This was the second night in a row at the Hipbone open studio and I decided to take it a bit easy and have fun with an ink pen. The one thing about drawing a figure in ink is that you really can’t mess up too much. Of course there are some occasions where you can fix slightly incorrect areas but for the most part drawing in ink takes a lot of focus and planning before placing lines. By the end of the night I was happy with what I had accomplished except for the gestures, I need to work on them more often.
At the beginning of the session we almost didn’t have a model because the model that was scheduled called and canceled at the last minute. Luckily there was a person in class that has some experience in modeling and he was nice enough to model.
Figure in Ink Tools
Tonight I used two different pens. The first is a Pilot Precise V7 (fine) which is good for a lot of ink drawings but it tends to be too thick at times and if you don’t keep it moving it bleeds quick. This is the hardest to work with because its very unforgiving with drawing a figure in ink.
The second pen is a regular ball point pen, I think we got this one from a hotel room years ago, its black and nothing special. But the weird thing is that I like it a lot. Whats great about it is that I an vary it intensity easily. I noticed in many places that I needed some very light shading and the pilot would be too heavy for this so the regular ball point pen worked well. I also used it to begin some of the figures in ink as light guide lines before adding in thicker lines with the Pilot pen.
The Drawings
My warmup page, it looks crazy but its very helpful especially for improving dexterity.
A page of 10 figure in ink, these were about 1.5 minutes in length.
5 minute gestures in ink, these are quite terrible, I’m not happy with them at all.
One more 5 minute gesture in ink.
These are 15 minute long drawings. Here I have some proportion issues because I was drawing too fast.
This was one of the better ink drawings of the night. I was really afraid of this pose. The model was very thin and a standing pose doesn’t have a lot of opportunities for comparing measurements. So I really had to focus down and get the proportions correct. I must say that i’m very proud of how it turned out.
I thought this one would be easy… but it didn’t turn out that way. I could have drawn this better with a bit more focus.
I’m very please with this drawing. I planned to work from top to bottom starting with the head and placing each line only after careful consideration. At some point in the future I’m sure after a lot of practice I can complete my figures in ink much faster. The likeness is a bit off but the plan worked really well.