I wanted to start experimenting with ink washes for a long time, so I added water to this years InkTober. I had great plans on how to prepare for my 3rd InkTober, but the only thing I actually did was to buy some watercolour paper… But this was my general plan;
1. Pick a Sktchy picture the evening before.
2. Start by warming up with a continuous line drawing in fountain pen.
3. Do an ink wash drawing.
4. If I have another great idea for the daily drawing: Ignore points 1-3.
I also wanted to draw faster and have a fairly portable setup. So I had this great plan about a quick underdrawing in pencil, and then adding 2 light passes of diluted india ink, a slightly darker 3rd pass and adding final details with fountain pen.
So thats what I did… for 5 days…
The number of passes seemed to grow by the day and the drawings were taking longer and longer. To try to save some time I dropped the warm up drawing and started drawing only half of the face, now using diluted water soluble inks form Lamy to add some colour.
I really wanted to rely less on contour line and after day 9 I realised that I had to go cold turkey and loos the fountain pen all together if I wanted improve at this. Soon after I started using diluted acrylic inks instead of dye based fountain pen ink giving me more control on the details. Quite an expensive month as I kept picking up new inks to try new colours.
All the drawings have been done with one brush only; a travel dagger brush, sable/nylon blend from Rosemary & Co.. I got one a while ago after reading about several urban sketcher using it as a “one brush dos all” but I newer really used it. Its my first “good” brush and I’m never going back to “too cheap” nylon brushes again – not that it’s an expensive brush. I’ll be getting one more to use with water colours.
The white highlights in the eyes where an adventure in their own right. Even though the drawings where dry the ink would bleed in to the white. Lamy’s dark lilac ink will happily bleed through 6 layers of Molotow acrylic marker. I tried any brand of white pens I could lay my hands on, opaque acrylic inks, china markers, cheap gouache etc.. In the beginning I fixed it in photoshop but I finally found a working solution; almost undiluted high quality gouache – some of the dark dye based inks might need an extra layer but it’s the best solution I found.
If you are curios about any of the inks I used u can read what ink I used in the comments on Instagram and Sketchy. The paper is 300g/m2 Canson Montval Aquarell and it worked really well.
Time wise this InkTober was a disaster. I spend way to much time on it, especially on the underdrawings and I didn’t really enjoy that part. But I really learned a lot about matching tone, using a brush and I got to explore a lot of new inks (Yes, I am an inkoholic). I also got a new best friend; my travel dagger brush.