Going straight to ink

My fascination for drawing straight with ink began with the drawing videos of a true master - Kim Jung Gi. If you haven’t seen his work, drop everything and google him.

Laziness was also a factor. Perhaps this was the engineer in me, seeking optimization out of every activity.

The good thing about pursuing art in today’s world is that progress cannot be institutionalized. There is no single ladder of success. There is no universally accepted notion of great art. The journey is yours to take and the destination is yours to choose. You can have fun along the way. Your success could be on a gigantic canvas, or in a stick figure webcomic.

It took me a long time to appreciate this fact, and longer to accept it.

 

With this extended preamble out of the way, I want to talk about how I draw straight with ink.

 

It was raining earlier this morning, so I could not go out to draw. I drew this scene from my desk, looking out of the window.

Jumping into an empty page with ink is a challenge for many reasons. Here are some pro-tips to deal with them -

  • Plan your progress across the page

    Before I begin a page, I make a mental map of the things I will draw and the rough areas they will occupy on my page. I break those things down by difficulty, and decide upon a starting point.

  • Make anchors

    Working in ink, it’s easy to have misshapen or mis-sized structures that just don’t make sense with each other. You avoid this by recognizing early the relationship that objects in your scene have with each other. With a careful eye, you must see what decides the size and position of what else.

    The first objects you draw are your anchors. The rest of the lines refer to the anchors, and are drawn in relation to them.

    (If you draw your anchor in the wrong proportion, it does not matter as long as the rest of the page is proportioned correctly to it. So find the most difficult line, and make it your anchor!)

  • Don’t draw everything

    When drawing a busy scene, on location, it’s easy to get intimidated. When I look at a tall building, the prospect of drawing so many windows scares me. The idea is to not draw everything. Stay with what captures your interest. Spare the details as you move radially outward from it. Eliminate objects far and away that do not matter to what you want to show. Be the master of your page and make bold decisions about what goes in.

My regular toolkit is very basic. In order to be sneaky, I must be inconspicuous. So I don’t carry too many things, lest I attract attention.

This drawing was made with a Sailor fude-nib fountain pen and a 005 Micron fineliner. I get different line widths out of the fude nib, which I love for its versatility. The fineliner helps me maintain consistency with my textures.

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I am posting a video this drawing process on my Instagram. Catch it there so you can see exactly how I drew this. I cover the pro-tips discussed above, and drew this piece in roughly 25 minutes.