a young tradition, continued

 

Last year I followed the prompt list from FurryLittlePeach and this year I did the same. Much like last year, I branched into a new traditional media that I was not super familiar with. This year I went with Pen and Ink.

0. Peachtober list.JPG

As soon as the prompt list came out, I started coming up with ideas. I had tentatively decided on pen and ink as a medium, so I knew that black and white sketches would be fine.

Sketches for Peachtober.jpg

Process

peachtober 2020-21.JPG

Here’s the deal. I have theoretically used pen and ink via nib and inkwell before. I bought a practice set in college. We did a leaf project where we were supposed to use the nib and inkwell pen and ink method on denril. However I am not a patient person and the ink would take forever to dry on the denril and at the pace that I wanted to go, I could never get my lines to be straight or not shaky. It probably didn’t help that I drank the amount of coffee necessary to wake up a horse. I gave up early on in that process and opted for the tried and true, the micron. I completed the entire project with a micron and pushed the memory of using an inkwell to the back of my mind.

TLDR–I am a pen and ink baby.

When I set out to start this project, I pulled out that old kit with very bendy nibs, I found myself getting frustrated to no end. I couldn’t figure out how to not flick ink from the nib every time I changed direction in the slightest. I was thinking of ways that I could incorporate the messiness of my work into the piece itself. I went back to the craft store, halfway through the finished pieces and picked up a new set of nibs. And let me tell y’all. It changed my life. Gone were the ink flicks, gone was the messiness (sort of, I was still learning). I was thrilled. The new nibs changed the game.

I started the practicing process in my sketchbook and doodled little renditions for each prompt. Once I felt sort of competent, I cut out my pieces of watercolor paper and laid down a nice ink swatch on each piece. I had let some ink dry at the bottom of my jar that I was using and when I picked it up, there were small pieces of ink that transferred onto the paper. I liked how the ink wash and chips gave the paper a charm before I even started drawing and inking. I think subconsciously it made it less scary to go straight for the ink. I used pencil to sketch the prompts using my iPad sketches as reference. I then used a brush to paint the shadows with washes of ink. After the ink dried, I then went in for the scary part and inked the piece.

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