Sketch Book for the Artist

ANIMALS

Drawing With Ink

To MAKE A QUILL OR REED PEN, keep all your fingers behind

the blade and cut away from you. Practice to gain a feel for

how materials behave, then cut a final nib (feathers, for

example, are surprisingly tough.) You can make ink easily

from the boiled, reduced, sieved, fleshy skins that surround

ripe walnuts. Collect skins from the ground beneath trees

once they are blackened. Walnut ink is gloopy, red-brown,

and delicious to draw with. Oak galls, forming the

basis of iron-gall ink, can also be collected from affected trees,

crushed, and boiled to make a golden ink. For centuries, galls

were ground with iron sulfate to make an unstable solution.

Running fresh, it was gray-purple. It dried black, and turned

brown with time. It also oxidized and ate or burned paper.

Some of Michelangelo's drawings are now a little eaten by

their own ink. Although oak galls and walnut skins are

harmless, always be cautious when experimenting with recipes.

REED PENS

Reed pens dispense ink

quickly, giving a short, dry

mark. Under heavy pressure,

they stick and judder forward.

I used these qualities to draw

the worms above. Rembrandt,

Van Gogh, and Matisse also

enjoyed them. Scribes of the

Middle Ages, finding reed

pens unwieldy, reserved their

use for large choir books, and

developed the quill instead.

QUILL PENS

Quills are highly responsive

to changes in pressure. They

give a finer, more extended line

than reed and a more organic

line than metal. Michelangelo's

dragon on p.244 is an exquisite

example. Quills are also called

Dutch pens, since the Dutch

were the first to realize that

they could be hardened and

improved with heat treatment

in ash or sand.

Reed marks The darker left wing of this

beetle was drawn with the wet inky

stroke of a loaded nib. The lighter right

wing, drawn with a dryer nib, appears

to glisten where the mark has broken

to show paper beneath.

Quill marks Quills carry more ink than

reeds, giving longer lines. The darkest strokes

of this grasshopper (around the head and

wings) were made first. Paler strokes for

the legs and antennae were made as

the ink ran out.