Experiment in sketching and painting in ink

In an issue of "Drawing" magazine this year I first read about the work of Paul Madonna (link below), who does wonderful pen and ink drawings of cityscapes and interiors in San Francisco for his one-of-a-kind comic strip. He draws the scene first in pen on location and then does the values and shadows in his studios from photos and memory. His drawings have kind of an ethereal, timeless quality about them that I love. I decided to try out the technique myself, so I sketched out a scene from when I was in Chinatown in San Francisco myself a year or so ago, then I got some Higgins "Eternal" black ink. It turns out that "Eternal" ink is not actually waterproof, so if you don't like a tone or a line you can soften it somewhat later on by wetting the paper and redistributing the ink.

I had to simplify the image quite a bit from what was in the actual photo, but I like the effect. The photo you see here has a warmer tone than the actual ink does. Another thing I find attractive about sketching or drawing with ink rather than pencil is that you don't have to worry about the image getting blurred in your notebook over time, which is a real problem with graphite drawings. Diluting the ink with water gives you pretty good control over the value range, though of course you can't get texture like you can with a pencil. But I thought this was fun and will probably give this a few more tries. It is something like painting with watercolors, but the ink doesn't have the saturated colors that watercolors have. The ink sketches have a kind of timeless story-telling look about them.

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