I love inking. I’ve always enjoyed the process of cementing pencil indelibly into the paper with stark black lines. I love the contrast, I love the act of it, like a moving meditation of hand and eye. And these days I really enjoy working with ink washes, an ongoing process of mixing the ink and water and laying it down, the ink appearing darker when wet to the point that I’m usually convinced I’ve ruined it all; until the ink dries and it looks better than I could have planned.

Moving on from the last post in which I talked about my pencil process, I tried something new (for me) here, which is digitally enhancing my pencils so they look like inked lines. By playing around in Photoshop this is a fairly easy process, which serves two purposes. One, I didn’t have to go over the same lines again. As much as I enjoy it, there is always a point where things need to be wrapped up. Two, I was able to take these digitally darkened pencil lines and print them onto thick paper, allowing me to keep the original pencils untouched. As someone who is almost always convinced they are just about to completely ruin what they’ve done, this is a great reassurance!

Overall I’m pretty happy with how it came out. I still need to gain more confidence in spotting large areas of black and going darker in general. Perhaps a task for the next project.

Next blog, my old foe, colour.