Moving onto Inks

    In the previous few posts I've been using 2.5mm lead holder on toned 5.5 x 8.5 inch paper and the portraits have come out well enough. However, the most important thing for any artist is proportion, and this can be studied in any scale. So, I'll work small. For the 8B graphite sketches, I forbade myself from blending, as I was trying to get used to the idea of pen sketches. The portraits below are done on 9x12 sheets. The inks were put on 140-lbs. hot-press paper, and were done from right to left, because I'm left-handed.

    This is my first time working with multiple tones-- each in a different Pentel Aquash water brush. It... isn't going smoothly. Strangely, the 1 (ink) to 8 (water) diluted ink seems darker than the 1 to 4 diluted ink. Maybe it has something to do with the Pen & Ink India Black brand I've been using, or maybe these brush pens aren't staggering the ink like they're supposed to. Maybe I just need to thin the inks a little-- a lot more. We'll see.

    Also, it seems to be a bad idea to ink dark-to-light, as I did with Sentenza (2).