Pen and Ink Sketching Made Simple: Your Ultimate Drawing Guide

1. Introduction: First set out on our ink sketching, or drawing journey. It can look like the place to be amazing. Ink artists make it look effortless, make it look simple, and yet their drawings, their sketches are full of character. When we get started, there is this bewildering array of supplies. And then with each supply, it feels like there are 20 new techniques to learn. With all of that, it can be really hard to keep our motivation up. But I'm here today to tell you it doesn't have to be like that. I'm going to show you how to examine and test your supplies to understand how they really work. I'm going to give you just two really key things. That's all you need to know to get started and master ink sketching, and we're going to create an awesome project together as well. My name is Toby, and I'm a loose ink and watercolor sketcher. I love creating my bold ink drawings and sometimes splashing watercolors on top. But today we're going to focus on that inside. And just because it's only ink doesn't mean we can't add color and can't add texture. Across this class, I split it into three sections to make it really easy to navigate, to understand the purpose of each part of the class. In section one, we're going to unveil the various implements that we might want to use, as well as have a play with them and actually produce a mini project or two to get to know our tools a little bit better. In section two, I'm going to show you what I think are the only two things you really need to understand to get to grips with ink sketching. We often think about ink sketching as line art, and I'm going to show you that that is sort of true, but it's definitely not the whole picture. We'll look at the idea of line up and contours and how to make that easy. That's concept one. Concept two is where we'll unveil texture fun character. And I am sure that by the end of that, again with a couple of mini projects, you'll be feeling so confident to launch into the final section. The final section is of course, the all important class project. You'll be getting things out of cupboards to have a play with them. Pens you thought were pointless because perhaps you just hadn't considered different ways you could use them and the different things they could bring to your art. And together we're going to create a few studies to really pick apart what our pens can do and what we can do with our pens. If you enjoy this class, then don't forget to pop up your project in the project gallery. And of course, check out all the other amazing projects which will be up there already. You could also leave me a review if you have the time. It's a huge compliment and it means the world to all of us teachers on skillshare. And finally, you can check out more of my classes on my profile or on in Scram and Youtube where you'll find me at Toby Sketch Loose. And with that, let's get started. 2. SECTION 1 - SUPPLIES: This class is split into sections. Section one is what I'm introducing just now. In section one, we'll find lots of discussions about different types of different types of ink, how to fill fountain pens, Useful background information which will hopefully give you ideas about how to use the equipment, the tools, the things you have at home. The key here is that I'm not trying to encourage you to go out and buy loads of stuff that you don't need because the art world is an expensive world. This class could be completed with a normal fountain pen, with a ballpoint pen with a couple of permanent markers and just a few things that you have lying at home. There are great fun ways of drawing using India ink, which is rather cheap just by simply sharpening a stick or using a glass dipping pen, which could be bought for a couple of pounds. Please don't take this class as needing to buy 1 million things. Take it as an opportunity to open all your drawers and experiment with what you've already got. 3. Supplies Overview: When we talk about ink sketching, the supplies we could use is incredibly broad. Everything from a high end fountain pen through to a low end ballpoint pen. Then there are people who will use sharpened sticks or fashion their own dip pens out of bamboo. Essentially, what I want to show you in this is the range of things that you might use. This is not an exclusive list though, because really right now, the message today is what you have is probably good enough and certainly good enough to experiment with, create great art, and have fun in this class. This class is all about exploration about creating fun pages filled with lovely ink sketches. In doing so, you'll need some ink mark making equipment in sketching implements, essentially posh words for pens. Now normally I start my class by saying, look, you only need this. These two or three things is all you need to complete your sketches Today, today is a bit different. What I'm saying is, don't need all of this. These are just some examples of things that you could need. For example, I've got a range of different fountain pens. These have all got different inks in and different nibs. I've got some fine liners, all of different thicknesses. I've got some other more fun or different pens. Ambo fue, a sailor fude, and a brush pen. I've also got dip pens. I've got inks up here which are soluble fountain pens. I've got inks up here which can go in fountain pens, but a permanent got other ways of filling our fountain pens and then even more off to the side. I've got a whole case of Dipper ball inks. Another dip pen, there are so many things you could use. All I want you to do today is find a few things that you might want to use. Maybe it's just one or two. You have loads of things. Maybe you have things stuffed in your drawers, which you haven't used for ages. And we're going to explore what you can do with these. We're going to explore the pros, the cons, and basically have a lot of fun exploring ink, mark making, in sketching, and creating art. 4. Paper Matters: Now I know this is an ink class, but I just want to take a short lesson to outline the importance of the so often forgotten but key supply that of course is paper. Whilst in matters, sometimes it doesn't matter at all if we don't have the right paper. With the wrong paper, things are so much harder, it limits the techniques we can use. Before we dive into exploring all our different pens, I just wanted to explain that also the paper we're using has a big impact on what we're able to do and how we're able to create. It's not something you need to spend a huge amount of money on. But using good quality sketching paper, or even better for me, I love watercolor paper, is, I think, a worthwhile investment. Let me show you why. Today we have three types of paper. On the left, we have some natural paper from Japan. This is made through the processing of vegetable fibers and plant fibers. Here we have some di paper. This paper is from India. It's handmade. It's from recycled T shirts. It's 100% cotton. Here we also have some 100% cotton paper. This is an etch, A five sketchbook got a slight texture to it. I'm just going to use a fairly standard fountain pen. Now, my preference for sketching is in a watercolor sketch book like this. If I just go to a random page, what you'll find is if you draw, you can get a really nice variety of line. You also will find, if you can see that the line breaks up a little bit. If I'm really gentle, the line actually becomes discontinuous. And that's because of the texture. I like that texture. Many people don't like that texture. But for me using a fountain pen, I love this paper. I find the varied line quality I can get is exceptional. Another key part of water colored paper is it means well, we can use water using water. Creating wet textures is something we'll be looking into in one of the later lessons in this class. But for me, if we are ignoring water textures and ignoring the ability to use that, then we are missing out on such a vast range of possibilities that our inks can give us. Suddenly things can come to life. You can create immediate contrast. You can create such just wonderful fun and interest on the page so quickly. If we use a paper which allows us that flexibility to use water, compare that to the Cardi paper. And what you might notice is that line breaks up a lot. It can be very varied. It can be much bolder. And that's because this paper is more absorbent, But because it's also more textured, it can become actually quite difficult to get a smooth line for me that's too textured and to absorbent over here on this natural paper, what you'll find is it's extremely absorbent. Look at that. If I leave my pen just still, it will soak up and soak up. And if I move my pen, you'll see I'm creating ink blobs without doing anything at all. This paper is actually very nice paper, but it's also a feature of cheaper papers that they're extremely absorbent. When we have absorbent paper like this, there's no chance of drawing a subtle limit. Look, if I try and draw a face, the features are enormous because just look at how big that line becomes versus over here. I can be very subtle. I can build up shadow. I can hatch gently. There's lots I can do. If we're using good quality paper, explore the paper you're using before you start exploring your pens. Because if you're using paper which isn't going to take inkwell, then you're not going to be able to explore your pens. You're not going to be able to find out the pros, the cons, the fun, the stress that comes from different types of pen. 5. Evaluating Your Pens: As we've said, the world of pens can be bewildering. So how do you know if you have a good pen? A bad pen, one which you're going to love, or one which is going to make your life more challenging than it needs to be. In this little lesson, I'm going to show you my demonstration of what I first look for in a pen so you can feel confident about selecting your own sketching implements. We've chosen our paper, now for me, this is my extra sketch book. It's got lightly cold pressed watercolor paper, 100% cotton. Choose your paper. And now we can start thinking about our pens and our ink and what it that we're looking for as we explore them, as we continue through this class. This isn't a deep exploration yet of the different pens. This is just how we start building up our ideas. Building the uses we might have for our pen. The things that I initially look for, how does it feel holding it? It needs to be comfortable for me, this twist bee has a nice weight to it. It's got a nicely textured grip. Number one is literally how does it hold? There are other factors which come into this. I like sketching with a really loose grip. If I sketch a loose script, what happens? We get a nice mark brill, versus if I take a fine liner and I sketch with that same loose script, nothing happens. Now, I know if I'm using my fine liner, I'm going to have to hold it more upright. That's okay. If that's what you prefer. It's just not what I prefer. We've got the comfort, we've got the grip, how we holding it. The next thing we want to know is what is the ink flow like? What we don't want is a pen, which we have to drag and drag across the page. You can hear that scratch as we try and get the ink to come out. What we want instead is a pen that just effortlessly flows across that page, but that doesn't leak in. We don't want one which produces that absorbent effect we saw in the last class. We've got the grip, the comfort, we've got the ink flow in, the feel. The next thing that I look for, because I think it's key in sketching, is the flexibility of that pen when we're creating a mark. Literally how flexible old can the line go, how fine can the line go. Then simple things like are we going to be able to use it for in techniques? In techniques are things like hatching, things like blacking in. Those are my initial things to look for. There are of course, a few other factors to think about. Those would become obvious through the course of this class. But those things would include ecological factors. How green is your pen? Is it a disposable pen, like a fine liner, or is it one that you can refill? If you can refill it, that's great because perhaps you can change the color. Perhaps you can change the ink from permanent to soluble. You can even change the nib and enjoy a lot of flexibility that way. Finally, of course, the price is a really important consideration. What I'd say, and we'll look at this through the course as well, what I'd say is that super expensive things aren't necessarily super better for sketching, They can just be more expensive. Or they can have a different level of craftsmanship around them rather than actually being better to use. With all this in mind, what we're going to do in the next class is have a look at how to create a little test page to work out the differences between the pens you already have. 6. Lets Make a Test Page: This is the first mini project. Get us used to our pens and to hopefully inspire you and show you that there might be something sat in an old cupboard which actually works amazingly well. Perhaps if you have a little tub of India ink, you want to sharpen a stick and see how that works on your little test page. I'm going to first create my test page. And you can see me doing that just very simply by adding a few titles at the top of a sheet of paper. And then we are ready to go grab your pens and dive in. And here we are. I've just prepared my little page with pen bold, fine hatch block flow and flex. And these are the things I'm going to be testing in just a handful of these pens. What I'd suggest is a first mini project is you grab a few of your pens. You can even use pencils. You can compare your different mark making implements and how they will function on a little test page. My first is going to be, this is one of my favorite pens. Tise, that's the first bit, the kind of pen. Then what's the nib? It's an extra fine nib because that's important, and we'll talk more about that when we look at Phantom pens. First, I want to know how bold it can go. This means pressing hard, as hard as we can, but as hard as we are comfortable pressing and not thinking we're going to damage our pen. Then we want to go fine for fountain pens to get the finest line by actually flipping it upside down. Now we're just scratching across the surface really gently. Next, I want to know, can it hatch? Doing the same thing, if I go quickly, I'm getting nice hatched textures. And I can also just try a little bit of cross hatching. What you're looking for is, are you getting texture or are we moving more towards the blot stage? Some pens won't hatch very well, blot very easily. Some pens will hatch easily. And they won't block so easily like this because it's so fine, it's hard to fill that whole page. Now we want to flow test really quick line into the flex. How flexible, how much can we vary the flowing line? That's what we're going to do, so I'm going to pick a couple more pens, we'll compare one of the most common things. First, this is a unpin, fine liner, uni pin. It's 0.5 millimeter. Let's see, bold. That's me pressing hard. Fine, being gentle, then hatching. A little bit of cross hatching and then blotting or blocking in. I think you can give yourself a couple of goes over. But what we want to see is not that you can block in, but how easy it is to do then flow and flex. We can immediately see some differences. This Uni pin, far less variable than the fountain pen and that's to be expected. I'm just going to continue now and see what a few more of my pens can do. This is a tombos pens with a nib, if they're a fountain pen, flexible nib like this, which allows us to get a huge range of texture and line weight immediately. This pentel brush pen takes that to the next level. Look, it's got a brush for a nib. It's harder to hatch with, but amazing for blacking in and creating that ink blot. Going back to some fountain pens, this is where we can think, oh, how does the ink change things? I'm using some obergene sketching, It produces a very much softer feeling line, easier to blot in interestingly, but just as much flexibility than other fountain pens, dip nibs For another option, this is some Windsor India ink with a unbranded dippy pen with a medium nib. And you can see here, it's a really bold line, but also really gentle fine line we can hatch very easily. It's harder to block because of the line quality being so thick, but very easy to create the deep, lustrous calligraphy style lines. This is one of my favorites. This is a platinum 3776. Got an ultra extra fine nib that really does show in how fine a line this fountain pen can produce. On the other hand, we can move to a lammy medium, much cheaper pen, but because it's got a medium nerve, it's bolder but also a lot more flexible. Again, showing that price isn't everything, but it does get you something. There's my little page. We've tested a fair few pens out here. Perhaps I've surprised myself in a few places, and I wonder for yourself, what have you learned? It's really interesting just to complete little exercises like this, to discover new things about old pens, about new pens, about different ways of creating. So join in, have Fannon do your first mini project. 7. Fountain Pens - Introduction to Filling and Caring: In this lesson, we're going to examine fountain pens a little more closely. This is a bit of an introduction to fountain pens and looking at different ways we can fill fountain pens, which of course, is one of the key advantages. And we'll look more specifically at why that's a key advantage, both in this lesson and in the one coming up. Our next stop is fountain pens. And I am biased, but I think fountain pens are absolutely wonderful. They are my favorite every day sketching pen. But they do also have a couple of extra considerations. One is a bit silly. It is literally how nice they are when you're getting a fountain pen. It's something that you can use for life potentially. But certainly for many years, getting a fountain pen which you, which you like, the look of you like the feel of is really important. They're not something you're likely to throw away. Just put a little bit of extra F into I want a lammy, which color to I want, then you can go really high end. But what I would say about going really high end, and some of these pens are quite expensive, is it does mean you need to learn a lot about maintenance. It does mean you'll be worried about putting in certain types of ink, which is something we'll get to shortly actually getting something nice, but something you're not too scared to use. And that's why I think pens like the lambs, Twi bees are really good. One of the key advantages to fountain pens is that you can change the ink inside your pen. Here, I have just a few different inks and a few different pens, and actually these pens have all got different inks in. I can produce a range of different lines. If I was really out there, I could put in some bright pink in yellow ink. You could produce any color. Key to that is understanding that there is more than one way to fill up pen. We all I'm sure know about ink cartridges in cotes are great, they're easy. I have a couple of these pens with ink cartridges. In the disadvantages, you are stuck with only the brands which, number one, produce a cartridge which fits your specific pen. The lamy cartridge only fits lamb pens. Number two, you're stuck with a limited range of inks because there are far more inks which come in, in, in bottles. And these ink bottles are much cheaper per volume of ink. If you're using a lot of ink, you'll get 50 mils of ink instead of five mills for about the same cost. But that brings another obstacle. How do you fill your pen? And there are two main ways to do it. If we look inside this pen, it looks like there's a funky ink cartridge in there. That is essentially what is in there. If I just pull this out, you can see this is the same as this, but full of ink. What we do is we take an ink converter as it's called, and it's got to be an ink converter that fits your brand of pen. But it's a one off purchase because this ink converter will work forever. With that in converter, we open our ink, whichever we like. We make sure that we twist it so the plunges all the way down, pop it in the ink, lift it up, and it will fill up. You can also fill many pens just by putting the ink cartridge into the pen, already, dipping the nib under the ink. And again, the same process and it will actually fill up all the way through the pen. It's a slightly neater way of doing it, but it doesn't work for a different cartridges and all different pens. The other way you can actually do it is using something as simple as a pipette or a blunted syringe and injecting the ink into this opening. That's one way. It's probably the most common way. But increasingly pens like this, the twist bee pen, if we look here, well there's no ink cartridge. In fact, if I twist the pen itself, you will see this whole plunger system inside moves. I can actually fill this entire belly of ink up. That is the same in a couple of brands like there's noodles pens, even this this is quite high end pen by Numiki has a similar system where if I unscrew it actually inside this you'll find there's no ink cartridge. There's just a huge belly full of ink. Then all I do is I use a pipette in this one to fill up. Just imagine how much ink is in there. The advantage to these systems is you can fill it up once a month and you're basically good to go. So there you go, a few ideas for different ways of filling your pen, and that is something extra to look for in your fountain pens there. Having looked at how to fill our fountain pens, in the next lesson, we're going to look at why, going to look at how these little ink marks can become so much more by altering the ink and altering the properties of the ink, which is something we simply can't do with disposable pens. 8. Inks for Fountain Pens: In this video, we're just going to do a slightly deeper look into a couple of inks you might want to use. Understanding the properties that you're looking for and therefore the uses that those different inks might have for you. Now, we can't talk about filling your fountain pens without talking about the different ink options. I've just got a few here, but there are hundreds to choose from. I want to mention a couple of really key properties. I'm not going to talk about the obvious one. The obvious one is the color. We all know that we could change the color of ink, But the less obvious one actually, the one which is really useful if we're wanting to use ink and water colors, is that some of them are waterproof and some of them aren't. If I wash over this, you can see all that water pooling. Notice how none of these lines are moving at all. There's no loss of ink from the page whatsoever. The ink that I've used to produce this effect, to produce a lovely permanent line, are carbon in by platinum and sketching. This is Lotti, which is producing this nice black. And then also I've got one called Jewel, which is, they actually call it Oberg, but this nice warm red here. Now the advantage of this is that we can produce ink and watercolor sketches or apply other water soluble pigments and things on top of our ink, which is really great and is the primary use for sketching. The disadvantage of these inks is that they have micro granules in them. If we let our pen dry out or we don't use it in a week or two, they can block, all of these inks can damage your pen. If you are leaving your pen for any period of time, basically empty all this ink out, fill it again with water two or three times to flush out all the ink residue. And then you should be safe to leave your pen, but it is a consideration, these inks can damage your pen. The other Ks, however, are amazing for creating instant texture. If we just wash down here, just look at how they come to life. You can imagine just creating the most wonderful abstract, loose sketches, using this effect. It is as simple as taking your pen drawing and then choosing where to apply the water. Suddenly this little doodle of an apple can come to life, can be provided so much shape. It's not that you need to throw out your water soluble links, it's that they have different purposes. Now, having done a silly little apple doodle, in the next lesson, I'm just going to do a speed sketch of lots of different random objects. And this might be another mini project for you. If we just want to break out of all these theory lessons and start exploring different kind of inks we have then doing little doodle sketches is a great way to get started. 9. Doodling Mini Project: We're veering now off on a little tangent to give ourselves a break. What you're about to witness is about as far from fine art as I think it's possible to go. I'm just going to doodle with different pens and different inks, objects which are around me in front of me. I invite you to do the same. We've talked through all these different pens and all the different possibilities. We've done a little test page even that might have felt a bit rigid. Now break free and have fun. Just see how can I grip my pen, How can I feel my pen? How do these inks combine? Can I use water with my inks in a risk free way for the first time? Maybe just sketching a little lake, which is something we'll be doing in a moment. So have a bit of fun for the next few minutes. Just create a little page of doodles and see what happens with that. We are off. This is starting off with me sketching my hair dryer. It's a hair dry I use sometimes to dry my inks or my watercolors. And you can see using this really fine pen, I can create little fine bits of hatching, little textures. Things will be exploring very soon. We can also do this lovely continuous line process, which is something I really love creating all these objects out of just a single line each. But what if we want some life? Well, maybe you get more life from this lovely red ink. And maybe we could try even sketching a whole candle. Just applying a little bit of red ink to the page, and then pulling back our water and seeing what happens. And like I said at the beginning, this is as far as you can get from fine art. But that's okay. We need to give ourselves a break now. I'm sketching what I'm talking into my little microphone again. Maybe we want to compare and contrast using a little bit of soluble ink alongside the insoluble ink to create different textures and have a little bit of fun. Now, we can even use our inks wet on wet. Wet and wet is where we have a wet page and a wet medium. In this case water on the page and wet ink and look at the different kind of doodles we can create. This isn't really an everyday object that's more of a lake in a forest, but you get the idea now. I just thought I'd try my Waterman Brown and compare that with some dark ink. As I was doing that, I thought maybe this red needs a bit of structure with some other dark ink. And then let's just jump out and have some fun with something completely different. So this is a dip pen just to show how similar actually the marks you can make are with a dip pen, but the ink isn't quite as soluble. India ink, which is what you use in most dip pens, will move a little bit, but it dries up very quick. Nonetheless, we can use these inks together, we can swap between pens, we can change all sorts of different inks, we can have a huge amount of fun dip. Pens are a very valuable tool, we'll be using more off later in this class. I just wanted to show you the range of possibilities of things that you might just want to have a doodle to give yourself a little break. 10. SECTION 2 - TECHNIQUES: Now section two is where you have arrived at. We've done all our supplies, but now we want to know how to use them. That is basically what we're going to do. In the next few lessons, we're going to look at what I call the two key concepts or ideas in ink sketching. This is how I think about my ink sketching, and it's what gets me through my ink sketches and makes me feel good about them and makes them come to life, at least in my eyes. 11. Ink Art as Line Art: For me, there are two concepts in, in sketching which we need to think about in this first lesson. And the one coming up after we are looking at the first concept. That is the concept which makes sketching easy. Now, it doesn't make it interesting and fascinating, that's coming up in concept two. But in these next two lessons, you'll get a really good understanding of how you can take any, any person, any animal, anything else through simple observation and the understanding of what we're trying to achieve. Without ink sketching, you'll be able to sketch it in an easy, in a simple way. There are two key areas to focus on, to work on when it comes to developing your ink car. The first one, the first concept is what makes it easy? It's what the ink is all about. At least that's what we think the ink is all about. Every pen will have a point. That point creates lines. That's how we write. We create specific letters by using these specific lines. Another way of thinking about inc is a contour. You can draw anything in front of you. I've got on my pens out a pen is unmistakable as a simple contour. And a contour is where we just capture the outside, the outer limit of our object. Something else in front of me is my microphone. Again, even that is going to be pretty instantly recognizable. Just from capturing that contour, we can focus the contour down. Actually, we can find objects within object buttons on my microphone, I've got little sign. But all of these things, all these things are just me picking out areas to contour. This is different. When we paint, we tend to focus on blocks of color. We focus on how to create the light and the dark in, in cart. We tend to focus on shapes, on lines. Instead of focusing on space, we focus on the borders and the contours. The contour and the line is the key bit. But how can we make this easy in a complicated scene? How can we make lines easy? Well, that is where shapes come in. Shapes is something I call about all the time. It is what it sounds like, shapes, the circles, triangles and squares. But we can build up all our objects. Anything out of these shapes, we don't have to name them. We can just think in simple terms. Our pen could have been a rectangle and a rectangle. Now we recognize as we're drawing it, that the rectangles actually got a slightly wobbly head. It's a rectangle with a wobbly head. We recognize that this rectangles got a wobbly bottom, but it's still a rectangle. Here we've got a circle. We recognize that actually the circle has a bit of a edge to it, fraying almost. But it's still a circle even though it's flattened and it's got this wobbly edge. It's a circle. We can just simply build up our line, work through thinking about shapes coming up. In the next lesson, we're going to put this to the test. We're going to look at a scene. Something more complicated than these simple objects. You'll hopefully believe me, that really it is that easy. 12. Shapes in Practice: So now we're going to take a scene. We've got a little scene, and I'm going to draw over it. I'm going to show you what I mean when I say finding shapes. Then we're going to take those shapes, pop them in our sketchbook, and suddenly we'll have the scene. It will be that easy. Now if you don't believe me, let's have a look at this example. What I'm going to do is use a really nice and boiled pen, so I can draw on top. And show you that this scene is just shapes. Now let's have a look. We've got here a triangle, then underneath it we've got a square, although we've lost a corner. But that's fine. Here we've got another triangle with wobbly edge, and then another triangle with a wobbly edge. This is a rectangle. A triangle and a square with a rectangle on top or be here with war key signs. Got a triangle here which has lost its corner. I'm thinking all the time. I'm just thinking in shapes. I'm just thinking, how can I interpret this as a series of simple shapes? In my head, I don't have to name the exact shape. I just have to be thinking in a way that lets me simplify. When we simplify, suddenly it becomes relatively easy to get this scene on the page. If I now use these ideas, I can bring all these shapes down. And this has a couple of other advantages. When I've drawn a square, I can easily work out the proportions. I can then go look, there's a square in the back here, This one. It is half the height of this first square. Then there's another square on top which is half the height of this square. Suddenly my proportions become easy, because I'm not thinking in complicated structures, I'm thinking in simple shapes. And simple shapes are very easy to compare to one another. Equally, perspective can become easy. Although perspective here, we've got all sorts of lines of perspective going forward somewhere vanishing off over here. This is a one point perspective scene. Or we can just look and go look at circles just getting bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger and the same over here. Getting bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger. By using shapes, we're not only simplifying our scene, making it easy to capture, we're also simplifying concepts like perspective, like proportion, like measuring, like creating character. All these things are getting simplified just through the addition of shapes. Now I know what you're saying though. This, although simple, isn't that interesting? And you're right, it's not interesting because shapes is just half of our little conundrum, half of the concepts we need to put together to make things interesting. We're now going to focus in a couple of lessons on how we make things interesting and how different implements help us with that. 13. Creating Interest: It's time now to lift those shapes. Take that simplicity and enhance this doesn't make it actually not simple. It's just a way of thinking, a way of understanding that beyond simple lines, beyond simple shapes, there are little touches and little things we can do. Little things we can think about which will lift our instantly. We have our shapes and we've decided our shapes are great. They're simple, but they're boring. How do we go from boring and simple to simple, but fun, but fascinating, but interesting? Well, this is texture. Texture has two facets. The first facet of texture is the texture of the object that we are trying to capture. For example, if I'm trying to draw a flower, it's got a smooth stem, but then the petals might be crinkled. Within this sketch, we are getting that crinkled feel by adding texture to our lines Within the center, you might have just repetitive little marks. It might feel like almost like a spiral going into the middle. Again, we capture that by imitating it with our pen. There is this texture which is representative, but there is also artistic, or creative, or non representative. I'm going to call it artistic texture. This is where we are exploring our medium, because the way we would draw this flower with this pen is different. The way we would draw this pen is different to the way we would paint it with oils. We've done it once with that pen already, but with this pen. With an expressive pen we might capture is much bigger, more brutalist marks. Still getting the idea, but focusing more on the heavy contrast. We've now taken our same scene, but we've applied an artistic touch to it, these artistic textures. I'm going to split even more into two facets. The first is the dry textures. And the dry textures are things like hatching. Hatching comes in many forms. It can also be creating repetitive shapes. It can be how we create our contour. It can also be how we create variation in our line as well. Going from soft to bold to discontinuous. All of these things are dry textures. What's always amazing to me is just incorporating these variations into our simple shapes, our simple contours. Adding these simple artistic textures in can bring life very quickly to an image. Whether it's a simple still life, this apple and a bottle of wine, or whether it's a more adventurous urban seen or landscape. Then of course, the opposite of dry textures are the wet textures. And this is where we can have fun with our soluble inks. If I draw a little square using soluble ink, we can soften that. Suddenly we've got some completely different textures. I could just drop some water on the page to bring my brush pen in, drawing a line across. I'm getting something completely different as well. There are lots of ways to create not just dry textures, but wet textures depending on the ink, depending on the pen we're using. Hopefully, that will make sense So far, what we're going to do is explore in the next couple of lessons how we consider these different textures. 14. Contour Textures: Now we're into the nitty gritty. We've got a few individual lessons where we're going to look at different types of texture, different concepts of texture. Some of them will overlap with one another and some of them will be completely separate. The first one is basically how to bring texture to your shapes, that is the idea of cont, texture. In particular, we're going to be focusing on how texture changes depending on your tool. It's not all about accurately looking out the window and seeing a bush and creating a perfect version of that bush. The perfect version of that bush is going to change depending on what you're using to make it. The first part of texture that I'd like you to consider, that I'm going to consider is the contour texture. A great example for this is something as simple as drawing a wall, drawing a tree, drawing a flower, any object in front of you, around you has a contour which has texture. Now I'm going to take something smooth, we just draw a smooth line. I can draw again my coffee cup, which is sat in front of me. That contour is smooth, it lacks texture, but actually that is the texture of my coffee mug. Look, it's smooth. It's accurate, that's a representational texture. I look out the window, I can see, for example, there's a bush outside my neighbor's house. It's basically that shape, but that's no longer accurate. We can actually create a representational texture, still thinking about that shape, but whilst applying textures which are mimicking or trying to mimic the shapes of those leaves, for example, in the grass coming underneath. Simply, I'm just going to look out my window again and I'm going to say, look, I can see my neighbor's fence as well and the fence basically shaped like that, but that could be anything. However, if I start applying texture, it's a wooden fence, it's got these spikes at the top. All I'm doing is applying some texture to my contour. In a few strokes, we've got something which is far more representative of reality. This is contour texture, It's the first step. It doesn't have to be representative of reality. I could equally have drawn this bush using a different pen. Using my Fed pen, I might actually focus on how the pen can create its own marks. It's semi representative. This is totally different to how I've represented it over here. I'm using different marks. I could take my phantom pen and do the same thing again. This time I'm being more loose and free because phantom pens have that freedom to them. There we go. Again, similar but different, equally valid representation. We talked about wet and dry textures, and why not use some water again to enhance or alter that texture? The same could be said over here, we've got a fence. Well, I could have done it differently. I could have used my brush pen and created bigger marks. And this time the texture is actually going to be from almost imitating each of those wooden boards going up. The contour is formed now, not by an actual contour, but by those marks I've made throughout. Again, because I love my fountain pen. Let's have it go with a fountain pen and see what I will do with that. This, it might be about going up and down again, keeping it a continuous line, that fluidity. Now we've got another different feel. We're still focusing on the same idea of the contour, but we can either try and be realistic and represent it. Or we can match that alongside the natural qualities of our pen to make things more interesting. 15. Dry Textures 1: The outside of our texture is done. If we're following the logical progression, that must mean we're looking at the inner textures. Now I'm going to split this up again so we can think about different ways to create texture with different implements. This first lesson is all about dry textures. Next we have all those dry textures that you can form and dry textures, textures of the ink alone, fine liners are a lovely place to start exploring this idea. You can form all different textures from simple hatching to cross hatching. For example, if we take my mug again and when I pop it down, I get a shadow down here. That shadow has no texture, But we can celebrate our ink pen by using an ink texture to also imitate that shadow. Now I can create texture and shadow and a bit of life in the scam, we can change that to double down on it, to enhance the shadow by doing some cross hatching just like that. We are again creating something which is not real, but it is a texture that enhances our art nonetheless. And imitates something real, imitates the shadow on our scene. We could take another example if we look in here at our fence. Our fence currently just has a contour texture, but with some simple marks within we're going to create some texture. Now this is a little bit like hatching. What I'm actually is imitate the shapes that are within the fence. I can see just over there, just outside my window. Similarly, let's say that this wasn't a fence tool. This is a brick wall. We can use repetitive shapes of the bricks to fill that wall with texture. The way that you shape your bricks, the way you apply your texture, could be realistic. If I do the top half in my fine liner, you probably consider this a realistic, obviously simplified, but semi realistic version of that wall. Or we come back with something different. We come back with our fed pen and suddenly we can create different loose marks, again suggesting that texture, but making it more about the pen, more about the process, whilst also trying to display something about. This lovely example would be in our bush, for example. Within here we could painstakingly draw lots of leaf shapes, or we can just do these scribbles that we've already done for the contour. These dry textures will build up shadow, they'll build up an idea of your scene wherever you are, Just building up, showing the process, showing how you created that sketch, whilst also showing something about the scene, but allowing expression, allowing more than just a photo realistic representation to come through. But instead allowing your scene to have an artistic or creative quality. 16. Dry Textures 2: Time. Now for a bit of a deeper dive into try textures. I'm going to show you two things here. And I invite you to treat this again as a mini project. And the first part to be creating a little grid of textures. These are the kind of textures you can explore depending on what implements you have and what you enjoy doing. In the second part, I'm going to show you how artistic textures can apply in different ways using different implements to different scenes. Again, I invite you at this stage of your journey just to pick some familiar scenes, pick some familiar people or animals, sketch them really quickly, and see how different textures emerge from different implements, and give your sketch different character. Firstly, you could start by creating a little grid like this page and trying out different things. This first is simple linear hatching, which you can upgrade to. Cross hatching using a really fine fountain pen or a fine liner is a great way to achieve this control technique. Not all pens are made of a control though Fude pens and flexible nib pens create amazing scribbles which can equally build up to create that appearance of shadow. More intermediate techniques, to be honest, suitable for almost any pen, is the idea of using repeating shapes. Here, the idea of bricks builds up into a wall. The idea of gravel perhaps builds up into a gravel road. Just the simple repeating shapes, using your pen to its personal capabilities can create amazing textures which are either representative or realistic. Stippling is the last one I'm going to show you in the dry technique section. The classic idea, the pointer is making lots and lots of dots. Again, this could be realistic or it could be artistic. But how do we put that into practice? How do we actually add? You can see here is a dog which has been constructed from simple shapes. But if I come back in with my Tombow pen, I can create a lot of fun, a lot of drama, a lot of texture, which gives this dog a lot more life. Simple hatching again, but this time done in a loose fashion. Using the fude pen to its strengths creates a lot more of a fur like texture. Perhaps we could do more simply constructing it without those initial lines. Just using tiny dots and a little bit of raft drawn texture to create a similar feel, a similar feel alive but simple dog coming over to the other side. If we use our brush pen creating another dog, this is actually a portrait of my dog asleep. We can use the fude pen to create those big bold lines, create that immediate contrast and a real feeling the image straight away, those rough textures suggesting something in the background. Rather than just focusing all our texture on the subject itself. The same subject drawn in different ways can have dramatically different feelings. This is a completely different example. Now we're using a fountain pen and we are focusing on some cliffs. The cliffs can be divided into shapes which you might notice have a contour texture. That contour texture can be enhanced. We could find shadow by applying different degrees of hatching and cross hatching. That hatching is not a texture which is real at all. The shadow, it's interpreting Israel, but the actual texture of the cliff is not that of the ink. What we're doing is we're creating an image which represents what we see, but shows the process. It shows that ink sketching process. We could go even more loose and abstract by applying hatching to the sky, which obviously isn't there. But it applies. An artistic or a stylistic note. A very obvious stylistic note, which some of you may love and some of you may not. But these are the things I'd really encourage you to experiment with, explore, see what different pens are capable of. For example, this sketch, very easy to do in a fountain pen or a fine liner. Very challenging to do with a brush pen, a fud pen, with the hatching being uncontrollable. Now, last but not least, we can apply the same ideas using different color inks to provide texture, which is the same look, the same stylized hatching in the sky, but actually gives us a very different feel. Something more unique. Perhaps it makes the buildings pop out in a different way. You don't have to apply hatching across the whole image either. I did the whole sky before and now I just do half, because that hatching gives contrast. Now we've got this marked contrast of sky against building, which really pushes things forward a little bit of different color, doing some ink blotting instead of just hatching. Well, look, we have a really fun scene emerging just through the addition of temple textures. 17. Wet Textures 1: Having done our dry textures, we're now onto our wet textures. Wet textures of course require soluble link, things like fine liners and the fed pen I've been using, this doesn't apply to, but there are many, many pens which you can use to create amazing wet textures. Now, wet textures are where, for me, things can come to life can be amazing, super fun. It does, however, depend on the pen you're using, which is what this entire class is all about. If I take my fine liner here and I put loads of ink on the page, even within a few seconds, what we'll find is that it basically won't move if I bring some water over that, there's very little movement of that ink. Within a couple of minutes, it will be totally bone dry and permanent. What you'll find is almost all fine liners, they say on them, waterproof water and fade proof or pigment ink. Pigment ink is ink like this, like carbon in carbon Inc. Is a permanent ink which you can put in your fountain pens. Sketch ink is another permanent ink that you can put in your fountain pens. That doesn't mean you can't use carbon ink for wet textures, but you can only use it if you add water First, having added water, I can take a pen which I have carbon ink in, and I will be able to create some wet textures. But it's going to be difficult to control. We need to think about the pen we're using. Fountain pens are my go to for creating wet textures. I've been using this one a few times, and inside it's got some normal Mike ink. If I draw myself a square, if I draw myself a line, if I draw myself some graphs, then I just bring a really simple water brush or any brush at all. You'll find we can create texture by moving things around. One way to create wet textures is to do your line work and then wash those textures around. We need to have a think as well when we're doing those textures a bow color because we can have a lot of fun by incorporating multiple colors into our sketch. If we're going to be doing any form of ink sketching, you can always change your colors. But it works especially well if we're doing these wet textures. The other thing we can think about is when are we applying it here? Yeah, we did water first, we can try that with some of these water soluble inks. We'll find that because they're water soluble actually tend to run a lot more easily. Then we can create marks inside, we can splash. If you're lucky, it's not easy to do with all fountain pens, you get a few splashes in there. We can also even use our fountain pens to paint from. There's loads of ways that we can start thinking about wet textures and creating wet textures. Last thing to note is when I've done this, I can use that ink elsewhere, I can move it around the image. It can be totally separate. Totally separate from the pen itself. Finally, is using different names like brush pens. Brush pens are made for these amazing textures. Just look what happens as I come near the water. This in actually will be fairly permanent when it's dried, But before it's dried, because it's laying down a lot more ink, it takes a longer time to dry. So before it's dried we can move it around, we can create just the most fantastic textures. These things can be representative here. It's representing reeds or grass, or it can be totally abstract, like dropping in little bits of black in here and letting them bloom out and just celebrating the kind ink techniques medium that you're actually using. 18. Wet Textures 2: Like with our dry textures, it's time now to have a little fun. And let's see how these wet textures might work in practice. Firstly, we can finish off that grid of textures. And secondly, we can jump in and do a couple of speed sketches, which I invite you to do to complete your mini project. Finishing off this section of the class, let's start with that little grid of textures now. I call this in loading, where we draw a line and that amount of line work, the number of lines, the density of that line gives us more or less ink to play with. And you can see that as we do on line two lines, three lines, four lines. Suddenly we get darker and darker and more obvious ink textures forming just by the simple addition of water. We'll see how that can impact us later. The next thing we can do is actually use our pen as a little reservoir, almost like we're using watercolors or indeed, like we are painting from ink out of the bottle. With this, if you let it dry, you can create other textures through layering. Notice how these ink lines on top of the previous ink are creating other layered ink textures. Now, the other thing that we can do with ink is wet on wet, which we've alluded to previously in one of the lessons here. I've got my pen, or brush pen. I've loaded each of these squares with water. And notice how by running our pen through it, on it, in it, around it, we can create different effects. We also could do that with our fountain pens, as I showed you in the previous lesson. Now lastly, these aren't wet textures, but I thought it was worth showing one more little goer textures with a bold pen. Notice I can hatch, I can stipple, I can use reoccurring shapes, I can cross hatch, and I can also do other things. It's just less subtle and therefore very different. Now let's explore how this might work in a scene, these wet textures. The first thing to note is I'm using here my normal lamy Safari pen. There's nothing special about the pen I'm using. In fact, it's one of the most common pens and I'm using lami black ink. The ink which literally comes with this pen, this ink is also soluble, but that doesn't actually affect our drawing process in any way. I'm focusing on shapes. I'm focusing initially on some dry textures of the contour that I'm finding of my sine. Contrasting the manmade contours of our lighthouse against the not manmade contours of the bushes and things on front. What you'll notice when we are thinking about our wet textures, that so much of our time is spent here on shapes and on dry textures. Already we have a pretty good scene emerging in front of us. What we can then do, however, when we've applied our dry textures, is very quickly create drama. It's a little bowl of ink and a simple brush and we can just move some of that ink around. Yes, we're impacting our dry textures and you might want to come back and add a bit more line work on top to reinvigorate some of those lines, or you might not. You might want to leave this as a really expressive, punchy, heavy contrast bit of art. You can see in no time we've transformed our image just for the application of wet textures. Next, we can have a look at something a little more complex, but again, an example of how to use our ink to its maximum. Here I'm doing a continuous line, an amazing technique to get to crypts with particularly with those lovely flowing fountain pens. This again is the same lami, Sari with black ink. You know what's happening next. Can it introduce just a touch of water and am just life and contrast oozing off the page, but don't have to stick there. Now I get out another lami with blue ink and we can add these blue tones. I can get another lami out with brown ink. I can hatch with that brown in that brown ink is also water soluble so I can create wet textures, So we can use our inks together, we can multiply and make amazing art just by layering things together. 19. Dip Pens and India Ink: With a class with so many different bits going on, I feel it's important to have a couple of creative breaks. Here is another creative break, or you can treat it as a mini project if you like. We have touched on all sorts of things, but I'm very aware that one thing we haven't done a lot of detail on is dips are wonderful, they are cheap, they are cheerful, they are flexible, have a lot of fun with them. I'm going to show you right now some fun we can have with dip pens with India ink with a brush and some water. If you want to complete this and the references in the class resources to download, this is chroma lighthouse that we are sketching together. You don't have to use dip pen, just use the things we've been playing with so far with whatever tool you like, it will warm you up really nicely for our project. With that, there is no time at the present to jump in a dip pen. Typically, we use with Ind. The reason we use it with D is because drink is fixed. If you put India ink in your fountain pen, you will damage your fountain pen. Don't do it. Get fountain pen safe inks. But if you put fountain pen ink on a dip pen, it probably won't stick around long enough to create really lovely lines. The other fun thing about Indi Inc is you can use all sorts of colors, which I've just outlined above. You can use all sorts of implements. I've mentioned a few times. You can use a sharpened stick here using a glass pen. I pick this up from Amazon for, I think, about three pounds. Yeah. Look, it really works. And you'll also notice that it holds a lot of ink. Although I've picked up in a couple of times, I've actually done this entire sketch so far from one dip notice as well. It's great for creating specific lines. Here we are focusing on shape. We're also focusing on the texture because the texture of the walls is smooth, really, they're quite modern feeling walls underneath, we get a bit more of that contour texture, trying to pick out the idea of the bushes, trees underneath and around our lighthouse. This pen is really great fun for creating these lovely illustrative images. You can get dip pens with all sorts of different nibs. This is why they are so flexible, because you can have spoon nibs, flat nibs, bold nibs, italic. All endless nibs dips themselves cost very little money because all you have to do is put them into your normal handle. Unlike a fountain pen Db, which comes with all apparatus, I love using dip pens for simple scenes like this, for creating simple ink technique, simple ink hatching, for example, here I'm pulling apart different planes of the image to create different shadows. Using simple linear hatching, we can then apply nice bold lines to enhance the silhouette of the image before starting to play around with how texture and color can interplay to pull apart two different planes. Now the front, I'm using nut brown. In the actual lighthouse, I've used black everywhere. Now the amazing thing about India ink is you needn't be stuck, just your dipping pens and dipping implements. You can use brushes, in fact, across the Orient and across Asia. The ink art that you see there is often created with a brush pen, much like the pental brush pen I've been using a lot in these classes. Here you can see with a tiny little brush just to drop the ink in, with a water brush, to move some of that ink around, just to soften it around, we can create the most dramatic sky. Similar but different to what we might be able to create with watercolors. You'll also notice that as I'm moving the water around, indic is relatively water fast, but not totally. I'm able to add a little bit of movement once it's tribe, but not a huge amount there also another great bit of indic fun is the idea that I can come around and I can put things like gold and silver ink and white ink. I just added a few fun gold highlights to my lighthouse. Finally, coming back, just showing the diversity of different nibs here. Back to my medium nib on my normal dippy pen. And you can see this creates a lovely, far more flexible than that glass nib. And we're able to just put a silly frame around our art, it fits for me, that illustrative Feel some bolder lines, regain a bit of structure where that gold has gone on and perhaps covered up some lines. There you go. This is how I love using dippy pens to create fun illustrative artwork. 20. SECTION 3 - PROJECT: The final section of this class is the project. Let me tell you a little bit more about what we're doing. The project today is to experiment even more with our different pens. I'm using four different pens for my project. You might use 238910. You don't have to use the same pens as me. In fact, I would love you to use different pens. The idea here is we take the same scene. I've got a reference of Lismore Lighthouse, really fun reference with some nice shapes and a few different textures that we can play with. We repeat that scene quickly, 234 times. How many times do you want by using different media, by using different markers, by using different pens, different implements, you'll find something different about the scene every time. I know that maybe some of you thinking repeating the same thing over and over, that is boring, but it's really not. I have the shortest attention spun in the world, but I find this exercise really fun. We're creating art over and over, re, exploring the scene. We're creating quick sketches that keeps us engaged and it keeps us learning and it keeps us entertained. Now my sketches are going to be around six in size. I'm doing them in my five wood color sketchbook, but I'm going to shrink them down to make them achievable quickly. That's a key tip here, because when we are doing these things, we want to do them quickly lively. We don't want perfect sketches. We want things where we made decisions, left it imperfect, and just had fun. When you're done, then take a quick photo and upload your finished project into the resources and project gallery. You can do that by clicking on the same name tab, the class Resources and Project, and then pressing Create Project on the far right. When you've done that, I can come back and I'll probably learn a huge amount from you guys, but I can also give a bit of feedback and encouragement on every single project. 21. Project - Fine Liners: It's time now for project part one. And I'm going to be using a couple of fine liners. Fine liners are amazing for those controlled specific marks, using a couple of them. Let's us vary our line and vary our texture just a little bit more. Push yourself as well. This is about exploring the scene. Exploring our marks. Trying to do this sketch in 5.10 minutes maybe, and leaving it unfinished. Leaving it imperfect is what this is all about. Because by doing these things, we open ourselves up to new horizons, to new textures. And we really explore all of our ink mark making opportunities. Now, having explored our different pens in different ways, and about how different pens and different things have different strengths, we're going to jump in and do a direct comparison. So I've got a scene here. This is Lismore Lighthouse near Ober. We're just going to sketch it in a few different ways using our different pens, and then trying to do different things along the way as we use them. I'm going to start with our precision instrument, our fine liners. I'm going to start, as I said before, fine liners are brilliant for finding shapes, being neat for those dry textures. Let's start. I'm going to create a little thumbnail sketch here. The idea of behind these thumbnail sketches isn't to create perfect sketch, but to explore the differences, the similarities, and have fun with the scene. I'm going to start in my little thumbnail here and just go for it and see what happens with fine liners. For me, it's all about finding those shapes. I'm never neat, but somewhere toward, somewhere towards specific. We're trying to find nice shapes because our line is so specific and fine, we can actually narrow down those shapes. We can find quite specific, neat shapes. We can still be quick and efficient with our marks, but we can be finding those specific shapes at the same time. Going to come around, find some of these small windows and work my way around. We've got this lovely chimney coming up the back there. We've got a couple more shapes to find that is basically a lighthouse. We've also got shapes in the background. Then coming up here some more shapes. One more shape to find which is the background. But what are we missing at the moment? What are we missing? Well, fine liners are a precision instrument. They have a precise line. We're missing a bit of line variation. The scene feels flat, it lacks any depth. We can easily fix that with a fine liner. Instead of using the same pen and pressing harder, we use a different pen and we press the same amount, and we get a harder line that is a 0.3 and this is a 0.7 What's going to happen now when I go round and I find the key, the shapes at the front of the scene. Well, hopefully you'll agree, Look, suddenly things jump forward. This is a really great test or use case for fine, specific shapes, specific details, then being able to control that line in a really neat and easy way to bring things forward. To make it jump off the page, a couple more lines, we can really bring forward everything that is at the front. And there we go. So now we have depth in our scene. But what are we lacking? We're lacking texture now with fine liners. Again, we have so much space for texture. I'm going to start off with something very fine, a 0.3 mill look, totally, totally different to what we've just been using. This is going to let me come around and do some hatching. Hatching is a quintessential ink skill and ink technique with a very fine hatch like this. Something you can't achieve with other markers on the pen. You can actually create a real subtle and lovely, both texture and sense of shadows. That's what I'm doing. I'm going around, I'm finding in the image, where are my shadows? Where I find those shadows? I'm doing some gentle hatching. We might want to add some other textures. Maybe we want to suggest them bricks. We can do that nice and gently coming down. Maybe we want to add a bit of structure to these rocks and things to this cliff. And again, we can do that really simply, really easily. We can do that with some slightly looser marks to show that we've got man made and then in the front we've got natural. We can add a bit of texture, something else. Haven't used the 0.5 yet, that's going to sit in the middle. Maybe with that we can add just a few, again, suggestions of that structure. Look, we can suggest where the rocks are coming in. We can maybe find a couple more windows that we hadn't fully elucidated before. We can embolden a couple of lines, that bold line. You see how that provides a little suggestion of shadow. Maybe just we can bring in some lines into that sea. And I'm just going to double down on our frame because a lovely frame around an image like this does give it something extra. Last thing that I quite enjoy doing, this might be something you do love or do not like, is really simple hatching in the sky. What I find is this celebrates what we're doing. It celebrates our ink pen, celebrates our liner. It shows us the processes we're using. It's not realistic, is it? But it's celebrating the fact of what we're doing. It's going, This is an ink drawing. This is an ink drawing using a specific pen. It flattens out the back. How we go, see if this is something which you enjoy. It's a great way to simplify an image and to fill negative space If there's just too much on the page. There we are. That is funnel one done an exploration of specific techniques using a fine liner. We can jump now to repeat the process, but this time using something more fluid and expressive with a fountain pen. 22. Project - Fountain Pens: Time for me to move to my loose, my lively, my expressive fountain pens. Let's see what we can make of these now. Remember, this is about exploring each of our own implements. I'm using what I've got. If you don't have a fountain pen, use something else. In fact, I would love for people to totally different things to me because we can all learn from one another that way. So we've had a look at fountain pens, we've seen some of the advantages of fountain pens. That is, their fluidity, the way that they just flow, the nibs, bend and flex. One thing I really love taking advantage of with a fountain pen is how that fluidity can turn into, for example, an expressive drawing. An expressive drawing just means a drawing where you are putting some of yourself on the page. It can be looser, it can be more abstract. For me, a great way of accentuating that is something like a continuous line drawing. I can repeat my scene for me. I know this could feel boring, but for me this isn't boring. This is really fun experimental exploratory stuff where every time we repeat our scene, we find different things. We find different ways, different things to express, different aspects to find different mistakes to make, and different amazing things to add. For me, look, this continuous line drawing is finding different textures in different parts of the image to include and exclude. We can be more varied with our line. We don't have to wait for that second pen, we can just be more gentle. We can flip our pen over and draw with the back to make it really fine. We can press hard, maybe to create that bold outline of our lightho and then we can come back to be soft again to get more of the background. We can use some hatching, but we could be much looser about it if we want. We don't have to be. Fountain pens can also be precision instruments, but for me, the magic of a fountain pen is the fact that it is fluid, it's loose, and we can just create these amazing expressive drawings. Remember, there are wet and dry textures out there in the world. These are all dry textures. Now was fountain pens, we talked about proof in water soluble links in this fountain pen, I've got a water soluble link, that means immediate contrast. Immediate, I want to say happiness, but what I mean is this immediate character. And I say happiness because it is something that makes me happy. Having this sudden feeling, jumping on the page. Look at just how it comes to life. This fluid, expressive process is much easier to create, I think with a fountain pen. Now, don't forget, as part of wet textures, you can do other things. It doesn't have to be just that one way that we tried there, where we draw lines and then ink 0 them. We could also add our water on the page and create some textures like that. Maybe then move around our ink a little bit and we can use different colored inks. We could pop in. I've been using this is name Black ink and now I've moved over to some ink by diamine and this is called Little Chris. It's just a lovely, slightly iridescent blue as you can see. Really creates a huge contrast compared to that ink we're using before. The name black can do some splashes and you see how we're now getting these textures, these movements which may be suggest that cloud in the sky having messed around with that, we can pop it back on. Maybe we come back with our black ink again. We can just embolden a couple of places and refine some structure if you want. All of these things. Of course, a very option. That's just little ideas that you can play with. We don't want to lose that loose feel at all. I'm going to be gentle as I do this. Just do a few extra lines and then sign it. And there you go. A very different version. But yeah, still the same scene, just using different tools to explore the same medium. 23. Project - Brush Pens: Last but not least is a double bumper. I'm going to be using my few days, my brush pens to produce two very quick and fun sketches. I call these pens anything I can do quicker pens because they're not subtle. But boy, do they get an interesting line loads of contrast on the page really quickly. Having done these too, we can flip our page over and have a look out in front of us. Haven't we used yet? What? Haven't we used? What? We haven't used? The pen and the brush pen. These pens are anything you can do. I can do faster pens, as I'd like to think of them, with a fude pen. This is Ambo fude pen with a flexible soft nib. What we get is this ability to create immediate contrast with much more simple line work. We should be able to create the same joy and expression. They're not going to be as subtle, and they might be more stylistic. But we can just create these big, bold flowing lines, just have immediate fun on the page, and be much more loose and yet still get across the impression of our scene. You see how these immediate dark areas develop just a few marks and we can create a real sense of drama. I think that's really what I love about these pens, the drama that they can create. We might miss a few bits out because the marks are bigger, the marks are bolder. It's harder to get those details in, but whilst it's harder to get those details in, it's easier to get that contrast and easier to get textures. So if we come down to these rocks look big, bold marks and we've really got that idea of this bold textured area going on again, Maybe because my mark is too big, I'm going to lose a little bit of the proportion of my lighthouse on the right, here on the left, but that's okay. This is what the nails are for. We're exploring getting things wrong and getting things right. Having the right, of course, being the expressivity, fun, the joy. We can still hatch, notice. But the hatching is very different. It's not subtle, it's old, It's really definitely there. Compare that to the fine line of hatching we were doing. If you remember, it's quite a marked difference. I think it's much more of a nod to texture, but it's like, yes, look I've arrived, I'm here. And that's what these are all about. This really quick, really lovely texture, which is, I think, really fun thing to explore now. They're so quick that we can easily, I think, achieve a second one in this same class because that one's only taking me a couple of minutes. Let's do something different with our brush pen. This ink is basically water fast when it's down, but only when it's dried. That means if we are nice and quick, we can create really wonderful effects. So we can pop our line down. I've still got some blue ink on there, but that's okay. We can pop a line down and we can actually use that unexpected blue ink to create part of the texture we can come up, and then we probably want more dry ink. When we get to the shapes of the lighthouse, this is going to be even less detailed because the marks are even more difficult to control, especially when we're going really fast like this. But again, we can now just flip between water and then ink and then water. Just find the big shapes, find those big shadows. We might even want to just go up where the lighthouse is, drag that ink up, that's got the shadow lighthouse, then we can come down with our pen and then up our lighthouse will just emerge there. As simple as that, in the background perhaps, this is another place where we go water first to drop a nice chunk of water on the page, then just drop in some mink. We've got that tone already there from the water. We can just move that water around now. Bring it around, bring it down, and bring the background down to the lighthouse instead of the other way around. Instead of a logical progression, we're just able to have fun, move things around and create another lovely but dramatically different image. And there you go. These are what I've called, anything you can do. I can do faster and amazing ways to create interest on the page in a matter of seconds. 24. Next Steps, More Ink Ideas: So amazing guys. You got here all the way through to the end. And that was a bit of a bumper class. I hope you've enjoyed each of those three sections. Going from supplies through to technique. Actually, getting to create a series of really fun miniature pieces of art. If you've learned something, you've enjoyed it. If you've got questions, then a class project, ask me a question in the discussion section. I love interacting. I think the most important part of teaching and of learning is to interact and have those questions and those concerns answered. If you've enjoyed it as well, I'd absolutely love you to leave me a review. It's the biggest complement. It means the world. It only takes a couple of minutes. Don't forget as well. You can find me elsewhere. If you search for Toby sketch, you can find me on Instagram, on Youtube. I have some courses on my website, Sketch, Lose.com UK. Whilst you're here, I have a huge library. Well over 20 different courses that you might want to take on skillshare, including others which are quite relevant to this one, such as classes on loose and expressible in sketching, classes on the beginning, basics of ink and line work as well, and a few others besides. You can find them all in my profile following this class. Most importantly though, take what you've enjoyed here. Take what you've learned here, keep creating, keep having fun, and just enjoy your own personal style of creative expression.