The last few days I tried using grey ink as the first outline, and then put on black ink for the darker areas. Usually I just draw straight off with waterproof black ink, but I had looked into Steve Reddy’s method, which has five steps.
For waterproof inks, the ones that are best when it comes to not bleeding out into the water are, in my experience, DeAtramentis Black archival ink, Platinum Carbon Black, and Lexington Gray.
Steve Reddy’s five steps are to start with a pencil sketch, then draw with ink on that, thirdly to put on a few layers of india ink mixed with water, then to put on water-colour and finish it off with black ink for crosshatching and adding highlights with a white pen. I usually just start with a black ink drawing – a few minutes in the morning, and then put on some watercolor when i’m taking breaks during the day. But now that there is the Christmas holiday i have some more time in the morning so I thought to add a third step to my own routine – to make the first inking with grey and then use some black where it is super-dark.
I inked up a Sailor Fude de Mannen with Lexington grey and gave it a go.
It didn’t work out that well – the ink was feathering on the first sketch. For that I used a scrap piece of moleskine watercolour paper (200 gsm, from a notebook). Yesterday I tried a piece of Sunders 300gsm hotpress paper – same there, the ink feathered. This morning I tried it on Arches 300 gsm hotpress. The Lexington grey didn’t feather but it still didn’t feel right.
I turned the three papers over and tried to work out what was wrong.
I found that it wasn’t my imagination – the Lexington grey really does feather – not on the Arches Hotpress, but I don’t want to waste such expensive paper on my daily exercises. Strangely, I found that my hand was hesitant when using the Silor pen – So i tried the Desiderata pen and my Kaweko sport on drawing the exact same motive, and there was a difference: for some reasons it felt much better with the Kaweko and the Desiderata and the lines came without hesitation. Pen use is of course very personal, but the feathering is obvious, look:
