Inktober |

In the second half of October I on a trip which interrupted my participation in the Inktober 2020 challenge, but I’m doing a bit of catching now. It’s never too late after all and I quite like the habit of sketching after dinner. So here’s some more.

Higgins Red Fadeproof ink, Noodler’s Golden ink, Sumi ink

Day 16 this theme was Rockets so I got out some firey colors.

Day 18: Trap I’m working from the Sktchy pictures. This was a subtle but excellent choice to convey the feeling of being trapped. I used the warm black Sumi ink to match the feeling tone.

Day 22: Chef. My guess is she’s making cannolis here and my bet is they taste pretty good.

A while back I added fountain pens to my sketching armory, and that opened up a whole world of inks which I knew nothing of previously. I ordered samples from Goulet Pens and soon had amassed a large number of mini ink vials which have sat on my table for some years unused. . . until now.

Diamine Grey and Winsor and Newton Sepia Calligraphy ink with brush

For this one I watched the Sktchy video of teacher Arto Isotalo demonstrate his masterful method of wet on wet watercolor. Water has a mind of its own in this kind of wet painting, and if you can surrender to it and be ready to work with all the blossoms and other irregularities, sometimes you get those the most amazing results. I’ve got to do more of these.

My son Andrew continues to blow my mind with his ink drawings. He’s letting me show one more of them here.

I’ve had a lot of days lately where I could relate to this drawing. How bout you?

You can see more of Andrew’s drawings here.

We’ve spent a great many days of late trying to avoid excessive heat and smoke from the fires. So my son Andrew (alias Drew or Droob) and I headed out to Doran Beach in Bodega Bay mid week. The sky was hazy but the air smelled cleaned and it was strangely still on the beach. Even the birds on the bay side were immobile on the beach. We put up the umbrella even though the sun couldn’t quite make it through the haze.

And then we got out our sketchbooks. Drew is one of those people who draws from memory and imagination. It just flows off his pen unimpeded. Creatures of all kinds that come from a fertile imagination that tells visual stories of the most unimaginable and yet somehow recognizable sorts.

So I asked him to give me a prompt and I would try. He said no, that would be cheating (or something like that). So I offered what I thought might help me to get started on a creature. . .a Ralph Steadman style splatter beginning.

So that’s what we did, using my credit card sized watercolor palette and the water brush I’d brought to start splattering. And he was totally game. This is what he did in approximately 6 minutes.

(I thought it looked more like a worm, but he said it was a tongue.)

And here’s mine.

I think I must have been feeling a bit out of my element and it came out in the tipsy drawing.

Well, I told Drew he should do the Inktober challenge with me. You know, the annual 30-day- October-do-an-ink-drawing-a-day challenge. And he agreed! So I’ll be posting both of ours here. And maybe you’d like to join us!