Fearless With Ink
Since it’s October, and that means a lot of people are participating in Inktober, I want to share my love for drawing in ink! I love my fountain pens - easy, accessible, and always ready for me to put some juicy lines in my sketchbook.
In addition to my trusty fountain pens (Sailor, Lamy, TWSBI and more), I did a rediscovery for my sketchbook practice.
Lately I've been loving a very simple set: dip pen, brush and India ink. It's a limited kit, and a little fussy on location, but as long as I don't wear white, I'm safe.
I like to make it a small creative adventure by bringing only those three along with my sketchbook. No backup plan, no extra colors. Just ink and whatever is in front of me.
During an art retreat I took in Bristol in August, I rediscovered how much I like working with India ink.
In class with Inma Serrano, she taught its to be fearless with ink. In this particular drawing, I made on day one of the art retreat, I focused on the shadows only, and let the dark shapes do the work.
The ink is bold, so the drawing becomes bold too:
Sometimes the courage is not only in using that very dark ink. Mostly it's in leaving a lot of things out and stepping away from the drawing in time. A few strong shapes, then put the pen down. The white of the paper does the rest.
Below are a few recent drawings for which I used my small set of ink, brush and dip pen.
I used to think of the dip pen as a scratchy device that would get stuck in the texture of the paper. A messy pen that gave me too thin of a line. But in Bristol, Inma let me use a dip pen that had a calligraphy nib. I had bought calligraphy nibs in the past, but hadn't;’t really used them much. I thought: If I have my fountain pens with calligraphy nibs, why would I choose for the fussiness of the dip pen, the bottle of ink?
I don’t even know why, but the nib of the dip pen gives such a different experience! A different, and more organic line too. I may have fallen in love a little.
You dip, you draw, the line fades as the ink runs out, and you dip again. That might feel disruptive at first, but the rhythm gives the drawing a natural pace, and the lines get lovely variation without much effort. I see liveliness in the drawings I’ve done lately with my dip pen. And I love it!
