Front Yard Birches

I did another pen and ink drawing in my sketchbook today. I’ve been experimenting with ways to get various shades of ink. This one uses a bluish and a brownish mix. I made another small paper palette. This time I did it with Yupo paper, which is a plastic paper because when I used card stock I discovered that the paper balled up when scrubbed and left little pills of paper in the ink. I figured plastic wouldn’t do that. I made two swatches on the Yupo with Pentel Sign Pens mixing two colors. I mixed black and light blue for one swatch and black and brown and ochre for the other. As before I used a water brush to pick up the ink off the paper palette and apply it to the drawing. It worked very well. I can add more ink and reuse the Yupo palette again and again because the plastic does not deteriorate.

I started by drawing the basic shapes with a very light gray ink pen. I then added additional grays working my way up in value from lightest to darkest. I used the bluish mix for the sky and the brownish mix for the light grays in the bushes and trees.

Travelogue sketchbook, Tombow ABT N95 Dual tipped brush pen, Kuretake ZIG Brushables 010 dual tipped brush pen, Pentel Light Gray brush pen, 2 Derwent #2 round water brushes – one with water and the other with a mix of Noodler’s Lexington Gray and water 1:2, da Vinci series 1573 #6 travel brush, vintage Sheaffer’s Balance Black and Pearl Lifetime pen with 14K gold nib ca. 1929-30 filled with Noodler’s Benenke Black ink, and Pentel EnerGel 0.5 black ballpoint pen. Image is 5×8 inches (13×20.5 cm).

Jim