Bichromatic Outlook?

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BruceI’ve start­ed exper­i­ment­ing with black and white and a sec­ond ink col­or. This draw­ing was done with Water­man Havana, a red­dish brown that turns just a lit­tle too pink when spread too thin. Still, it adds some warmth and char­ac­ter to the draw­ing while still retain­ing the B&W character.

The draw­ing itself pre­sent­ed a num­ber of chal­lenges. The light and shad­ow rela­tion­ships were dif­fi­cult, and the her­ring­bone pat­tern in the jack­et was as well. As usu­al I’m trou­bled by how dif­fi­cult it is to lay down con­sis­tent hatch­ing. There is a lot of dis­ci­pline I need to devel­op, and my con­trol over flex­i­ble pens and brush­es leaves some­thing to be desired. I’m on the look­out for more flex­i­ble foun­tain pens, as the flow of ink with dip pens can prove very dif­fi­cult. I’ve been exper­i­ment­ing with a pen that takes dip pen nibs called the Ack­er­man Pump Pen but so far I’m more pleased with the con­cept than the pen itself. It came with a Hunt 101 nib which I like a lot for draw­ing, but I’m hav­ing a lot of trou­ble with the ink flow­ing way too freely. At one point I lost a tremen­dous amount of ink and the whole thing would have been ruined if I had­n’t been work­ing on vellum.

The tools that end­ed up going into the final draw­ing: Two extra-fine Rotring 600s, a fine and an extra-fine Rotring 700, a few rapi­do­graphs, the Ack­er­man Pump Pen and a Kaimei brush pen. I’ll pro­vide more details on all of those tools at anoth­er time.

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2 Replies to “Bichromatic Outlook?”

  1. Are you using Foun­tain pen ink?

    Are you use­ing foun­tain pen ink in the pump pen? If so you might find that a thick­er ink like an India ink, Doc Mar­tins Black star might work bet­ter. Did the pen come with some­thing to cov­er the vent hole a lit­tle? If not you might want to cov­er the vent hole on the Hunt 101 nib with a smal piece of tape.

    1. At the time of that writing,

      At the time of that writ­ing, yes, I was using foun­tain pen ink, but I’ve since switched to Speed­ball Superblack, which if I recall cor­rect­ly is the ink Charles Ack­er­man rec­om­mend­ed to me. He’s also con­tin­u­al­ly tweak­ing the design and mate­ri­als of his feeds and I’ve been in com­mu­ni­ca­tion with him about these advance­ments. I still haven’t got­ten a work­able solu­tion, but I’m con­fi­dent that I will.

      Thanks!

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