Daisy is one of my favourite models, not only is she a great person to talk to, but also her poses are full of character and stretch us as artists. This life session was the best session in recent weeks because we had a model who felt as excited to be there as we were to draw her, and that reflected in the work we were doing. And I love drawing curves, S-curves, serpentine curves, swooping curves – and she has plenty of those.
Again a lot of ink work – the first life outing of some of my inks and the Duke 209 fude nib fountain pen (still waiting for the others to arrive, eBay sellers are blaming coronavirus while not actually keeping you informed, then lowering the prices after you buy them – very annoying).
You can see the 5 minute studies using (from left > right) my first JinHao fountain pen with I think Rorher & Klingner Lotte Sketchink (I’d just flushed it out hence the pale lines). Then the fude pen with Diamine Registrar’s ink which seemed to struggle with this paper so I finished it with dip pen and the flex nib, and Rorher & Klingner Sketchink, which the last one is purely done with. I like the character of the last study.
It is a good demonstration of the different marks you get from fountain pens and dip pens.
I also did another brush and ink study using the Diamine Registrar’s Iron Gall ink above. Better than last time, more control over the dark areas, but then I also did another dip pen piece below where the dark areas became too dark, hard to judge with just the temporary mid-shade blue dye to work from. What I’ve since found is that the Diamine is worst for this, other iron gall inks don’t darken as much. Maybe I should find another blue/black fountain-pen friendly ink that has a darker dye to begin with?
And the final piece uses two inks I’ve not used at life drawing before – the two Koh-I-Noor document inks. Not iron gall inks but also apparently similarly permanent, they are lighter in shade when diluted. The black has actually a green shade only when diluted, which I love, and the blue is a nice bright blue that mixes well with the black. I hope they stay lightfast when diluted. Koh-I-Noor aka Hardtmuth is a Czech firm and the ink is really cheap although takes a while to get here, but like a lot of my materials the firm is 18th century, started in 1790!
Here I was using the flex G nib (the Zebra I think, had issues with the Nikko) in the dip pen to big effect with those swoops:
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