A Pen & Ink Sketch on Christmas Day

A Christmas day stocking. When the sketching mood hits, I have to grab my pens and just draw something.

So, this sketch is a much more subdued pen and ink drawing. More thought was put into it. Placement of object(s) on my paper, angle of the stocking, shading, etc. Still trying to avoid getting into the details. Sketch loosely. Leaving enough white on the paper. That’s a hard one for me. The white areas you see in the stocking have no ink and no water in that area. That’s where my happy surprises come about. While I would love to see soft edges, hard edges are just as nice. Plus when the ink and water dries, the sketch looks different.

That poinsettia sketch in the previous post was pretty wild. I enjoyed the spontaneous process of not thinking about it too much when I had my inky nibs on the paper. Then I had to figure out when to stop. Because I was having too much fun. Playing with all the beautiful colors. Like the bold reds!

Robert Oster Signature inks used: Red Candy, No Fixed Address (shimmer), Thunderstorm, Silent Nite, Eucalyptus Leaf, Peppermint, and Heart of Gold (shimmer).

Fountain Pens: TWSBI GOs Stub 1.1

Water brush: Pentel

Journal: Stillman & Birn Zeta

Tips:

Sketch loosely. Don’t get lost in the details. Objects closer to me will show more details. Objects further away will have less and can be blurred.

Work in layers and let each layer dry before adding more color or more water.

Perfection doesn’t exist in my art vocabulary. Practice sketching daily. Quick sketches. Sketch shapes and shadows. Things around the desk, the kitchen, food, cups, tools, etc.

Keep a pad of paper or a journal on the desk/creative place for quick doodles. (Oh…this sounds like a great idea for a future post).

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s

%d bloggers like this: