A good session at Portraits At The Pub with Jules furthering my experiments with Diamine Registrar’s Ink, drawing with fountain pens and flex nibs in my dip pen. In fact this was the first outing of my ‘fude’ fountain pen, with a bent nib which you can see in the drawing above right. More dip-pen work with the wonderful Rorher & Klingner Sketchink ‘Lotte’ which the only caveat is it dries so quickly. That’s great for quick sketches in the cold and 5 minute life sketches, less great if you want to also use the ink you’ve laid down for washes, it’s a minor thing.
Also more experiments with ink painting with the Registrar’s ink, again part of the problem there is the reverse – it dries so slowly, and it’s very nature as an iron gall ink means it’s hard to judge tonality, what seems like nice mid blue becomes black which means it can be a little too deep, like this painting. Hence working with the conte carre over the top, and adjusting it with white Posca marker. I also got the neck wrong, hence this being a detail!
As usual I didn’t have much time for watercolour and this ended up being a quicker pose than planned so I drew a fast loose fineliner drawing on the F5 paper and then a quick watercolour sketch. It ended up being the closest likrness to Jules and I love the directness of the expression and pose. Still had spreading problems with that paper – I know, people want to be Flake advert and I want to be a London Transport poster.
Is it too much to place pigment somewhere and not have it spread all over? Sometimes it looks great, sometimes a mess. This is why I still use the cellulose paper.
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