Pen and ink drawing tips

Before I share some pen and ink drawing tips, let me take you back to my childhood. While studying in schools and colleges, whenever the classes seemed boring, I had one favourite time pass. This time pass was to doodle in the last pages of my notebooks. It’s quite a safe thing to do. The teacher thinks you are making notes and you are away in your imaginary creative world. Making random sketches was so much fun with pen as the pen gives an immense control. The kind of control which a pen provides makes sketching, shading and fine detailing so much easy.

Now, after entering the art field, to my surprise, I got to know that there is this medium called pen and ink. Hardly did I know in my student time that I will get to re live those moments of doodling with pen. Some basic pen and ink drawing tips can take your simple drawing to an altogether different level.

The pen and ink medium can be used for creating various effects in art. Many artists have their own unique style with this medium. They use the pen to create different strokes in different directions. They can also use the crisscross marks or wash technique (giving a background with water colours).

Coming to pen and ink drawing tips, first of all, use a pen specially designed for this kind of work. Special pens for this medium are available in any art shop. These pens are categorized according to the nib size and the color of the ink. For my pen and ink works, I have used mainly black inked pens till now.

Not only did I make semi abstract paintings like above from pen and ink, I also made some still life sketches while learning this medium.

As can be seen from the above sketch, even though all the objects in the still life have been sketched using the same black inked pen, a feel of different tomes is tried to be established.

In order to create darker tones, rather than continuing making lines in the same direction, I slightly tilted the orientation of the lines. This, in turn resulted in the overlapping of the new lines with the previous ones. Hence, tones, just darker than the previous ones were created.

Some more pen and ink drawing tips that I used to create depth:

• For the darker shades, the spacing between two parallel lines was less and vice versa.
• For the lightest portions in any object, I left that portion blank; hence the white paper signifying the brightest portion where light was falling.
• For dealing with places that required very minute detailing, pens with the thinner nibs were used.

We all need change at some point in our lives. Switching to pen and ink medium was a good change for me after making several works in water colours and oil medium.

This switch provided me with a new fresh energy to go back to the previous mediums and also opened avenues to keep experimenting with this new medium whenever I feel like.

Take note of above pen and ink drawing tips and start your experiment today!

P.S. You can by pens specially made for such drawings from the following link:

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