The Continuing Story of Ink Bottle Love

I’ve got­ten behind sched­ule on the «Pens and Inks» series, so tonight after spend­ing a few hours putting down ink I went back to my sched­ule and refig­ured the due dates. I’m keep­ing the same final date, just reduc­ing the num­ber of days I have to fin­ish each of the draw­ings in the series to give them an even pace start­ing now. There’s no point in stick­ing to an unre­al­is­tic sched­ule. The new sched­ule may not be real­is­tic either, but it is more so than one which has dead­lines in the past for a draw­ing I have yet to begin.

I’m not unhap­py with the progress on the box. I have anoth­er lay­er or two to put down and I have to make some deci­sions about the out­lines, but I don’t want to put down any out­lines until I am real­ly sure what I’ll be doing for the back­ground. The back­ground still stymies me. I’m sure that once I find a solu­tion it will just be a mat­ter of putting the hours in, but right now the ground in this image is an unsolved problem.

The bot­tle, too, is just about done. There are a few places I want to go back and touch up a bit, but I’m wary of doing too much more to it. I’ve already put down a cou­ple lay­ers too many. That’s some­thing that hap­pens when I’m not as dis­ci­plined in my cross­hatch­ing as I’d like to be. In order to get the smooth feel­ing I want from the draw­ing, I have to add more lay­ers and close in the space between the lines. When the lines are more con­sis­tent, few­er lines can be used to make a smooth surface.

Oth­er than the back­ground, I have yet to work on the pen’s nib and the cap of the pen. I’ve extend­ed the right hand mar­gin of the page out to the right a half-inch, which gives the com­po­si­tion some breath­ing room that it need­ed. As a result I may decide to repo­si­tion the pen cap. A cou­ple of sketch­es, maybe block­ing out the shapes on vel­lum, and I should have an answer.

Below, you can see the pro­gres­sion of the lay­ers of the bottle.