Getting Started

Hey Everyone!
Well, here is my first official blog post. I decided to ease my way into this project, so I have started with an art form that I am already slighty familiar with: Pen and Ink. All you need to create a pen and ink drawing is thin tipped pens, not unlike fine tipped sharpies. For the first artpiece I did, I mainly used a common type of pen stroke called hatching, or cross hatching. Here is the picture below:


This is a pen and ink drawing on top of watercolour paint. It is based on a picture that I took of a broken window from an old shed on my farm. (Sorry about the bad quality picture, my camera is getting fixed so I had to use my mom's phone). This art piece didn't turn out exactly as I wanted it to. The red paint of the shed walls looks pinkish in contrast to the black pen, and if I did it again I would probably choose a softer green for the view out of the window in the background. But you learn from your mistakes, right? Anyways, this picture was made using hatching. Hatching is the most basic stroke that gives an illusion from a short distance that there are various shades of grey, when really it is all created from fine black lines. The fewer white spots that show, the darker the value appears. Cross hatching is simply hatching in which the lines cross over each other, to give a different look.

The picture above is a quick example of cross hatching. As you can see, the more lines there are, the darker it looks.

I also made another art piece using pen and ink, but this time with a different drawing method.

For this drawing of a leaf, I used a technique called stippling, of which there is an example of below.

Stippling uses tiny dots to create value and shades of grey with black pen. The closer together the dots are, the darker the tone. I was happy with the way the drawing of the leaf turned out, you just need a lot of patience with this technique. One can get tired of dots pretty fast! :)

 

Over all, I really enjoy doing pen and ink. It requires patience possibly a lot of time, depending on the technique you are using. The number 1 rule that I need to remember is DON'T GET LAZY! The lazier I get, the more sloppy I get, and sloppy, messy hatching or stippling does not turn out very well. Unless, of course you are doing a loose kind of pen and ink, which some people can do very well, but I cannot.
So that brings us to the end of this post. I hope you enjoyed reading it, and please feel free to give feedback, make comments, criticize, ask questions (though I probably will not be able to answer most of them :) ) etc. etc. And if you want some more information on pen and ink, I found some very good stuff at http://drawsketch.about.com/library/blinktexture.htm . Well, that's all for now! Till next time, Riley