How to use Artist Inks

Knowing how to use artist inks properly will help ensure your work is to its maximum possible quality. Inks are an extremely fun medium to work with but lots can go wrong with just the slightest of slips. The following ‘how to’ provides 10 essential tips to consider when painting with oil.

Photo Credit: Designlazy.com

Steps

1- Let your style determine your ink. Choose your inks to suit your purpose. Indian ink is a standard staple for ink artists, it’s permanent and waterproof. Waterproof inks are best for line work, while water-soluble ink should be used for washes. 

2- Start with rough paper. Heavy grade, roughly textured watercolour paper is useful for making corrections. Rough paper makes it easier to lift off the ink. Do this by using a moist brush to absorb excess ink and then flooding the area with clean water. Only then should you blot it to absorb the remaining unwanted ink. This prevents it getting into the paper, which will happen if you blot it straight away. When all else fails, the white ink pot comes out. 

3- Try different nibs. There are a variety of pen nibs available for drawing and each offers a different effect. The size and shape of the nib will affect how much ink you need to use, what your marks will look like and how many times you need to dip your nib back in the ink. As a guide, use a reed pen for frequent, short strokes or try a round tip for wide, smooth lines. If you are just starting out, you could try using just the tip of a finely pointed sable brush as an alternative to buying a nib. 

4- For shading and modelling form, try using different strokes: cross hatching along with stippling and squiggly, circular marks, for example. They all help to add interesting textures as well as building the shading you need.

5- The fact that pen and ink marks cannot be easily undone or corrected like you might with charcoal and pencil might seem scary and unattractive at first. Be prepared to make mistakes: the rewards for those mistakes are the drawings full of the sort of spontaneity, passion and rawness rarely seen in carefully plotted pencil work. 

6- Working tonally can be very expressive. Use dark ink and then dilute it to indicate the lighter areas of your subject. Beware of going too dark. It’s very easy to over-darken using pen and ink yet virtually impossible to reverse if you’ve gone too far. Keep stepping back from your work as you build it up and stop applying ink when you’ve reached a good balance of light and dark.

7- Beware of smudging. Wet ink must be handled with even more care once it has been applied to the paper. Always remember to watch your arm. Use a hairdryer to dry the ink if in a hurry.

8- Try working wet. Just like watercolour paint, ink reacts differently if it is applied wet-in-wet rather than wet-on-dry. Working on a wet surface will give you much less control over how the ink behaves, but this can be part of the fun of experimenting. If you want to try working in this way, opt for a ‘sized’ paper (paper with a resistant gelatine layer). Any paper that’s too absorbent will cause the inks to bleed. 

9- Accept mistakes. Ink is obviously permanent so there is no going back. If you are just starting out and a bit nervous, it might be an idea to sketch in pencil first and draw over the top of this with ink, however as you get a bit more confident it is much more satisfying to just go for it as it gives the lines much more freshness and a sense of life. If you make a mistake, just accept it and work with it; often the mistakes are the best bits. 

10- Balance line with washes. A popular method of working in inks is the line and wash method – mixing dark lines with washes of dilute colour (either ink or watercolour). There is no fixed order for line and wash work, although be warned that washing colour on top of black lines can often dull them so it helps to consider this when planning a drawing. In order to create a cohesive and balanced artwork, it can be best to work up line and wash in alternate layers on top of one another. 

Tips

Embrace ancient traditions. Learn from Chinese and Japanese painting traditions – not necessarily in terms of style but certainly with regards to your command of the brush. Control is the name of the game. The familiar way of holding a paintbrush (leaning the brush into your hand at a diagonal angle to the paper) is actually the western way. In the Far East, artists usually hold the brush completely vertically, away from the palm of the hand. Drawing with the brush at a right angle to the page allows for multidirectional strokes. 

Try a new base. Perhaps use Grey or Black ink as a base, but then add other FW Acrylic Artists’ ink colours to the base to give a more subtle interesting mix. For example, if using a base ink of Payne’s Grey, perhaps add some Burnt Umber or some red inks to counteract the blue bias of the Payne’s Grey. Black ink can have a very warm tone, which isn’t sufficiently intense, so it’s a good idea to add mid-blues and sometimes a little red such as Process Magenta or some Burnt Umber.