4 1/2" x 6", 1974.
Posted by Pyracantha at 4:08 AM