Chapter Three, Custom 742 Falcon Drawing

Jump­ing ahead sev­er­al lay­ers, now there’s more tone and the appear­ance of con­tour. The nib of the pen still needs more con­trast to make it look shiny. By now, I’ve stopped using the 0.13mm pen exclu­sive­ly and have begun mak­ing some lay­ers with the 0.18mm pen.

There are two issues with con­tin­u­ing to use the fin­er pen. First is the fact that the more ink goes down on the page, the less blank space there is be dark­ened by the pen. After going over an area a few times and hatch­ing with the 0.13mm pen, sub­se­quent lay­ers do less to dark­en the area, because a greater por­tion of each pen­stroke cov­ers over area that’s already black with ink.

One way to counter this is to use a broad­er pen­stroke. Too much dis­par­i­ty between the weight of the pen­stroke can be coun­ter­pro­duc­tive though, because the dif­fer­ence can call atten­tion to the indi­vid­ual lines. Since I’m try­ing to acheive a smooth effect, I have to be very cau­tious about which pens I use in con­junc­tion with the oth­ers. For the sur­face of the nib I nev­er used a pen heav­ier than 0.25mm, and that was used very sparingly.

The poten­tial­ly big­ger prob­lem with very fine points is that it is very easy for them to tear the sur­face of the paper. Even with very smooth illus­tra­tion board and the ink lubri­cat­ing the con­tact with the paper, the very fine points will gouge the sur­face of the paper. Draw the point across the same area a num­ber of times and the sur­face will get rough no mat­ter how light a touch is used.

Although I’ve used dip pens for draw­ing and I very much love the flex­i­bil­i­ty they pro­vide, the points are sharp steel and very much has a ten­den­cy to bite into paper. This is the sort of thing that tempts me to work larg­er and work with broad­er pens. Foun­tain pens have smooth irid­i­um (it’s not real­ly irid­i­um these days, but they still call it irid­i­um) tips that are very gen­tle on paper. Foun­tain pens have their own draw­backs for draw­ing though—it’s rare to find any pens small­er than 0.35mm and flex­i­ble pens are very hard to find. Fur­ther­more, most foun­tain pens inks are not durable. I’ve post­ed about Noodlers inks, but even Noodlers has some draw­backs for artis­tic pur­pos­es. So there aren’t yet any per­fect solu­tions, I just have to keep work­ing with what’s avail­able and keep exper­i­ment­ing with the avail­able tools.