Tree in India Ink
10″x14″, India ink on Khadi watercolor paper
Tag: ink
Ballpoint Pen Fun
Ballpoint pen is surprisingly fun but also a little messy as an art medium. Watch out for smearing!
Stalogy pen with black, low-viscosity ink on Canson multimedia paper
I based this off a photo I took at the precise moment a Great Blue Heron dove for a fish. My camera, a Canon PowerShot sx740 HS, is perfect for carrying around in my purse, but I haven’t mastered taking a really great photo, especially from a distance. That hasn’t stopped me from using it all the time, and nearly all my artwork is from my own reference photos.
In real life, the fish wasn’t as lucky as the one I drew. I added the fish and then decided to keep the theme of “almost” going by adding the little, tiny dragonfly above the fish.
India Ink and Linework
I actually completed an entire drawing without resorting to using an ink wash to soften my scribbly linework. If I could do this one over, I’d probably keep the treeline lighter and make the sunflower less “solid” looking. My goal was to create lights, darks, and grays with hatching and cross hatching. I created this drawing following a course by artist Philip Harris on the Domestika website.
Both are 9″ x 12″, Indigraph pen and ink on Canson multimedia paper
I tried another but realized at some point I wasn’t going to pull it off without an ink wash, so out came the water and brush.
Orchids in Window in Ink
Another ink and wash drawing on Khadi handmade paper. In addition to the pack of twenty sheets of paper, I now have two small hardcover journals and one larger square journal, all Khadi paper. It’s now my favorite. I would say the same thing if I was lucky enough to have the equivalent with Twinrocker paper, but they only do single sheets.
10″ x 14″, ink on Khadi handmade watercolor paper
I’ve been using a white Neocolor I (water resistant) crayon to create highlights,similar to using masking fluid. I put it down after the first line drawing but before the ink wash. Or, I use the crayon or to add in a few after I accidentally make something too dark. I dislike using gel pens. They never seem to work on whatever surface or medium I’m using, but when they do work, there’s often a opaque feeling to the whiteness. With a crayon or colored pencil, it’s easy to create a subtle highlight. However, once on the paper, it’s extremely hard to go over it again with ink. It’s also difficult to put in highlights on white paper before adding a wash. In the drawing above, the highlights on the leaves in the bottom left were created using the wax crayon before I put in an ink wash (several times to get it dark), and they kind of glow.