Sketching For InkTober 2015

Posted on October 19, 2015 by Larry Marshall

Every year the internet is treated to a stream of sketches in the name of Inktober and this is is no exception. I don’t formally take part as I already draw constantly in ink and so I just continue to post my normal drawings. But I was out the other day, having filled a Pilot Prera with DeAtramentis Document Brown ink and I thought about Inktober and did several sketches while on my walk. Here are a couple of them.

Right now the St. Charles RIver is at very low levels. I thought these rocks warranted a sketch.

Bassin Louise did a major service upgrade this year with the addition of these power stations that allow boats to plug in. Now that the boats are being removed from the water for winter, the stations are available for me to draw. So I did.

Maybe I’ll do a few more of these before October is over. I enjoyed the ink/pen combination and the tiny nature of these sketches.

De Atramentis Document Ink: Creating A Grey

Posted on February 2, 2015 by Larry Marshall

The new De Atramentis Document inks (not to be confused with other De Atramentis inks) are a dream come true for those of us who sketch with fountain pens and want waterproof inks. Before they came along, color choices could be described pretty much like Henry Ford described color selection for the Model T Ford – “any color as long as it’s black.”

The current elephant in the room question is whether we’re going to have a ready supply of these inks over time. De Atramentis is a one-man operation and Goulet Pens, to my knowledge, is the only source for them in North America. Their last shipment came in and went out before some people had a chance to even see them show up. Brian has said their current order is very large. I hope so.

I was one of the lucky ones. I’ve had De Atramentis Document Black and Brown for a while now and was able to fill in the other colors during the few hours they were available at Goulet Pens.

The potential to create any color I want now exists, except for one thing. De Atramentis sells a solvent for their inks and proper dilution should be done with that solvent. These inks are pigmented inks and every ink have a particular chemistry to give them the flow and paper interaction properties of a particular brand of ink. The proper solvent should be used to provide the proper lubricant, stabilizer, and maybe anti-fungal agent in their proper proportions. The big deal here is the lubricant as this generates proper flow through the pen. Too much lubrication and you can get feathering, nib creap, and slow-to-dry inks. Too little and you can get a dry-writing ink, though it may actually dry more quickly.

So before I continue, there’s my caveat. If you fear doing anything that might be referred to as an “experiment”, read no further. This is an experiment. I’ve mixed up a grey ink using the brown and blue ink in this line. It creates a very dark grey, not unlike Noodler’s Lexington Gray but a bit darker. I wanted to lighten it up, but the solvent isn’t available to me, so I used water. Worse still, throwing caution to the wind, I used plain old tap water to thin the ink. Here’s what I mixed:

De Atramentis Document inks, not to be confused with other De Atramentis inks:

Brown: 3 parts
Black: 2 parts
water: 3 parts

That works out to 60% water, which is a lot but I found that when thinning other inks I had to add a considerable amount of water to lighten their color. This proved true for the De Atramentis Document inks as well, maybe even to a greater degree.

As you can see, I got a decent dark grey. I may want to play a bit with the blue/brown mix or maybe try a green/red mix but this is just about what I want on a tonal scale. Just enough to take the harsh black edge off my sketches.

The real point of the experiment, though, was to see how diluting with water would work. I’m surprised to say that even with this extreme dilution, the ink holds up nicely. There is no feathering, the line remains consistent and there are no flow problems with the Pilot Prera (fine nib) that I used to dispense it. I wanted the sketch to reflect the tonal differences between the black and gray lines so I used De Atramentis Black to do all the shadow lines on the right side of the bottle. After scanning I quickly slopped watercolor all over it and can report that the waterproof nature of the ink is retained. All of this is being done on cheap sketchbook paper. Just to ensure that it wasn’t the result of the paper, I did a bunch of scribbles on Stillman & Birn Alpha series paper and those were were waterproof as well.

By the way, there’s been some discussion of a Fog Gray color being added to the De Atramentis line. Those few who have had access to it have found that it’s really more of a grey blue than a true grey. Given that it’s easy to mix our own greys, though, it hardly matters.

For me, the experiment was a great success. To be honest I’m still a bit surprised because in my experience, dilution of pigment-based products (wood stains I’ve used) with water are very limited and things tend to fall apart once you get past 10-15%. Here I’ve more than doubled the volume of ink with water..and it still works. Go figure. I still wish I could get access to De Atramentis solvent but until that time…I’m going to go draw a few shades of grey.

De Atramentis Document Inks & Doodling

Posted on January 29, 2015 by Larry Marshall

De Atramentis, the Austrian ink company, has been releasing a growing line of fountain-pen friendly, waterproof inks for a while now. Buying them in North America, however, has been nearly impossible. Goulet Pens finally got them back in stock, I ordered, and within a couple hours people were reporting that they were out of them. Hopefully distribution will get worked out over time.

These inks are a wonderful addition to my arsenal and become the ones I use most often, I think. Not only are basic blue, black and brown available but they sell an equivalent of the CMYK (cyan/magenta/yellow/black) set that is used to generate color in offset printing. And they’re mixable. Jane Blundell has done a series of blog posts on mixing them.

The black ink makes my Pilot Falcon very happy. Like Platinum Carbon Black, it causes the pens to write a bit finer than they normally would.

Same thing for the Pilot Prera.

I’ve just started doodling with them. I’ve mixed up a gray but otherwise I’ve been working with the colors straight out of the bottle. They are very similar to Platinum Carbon Black in use, though for some reason they feel smoother to me, maybe a bit wetter. So far I have them in Pilot Prera and Falcon pens and a Noodler’s Creaper. As is typical of the Creaper, there is a bit of start up problem but otherwise all these pens seem to like it. Time will tell.

I did some hatching practice with a Pilot Prera filled with De Atramentis Document Brown. The color is a rich brown, leaning towards a burnt sienna. I really like it, though I can always adjust the color by mixing. That’s the great thing about these inks.

Artemis: Greek Goddess Of The Hunt

Posted on December 7, 2014 by Larry Marshall

Long before Katniss Everdeen shot squirrels in the forest surrounding District 12, Artemis was the protectress of nature and the hunt for the Greeks. With her spiffy garb and bow & arrow, she most certainly could have wowed them in any Greek version of the Hunger Games.

As a sketching subject she caught my attention, though the statue I drew from only had the stub of her bow gripped in her hand. I used my artistic license to add her bow. It just wasn’t right that she’d lost it.

Stillman & Birn Alpha (10×7), Pilot Prera, De Atramentis Document Brown

How Did Apollo Carry His Water?

Posted on November 29, 2014 by Larry Marshall

The “Olympus” exhibition at Quebec’s Museé de la civilisation includes a series of art-laden pots and pitchers that make ideal drawing subjects, as long as you’re not easily frustrated by a bunch of design details. This particular jug is about a foot in diameter and a bit taller. My view of it, from sitting on my stool, only exposes the bottoms of some of the characters and trees that wrap around the top of it but the placard explains that these folks are Apollo and his buddies and that the jug was used to carry water. I mostly take a ‘who cares’ attitude towards such things as the important thing to me is that it’s a stunning piece and something fun to draw.

I started with a pencil to organize basic shapes and to lay out the detailed banding – banding that drove me nuts as I tried to draw it. I used Strathmore Series 300 (vellum) bristol for this drawing. Once I was happy with the proportions I switched to a Pilot Prera (F) filled with De Atramentis Brown ink, one of the new permanent fountain pen inks made available by the company.

I can’t recommend these inks enough. They’re a dream come true. If you haven’t seen them, go to Jane Blundell’s blog where she’s mixed up a series of colors using them. Then you’ll want to head to Goulet Pens to buy some (grin). To me these are the ink equvalent of Stillman & Birn’s great sketchbooks entered my life. Both provide ideal solutions to my sketching material needs.

Apollo water jug

I’m a ‘line’ kind of guy. I’m not a watercolor guy who happens to do his drawing with a pen. And so when the drawing is done, I feel that I’m done. If I add color it’s mostly done as an afterthought. In this case, however, I decided to try adding some color. Rather than using the original, I scanned it and printed to Canson Montval Watercolor paper. This is my first time using this paper and it may be my last. I much prefer the paper in my Stillman & Birn sketchbooks when it comes to using watercolors. Anyways, this is what it looked like when I was done abusing the paper, or it me.