I really love Yuko's work so I was very excited about this online course. Its an amazing opportunity to see the artist at work and a great inspiration. So needless to say after watching the lessons my hands were itching to do some inking. Made a sketch first and then moved to the final version. I experimented with a few different brushes, my good qualilty oriental brushes are too big, smaller onces are bad quality since they dont hold the fine tip very well and are only good for short strokes. So mostly I used kolisnsky sable watercolor brush for detail and larger yasutomo haboku-stroke for thicker strokes. The hardest part for me was working without a reference and without a more resolved sketch. I've made many mistakes and the waterproof ink on paper isnt going anywhere. So I increased the amount of strokes to cover the mistakes. Some marks got out of hand and I didnt have the confidence in my hand at certain points, especially in the beginning. Its very hard to let go of your fear of making a mistake, in the end I just decided not to care and have fun with the strokes and ink regardless of how many mistakes occured. Without some spontaneity certain areas wouldnt work out well, in the end I guess I relied on chance.

I have finished my final project. Took me forever (with many breaks for other projects to keep my sanity;) ) ... I think I might tweak it a bit later where the smoke clouds are. Overall it was fun, but the buildings drove me crazy, especially because I enjoy drawing people more than architecture. The clouds were fun because I was experimenting and just seeing where the medium will take me :) I am happy with results, ink and brush are a difficult game of looseness and control. But the finished result the mingling of black and white  is striking. As usual I feel that I could work on it more but sometimes one needs to stop otherwise the artworks will appear overworked.