In the late ’60s or early ’70s, when handwritten balance sheets were becoming a thing of the past, my dad brought home this surplus-to-requirements 20-ounce (more than half a litre!) bottle of Parker Super Quink permanent red ink, ‘the only ink containing SOLVE-X for better pen protection’.
Ever since, I’ve been wondering how I might use it. Could a palette of black and red evoke the calm sophistication of Chinese calligraphy? No, it reminds me of the artwork for Roger the Dodger in The Beano, printed in two-colours on newsprint in the 1960s.
A random selection of inks – and Tipp-Ex – from the plan chest drawer but the kind that I’m re-ordering today is my regular De Atramentis Document Ink – one Black and one Sepia Brown, which is what I’ve used in this drawing. The advantage is that I can add watercolour to the drawing after just a few minutes without the ink running.
Watercolour doesn’t give me the flat colours that I like when I finish off the drawing on the iPad, but I like the messiness, subtlety and luminosity that I can get with the watercolour. Plus it’s quicker than the scanning and setting up involved in the iPad approach.
Blotty Gulls
I like the quick pen and wash effect that you can get by blotting non-waterproof ink with a dab of water, which is what I did this morning with my Lamy Safari with a Lamy ink cartridge. The table on the balcony at the Boathouse Cafe at Newmillerdam was dappled with dew after a cool (and probably frosty) night, so I dipped my finger in a drop and used that, but the disadvantage of water soluble ink for me is the danger of accidentally blotting a drawing, as I did this morning as I opened my sketchbook, causing a slight blot on yesterday’s treacle tins drawing.
When my order arrives from The Writing Desk I’ll be filling up my various pens with brown and black and going back to waterproof De Atramentis.
A bit of practice before I go out drawing figures on location next week. I want the speed of drawing I can get by drawing in fountain pen rather than with an Apple Pencil on the iPad.
I’m using a Lamy Safari filled with a Lamy Black cartridge, which I find flows slightly more freely than the waterproof De Atramentis. But the Lamy Black doesn’t dry waterproof, so I’m adding colour to the scanned drawing in Clip Studio Paint on my iPad.
Flat colour isn’t as subtle as watercolour but in this case that’s not what I’m after; it’s supposed to be a simpler graphic element – along the lines of a lino cut – to contrast with the busy-ness of the pen line.
Those scribbled initials are my colour notes, which I’m leaving in place to give a bit of animation to the drawing.
Sketches from Newmillerdam, Harrogate and Queen Street, Horbury, in my pocket-sized A6 landscape Seawhite Travel Journal. Lamy and TWSBI EcoT pens, De Atramentis ink (a mix of brown and black as both were running out).
After my practice at cross-hatching using a dip pen on a tilted drawing board, I looked around for an object to draw and went for this Lowe Alpine haversack.
The wind has just changed from mild, from the mid-Atlantic, to cold from the north-east, so I sat with a latte to warm me up as I started this drawing at the Boathouse Cafe at Newmillerdam this morning. I used my Lamy nexx fountain pen but I think, now I’ve scanned them both in ‘text’ mode, pure black and white, that it would be hard to spot the difference between this and the dip pen in the haversack drawing.
The black areas were brushed in later from a photograph I’d taken on my phone, outlined with a Rotring Tikky Graphic pigmented ink pen and filled with a number 10 Prolene series 101 synthetic brush using the Rohrer’s india ink which I used with the dip pen.
In Drawing Words and Writing Pictures, Jessica Abel and Matt Madden recommend drawing with your board angled at approximately 60 degrees. My old cast iron letterpress gives me just the right angle to prop the board against, which I’m resting on my knees. My parallel motion drafting board can’t be manoeuvred to that angle.
They also recommend always drawing with arm movements when you’re working in pen, so definitely not my the finger movements that I always go for in my detailed work. I’m going to try some of the exercises they suggest for getting used to working with a dip pen.
It’s going to take a lot of getting used to but I like the feeling of making marks on what feels to me like a near-vertical surface. Bristol board, also recommended in Abel & Madden’s book, doesn’t tear as I scratch away with my dip pen and it gives a crisp line with no bleeding into the fibres of the paper surface.
