✍️ Basic Mark Making with Ink

So now that I've introduced you to the materials, I want to take a moment to demonstrate a little bit of what they do. So we're just going to do some basic mark making with our pens, just so you can get an idea of their footprint. So we'll just start off with the ballpoint pen. Everyone knows it. So let's start with it. It's really simple. The great thing about ballpoint is it has a little ball tip on it, so it glides on paper. It doesn't scratch. And what I want to show you is that ballpoint, it's kind of like a mixture of like pencil and pen. The ink is really viscous. In fact, it was made during World War II because they were looking for a type of ink that could be taken out in the field and that was portable and that could be used on a variety of different surfaces and vertical. So it's kind of interesting, the history of it. But anyways, you can go super light. I mean, you can do fields of where it's basically invisible. Not invisible, but it's just like such a half tone that you can do. And like I said, with the ball tip, it just makes really fast work of inking. You can just like go really hard with it. A lot of scribble. It just has a lot of expression to it. So it's a great tool and we take it for granted every day. But it's a really wonderful instrument to keep on hand. They're super cheap, reliable. The only thing is you'll notice here, for instance, if you're trying to do a ballpoint pen drawing and you're taking your time with it and you're really building value slowly. In fact, there's a lot of examples of that type of artwork on Instagram or online. You can simply search and you'll see what people can do with it as a finished material. But anyways, this is something you'll see that happens with ballpoint pens. So just avoid this as much as you can. So like any art tool, any art instrument, you kind of want to be aware of some of its pitfalls. So ballpoint tends to drop blots of ink like this. So it's just really good to have a spare piece of paper on the side. I'll just use my left side of the sketchbook here. When you notice that it's loading up on the tip, just dump some ink off to the side like this. Boom. Just get rid of it and then you can go right back into inking. So that's like basic marks with this guy. Onto the more technical pens that I described earlier. Micron being probably the preeminent example. A lot of people use these. Some things to know when you're handling them though, they feel really good in the hand but this tip is very delicate. So unlike your ballpoint pens, which you can really abuse like I said before, this tip you need to be quite gentle with. So drawing with the micron is not so much about extreme pressures like I was really digging into paper here. This is more about finesse. So you're going to be finessing with this guy. But again, just some basic marks. You can get some variety of line but the technical pen, they come in various sizes for the express purpose of keeping standard widths of line. So that's why architects like to use them, industrial artists like to use them, designers like to use them just because the line quality can stay so standard and so consistent. But that being said, the way that you hold the pen, you can also get some like half tones like this, you know, just really lightly dragging it on paper or you can just hold it more vertical and with more purpose and get these darker, more even lines like this. Again, like I said, you really don't need much pressure at all, just light on the page. And also, I'd like to take a moment while I'm doing this to let you know that it's really important when you're inking, if you're really focusing on inking as a finished product, you need to make sure that you're relaxed, you know. So I'm doing this demonstration. It's very simple what I'm doing. I'm just showing you what these instruments do. But I do want to touch on the fact that when you draw a line, it's kind of like a seismograph, right? You're seeing the trembling of my heartbeat, of the muscles, everything. So ink is so beautiful in that it's kind of a direct translation of what's happening in your arm physiologically, in your heart, everything. So you want to be calm, you know, you want to be in a state of mind that's very relaxed. Obviously, there could be other people that are just scribbling away and going to town. But for what I'm doing right now, I just wanted to remind you of that. So this is size 1. Like I said, here's size 1. That's those lines. Here's size 2. Like I said, we're going to be dealing with graduated sizes. So here's size 2. You can see the difference in thickness. But again, you can still get a variety of width of line. You know, you can go from a little bit thin to thick to thin. This is a favorite exercise of mine because what you're doing is you're creating the illusion of volume simply by pressure. So there's that. Micron also goes down to a 005. And I'll just write that here. And you can see how thin these lines are. And I really enjoy using the 005 quite a bit just because it's so delicate and the lines are so fine. It's kind of one of the thinnest sort of technical pens you can really get to. There's another brand, Rapidograph, that I had shown you their inks. But Rapidograph actually makes a line of these technical pens. But I avoid using them because they're difficult to maintain and they're quite expensive. And to me, it's just not worth the headache or the price. But if you're interested, go ahead and check one out because they do make probably one of the finest tips for any technical pen. You can get razor thin lines. But like I said, they're extremely finicky. So that's it for those. The brush pen, the brush pen has a lot more expression to it. You know, the technical pens are there for control. The brush pen is there to simulate a brush and therefore you're relinquishing some control. So what you're doing is you're letting kind of the natural structure of the brush play a part in your artwork. You're not, obviously you're trying to control your lines and you're giving them purpose. But at the same time, you're letting go a little bit. You're allowing them to sing a little bit for you. So people that work in brushes or brush pens, they've used them a lot and what they're able to do is they're able to kind of predict what the outcome of their line will be based upon their movement and the pressure. So it's something for me to sit here and explain that to you, but you really need to just hold one and experiment with it because you can get all sorts of funny, beautiful line work. They're great for, obviously, that's why people in calligraphy, they love just kind of the sort of half tones and that brushing effect, the feathering that it can do. You can smudge them a little bit if you want to. I personally hate smudging ink because it's messy and also I just don't like it. But it is a possibility with brush pens. Again, something to notice about the nib, about the tip, you'll see that especially with a brush pen since it is synthetic, you'll see when you lay something down that the tip won't bounce back to a natural state, right? So I can turn it on its other side and you'll see that it's sharp that way but it's flattened out because of the way I just used it. So when you're using these, always be paying attention and it'll become second nature eventually, but always be paying attention to the fact that every line you draw will result in the brush exhibiting a different characteristic like a static characteristic. So you always want to be looking at that before you put your next mark down so that you can anticipate what that mark will be like. Again, that's just from experience. Eventually, you won't even think about it. So now, I also want to go into some of the nib pens and I'll take a second here to talk about your workstation. I'm right-handed, so I keep my ink on the right side and I also keep a little bit of spare paper or something just to blot with on my right side. I want to be keeping everything. I don't want to be crossing over the page is what I'm going to say. I'll put it that way. I don't want to be dipping over here and then crossing over constantly. I want to keep it isolated over here since I'm right-handed so that I'm simply just going from here to here. I'm just reducing the risk of spillage, of drippage, of all that other stuff that can be a real headache when you're working on a beautiful piece and you spent 20 hours on it and then boom, you just drop a big lop. So this, just basic setup stuff like this, super simple but it's worth considering because it'll save some headache in the future and I've had enough mistakes in my past to let you know that it's better just to instill the good habit early on rather than fighting some bad habits. So here we go. So basically, you just want to be loading your brush, you know, or your nib rather and I'm just dragging it on the rim of the ink well and I'm doing that because I don't want to bring the pen straight to the page with a lot of ink. Luckily, it's not doing it now but sometimes these things will just hold a big glob. Oh, right there, see like that. So you don't want to do that necessarily unless that's what you're going for. You can see how much ink these guys can hold. So what I do is I dip and I don't even dip, I don't shove it all the way into the neck right here. All you need is ink right on the part that's activated right here. So I just put it in there, remove the excess ink and then start making marks. So these nib pens are great because you can do, you can get a lot of different line qualities. So if I'm drawing with the direction of the tip, so see how the tip splays open like that? That's how you get a thick line, okay? Because the tip, if you look at it from above, it's like this. It has two channels and these two pieces right here, they split outwards and that's what releases ink flow. So when you're drawing, if you hold the nib on its side, you're really only limiting, you're just limiting yourself to these lines which is good though because let's say you want to keep consistent line work. Well, you just simply hold the pen a little bit on its edge and you'll get these really consistent straight even lines. If you want to explore more quality of line, that's when you kind of hold the pen this way, flat to the page because then you can really push and you can get these big lines with a lot of variety, you know, can make these curving marks. But specifically with these, unlike the technical pens or the brush pens, these nib pens, they have a rigid form to them. So that's something to keep in mind because you don't want to be drawing like, I'm not pushing this, right? I'm not going to push the nib against the paper because this isn't activating these tips that I had explained earlier, that's not activating those. In fact, I hope it picks up in the camera but I'm actually pulling up paper and it's getting dug into the instrument which I don't want. So because of the nature of these nibs, you kind of want to work with how they naturally flex. And again, it's something for me to sit up here and try to describe but once you hold it in your hand, it'll be more intuitive, you'll understand what I'm talking about. Something else though, I like to also have a little bit of water. Water is, it's a funny thing because it destroys basically everything it comes in contact with artistically but we need it for washing and it's a great medium to dilute things. But it is kind of the enemy of like all materials. So it's best to just not overuse it. If you want to wash your tip out, you don't need to dunk the whole thing in there, just get the tip wet and then simply just wipe your tip with a paper towel and then you've cleaned it and it's good to go. Because eventually what happens is that ink will dry and it'll get stuck inside these tips that splay open. And when the ink is dry in there, it won't flow easily from the base to the tip. So that's something else to keep in mind when you're moving on to these crow quills, they require a little bit more attention to what's going on with the tip. So here's another example, this is a much finer tip, this is the crow quill. I think this is a copper tip, I'm not exactly sure but this one doesn't have as much flex as this one and when you see it in person, you'll understand that there's extra little slits in this guy that gives it way more flex. This one is more rigid and they make it rigid because this one is designed to just give really fine lines and I'm not actually having trouble getting it to flow. Again, sometimes you just need to, you know, if it's not flowing, so it's like, you know, it's not doing anything for me, you just need to keep charging it with ink and find where it starts to deliver the ink properly. So don't stress out if it seems like at first, oh, there's no ink coming out, just get into the ink well and keep at it because eventually it'll just start releasing ink. And like I said, these break in over time actually, they get better and they get more reliable the more that you use them. So this guy is really great, again, just for fine line, fine line work. I actually hold this one more like a pencil, I kind of choke up on it a little bit. I really don't think that these are suitable for holding like, I mean, I guess you can do it, holding like a wand for instance. Some people will like hold really far back but I like a little more control so I choke up a little bit when I'm using these pens. But we'll get into the mechanics of these instruments too a little bit more because everyone's a little bit different. I just want to get through what each of these look like before I get into kind of some of the more basic movements of the pen that we'll use for our drawings in the future. Finally, I want to really quickly visit the brushes here. So I'll just show you, I'll just use this brush right here. This is a size zero, again, it's a Kolinsky Sable. This one maybe costs like $9 or something, basically you're purchasing the hair count. So the smaller the brush, the cheaper it's going to be, which is great for us drawing with them because we can get super high quality hairs in our brush for a pretty cheap price because we're not using big, big brushes here. In fact, I'll even take this moment. So this ink well, I actually have trouble visually seeing where my brush is going because with brushes, you don't want to be dipping deep into this collar right here. When you start to get ink up inside, it destroys this brush over time. So what you really want to be doing is just getting brush on the tip. So that's where I keep this guy handy because I can just simply take this other ink and I can just drip it in there and I don't need that much, I just need like that. And now I can really see that all I'm doing is I'm getting the tip wet in that ink and then I'm just, again, I'm just drawing and these are the lines. So with the brush you can immediately see, you can immediately see why the brush, in my opinion, is superior to everything else that I've shown you just now. And for me, and that's subjective, okay, that's not like an objective truth, that's just an opinion of mine. You can just see how beautifully seamless you go from different line qualities, okay? Unlike here, this is beautiful too, honestly. There's a scratchiness and like it has some funky angles taking place and there's a real value in that. But for me, I just really enjoy the way that a brush behaves on the page, just how much flex and bounce it has and how it comes back to its natural state unlike the pen brushes which tend the fibers, they just spread out once you use them. And then it's about you having to notice that and collect them back into a sharp tip. With these, they just automatically bounce back and you just can't find that with synthetics because the natural fibers are so much, they're just so superior. So here's just some basic marks. In fact, I'll just show you the rigger brush. So this is a pointed round, this is a rigger, it's a little bit longer like I said. So, when I load this up, it can take a lot more ink because the fibers, because the hairs are so long, but it's designed so that it culminates into a really sharp tip. So, you can just get these long lines with it, okay? And so now, while I'm on this subject doing these long lines, I want to let you know that there are some more natural movements just mechanically in your wrist and you just can't get around this, it's just like a physiological fact. Your wrist, when you're drawing, your wrist wants to open more. So, it's easier to go from a tight sort of constricted posture to an open one, like letting out a breath, okay? So, when I'm drawing, I usually try to orient my hand in a more natural position. So again, these are more natural to me, these movements like this. This movement, not so natural. I'm kind of fighting my wrist the entire time and I'm doing a lot of work with my fingertips. So, the idea is that you want to isolate as many little muscle groups as possible when you're drawing because you don't want to be using too many. You want to just be using as few as possible so that way things flow much easier. That being said, you can really train your wrist though to get comfortable with these physically unnatural movements. So, that's just something to be aware of is when you're doing your first marks with your instruments that you've purchased, get to know what feels good. Get to know, do I need to turn the page? Do I need to turn it this way? What marks feel better? How does like a horizontal mark feel versus a vertical one? There's going to be a lot of movement in your elbow and your shoulder and stuff, okay? So, like I said, you want your workstation to be able to accommodate all this. But there are certain things like when you're going horizontal for instance, you're pivoting. I want to be pivoting on my elbow. I want this motion, okay? And I'm mitigating that arcing with mechanics in my hand. So, even though I'm pivoting off my elbow, I'm kind of correcting that arc with my wrist and my fingers and I'm making these straight lines. But when I'm doing vertical, I'm kind of just like dragging. I can just drag simply with my whole arm from my shoulder almost. I can just drag down. Or again, you know, it's a combination of different things and just make straight lines mainly from the wrist. Again, I could talk about this all day but once you get the pen or the brush in your hand, you really see how they feel. For the brushes, again, like the nibs, water is the enemy even though they're designed for it. It's like a strange paradox, an unhappy relationship. But what you really want to be doing is rinsing the brush and I like to have a second cup of water as well because I'm loading up this water, see how dark it's already become? This water is so dirty. I want to go into this water now too. Hope you guys can see that. I want you to see how clean I try to keep this water. It's best to always have gradations of water. Sometimes I even have three cups of water when I'm using watercolors and gouache because again, I'm trying to keep that brush as clean as possible. And you'll see when you blot it out, you'll see that you're trying to assess how much ink is left on there, right? You don't have to obsess about this. I just want to take a moment to demonstrate that when you're cleaning it, see how much ink just came off? The brush looked clean, the water looks clean but look at what just came out. So you really want to make sure when you're cleaning these brushes as you're using them to get right up on that color, right where the brush meets and you really want to just press on that and pull out until it's clean. So that looks much cleaner to me. And we'll check this one too. See, there's a little bit of residue there. But so that's that. I just wanted to take that moment to show you really basic mark making just to let you know the characteristics of each instrument. A lot of them, you know, at first glance will seem quite similar and that's okay. It's just the more that you get to know them, the more nuance that you extract from them, the more you get comfortable with them, the more you're able to kind of play onto the strengths of each one. So that's it for basic marks. And then I want to move on to some more basic combinations of how do we go from a basic mark to then applying that towards an actual drawing.